by Tim Wu
With Stanley and Helen Landsdowne Resor, now married and at the head of it, J. Walter Thompson was, by that time, the largest agency in the world.18 The firm leased space in the art deco Graybar Building attached to the Grand Central Terminal in New York (a block from Madison Avenue), completing its move to the center of American corporate life.
The rewards to those who had made the climb were ample indeed. The Resors acquired both a mansion in Connecticut and a vast ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where they hired the pioneer of modern architecture Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to build their vacation home, his first American commission.19 As for Albert Lasker, the president of Chicago’s Lord & Thomas, his estate on five hundred acres included a working farm, an eighteen-hole golf course, and a movie theater, among its twenty-six structures.20 Even the abstemious former preacher Claude Hopkins was eventually moved to acquire a pile in the Michigan wilderness, as well as an oceangoing yacht. His wife, writes David Ogilvy, persuaded him “to employ an army of gardeners on their estate, and to buy splendid Louis XVI furniture. She filled their vast house with an endless procession of guests. Her cook was famous. And she played Scarlatti to Hopkins for hours at a time.”
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With its acquired wealth and grandeur, the industry began to see itself differently, in a way more attuned with its origins, which its cloak of science had served to conceal. No, not the origins in patent medicine, redolent of swindle and charlatanism—that lineage advertising was glad to have disowned, even if it would never disown the methods. Rather, it was now that advertising began to see itself in the image of the original propaganda body, the Church; its work as a mission; and its masters as capitalism’s new priestly class. The agencies were educating the masses, doing a sort of missionary work on behalf of the great new companies fulfilling the broadest needs and deepest desires of the nation. President Coolidge captured the new image in a 1926 speech: “Advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade. It is a great power that has been entrusted to your keeping which charges you with the high responsibility of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world. It is all part of the greater work of regeneration and redemption of mankind.”21
Many of the most talented copywriters, as we’ve seen, came from families steeped in organized religion. Some saw surprisingly little difference between the two callings. In The Man Nobody Knows, a 1925 bestseller by adman Bruce Barton, himself the son of a Methodist preacher, Jesus Christ is depicted, not ironically but with earnest reverence, as an early advertising man and small-business owner, managing his team of disciples who “mastered public attention” and came up with winning slogans such as “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Barton reached even deeper when he wrote that “advertising” was a force “as old as the world…‘Let there be light’ constitutes its charter. All Nature vibrates with its impulse. The brilliant plumage of the bird is color advertising addressed to the emotions.”
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Whether or not advertising was as exalted a purpose as some had proclaimed, by the end of the 1920s it had unquestionably changed the tenor of daily life across the industrialized world. For it was then that a conspicuous feature of modern existence, albeit one that we are all now well used to, was born: namely, the fact of being constantly cajoled and sold to, the endless stream of appeals that take such effort to ignore, promising as they do the answers to all our problems, the satisfaction of all our yearnings. Now is when advertising was first woven into the fabric of most Americans’ lives, as bit by bit the major brands planted themselves in the collective consciousness, like so many mighty trees—as if Cadillac or Coca-Cola could never have been just names but were somehow imbued with meaning from the beginning of time. The built environment created by advertising began to seem like a natural ecosystem; the incessant barrage of commercial propositions became a fact of life.
It is therefore all the more stunning to imagine that the industrialization of human attention capture as we know it had really only begun. The possibilities of electronic media and the Internet still lay in the future. Thanks to the rise of advertising, the world seemed cluttered with come-ons, but these were still confined to newspapers, magazines, posters, billboards, and leaflets. And yet unbeknownst to most of those making the most grandiose claims for advertising, some of its best days were already behind it.
When, in 1932, Claude Hopkins died of heart failure, at the age of sixty-six, The New York Times described him as “the man who had written $100 million worth of copy.” Despite his success, however, when Hopkins was near death, he claimed with his peculiar piety that “money means nothing to me, save that my Scotch instinct rebels at waste.”22 He had also ended his autobiography on a strange note: “The happiest are those who live closest to nature, an essential to advertising success.” It was an odd sentiment from one foremost in the effort to replace nature with advertising. Perhaps the old preacher had one further prophecy in him.
CHAPTER 6
NOT WITH A BANG BUT WITH A WHIMPER
In 1926, Stuart Chase and Frederick Schlink met in a Greenwich Village speakeasy and over the conversation found that they agreed about many things. Chase was an accountant and former investigator at the Federal Trade Commission; Schlink, a standards engineer, had worked in the National Laboratories. Although following markedly different professions, both men were near zealots for the scientific method and its power to expose truths that might be contrary to popular opinion. They also shared, above all, an implacable contempt for the advertising industry, and what they regarded as the massive fraud it was perpetrating on the American public.1
The two would later use the following parable to capture their view of the inherent tension between truth and advertising:
Two men are discussing the merits of a famous brand of oil. Says one, “I know it must be good; it sells a million dollars worth a year. You see their advertisements everywhere.” But the other says, “I do not care how much it sells. I left a drop of it on a piece of copper for 24 hours, and the drop turned green. It is corrosive and I do not dare to use it.”
…The first speaker followed the crowd, but his friend disregarded the fact of bigness and went after the facts of chemistry. As a result, he arrived at a precisely opposite course of action from the common one. Sometimes the crowd is right; often it is wrong. It remains for science to read the balance.2
That evening, Chase and Schlink decided to collaborate on what would become a manifesto: Your Money’s Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer’s Dollar. As they wrote:
Consumers make their blunder-ing way, so many Alices in the Wonderland of salesman-ship; they buy not what they freely want, but what they are made to want. In the office of the advertising agency, human psychology is an open book. There is no strand or chord of it upon which the advertiser has not learned to play….But there is just a chance that the gentlemen who run this unparalleled side show may be putting on the acts a little too fast; just a chance that the superlatives have almost reached the limits of registering on the brain; that the sheer multiplicity of brand names dizzies the spectator instead of seducing him….In that hope this book has been written, but its authors have not deluded themselves with the belief that the triumph of science is inevitable.3
Both encapsulating and amplifying an emergent disenchantment with the high-handedness of advertising, Your Money’s Worth would become a bestseller, known in its time as the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the consumer movement, and, along with the Depression, it sparked another major revolt—another period of consumer resistance. The authors knew their success owed in part to a perspective that was, in their words, “in no sense revolutionary.” Chase and Schlink were no critics of the free market, private property, or any other defining feature of American capitalism. Indeed, it was in the defense of the market’s integrity that they attacked advertising, which, with its misleading and deceptive claims, and manufactured demand for relatively needless products, was distorting the economy to the nation’s detriment. In the wake of the book
’s success, in 1929 the authors founded Consumers’ Research Incorporated, which aimed to be the world’s first scientific consumer product testing service. The new organization produced a confidential newsletter—the Consumers’ Research General Bulletin—which supplied its subscribers with secret reviews of products and product claims, based on rigorous testing.4
Chase and Schlink’s ventures were, in fact, only the leading edge of a broad-based assault that would ultimately figure in advertising’s near collapse. Over the 1930s the movement collected a range of fellow travelers, among them academics like Rexford Tugwell, the Columbia University economist and member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, who opined that nine tenths of advertising was simple economic waste; as well as members of various women’s groups, like the League of Women Shoppers. It was fitting perhaps, after so much targeting of them by advertisers, that women were widely viewed as the heart of the movement. The average woman was outraged, Business Week reported, to find that “the soap which made her so popular at the dance was made with a little creosol…recommended by the Government for disinfecting cars, barns and chicken yards.”5
Some of the most intense new critics of advertising were internal. In 1928, Theodore MacManus, who had so famously branded Cadillac, Dodge, and Chrysler, decided he’d had it. Writing in The Atlantic, he denounced both his own industry and the whole of modern civilization: “Advertising has gone amuck,” he wrote, “in that it has mistaken the surface silliness for the sane solid substance of an averagely decent human nature.” A serious Catholic, he blamed the American brand of Protestantism for creating a “Nadir of Nothingness” in which people worshipped consumer goods as “brightly packaged gifts of the gods.”6
Helen Woodward, a copywriter of prominence, wrote a popular book lamenting the emptiness of what she’d done with her life. She offered a professional confession: “In the advertising business we thought ourselves important. We thought we knew what we were doing; we had our plans for next week or next year. The realization came to me with a slow shock that I was nothing, we were nothing. We were feathers all of us, blown about by winds which we neither understood nor controlled.”
The darkest was the work of James Rorty, another former copywriter, who wrote Our Master’s Voice: Advertising (1934), in which he described the job’s effect on the soul. The adman, he wrote, “inevitably empties himself of human qualities. His daily traffic in half-truths and outright deceptions is subtly and cumulatively degrading. No man can give his days to barbarous frivolity and live. And ad-men don’t live. They become dull, resigned, hopeless. Or they become daemonic fantasts and sadists.” In one poetical passage reminiscent of “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Eliot’s 1925 cry of despair for Western civilization following the Great War, Rorty memorializes his former colleagues thus: “they are dead men. Their bones are bakelite. Their blood is water, their flesh is pallid—yes, prick them and they do not bleed. Their eyes are veiled and sad or staring and a little mad. From them comes an acrid odor—they do not notice it, it may be only the ozone discharge of the machine itself.”7
Advertising had not come so far so fast to take these attacks lying down. The International Advertising Association pronounced Your Money’s Worth a work of “communist propaganda.” The purpose of the consumer movement, another critic charged, was “to overthrow capitalists, but to have the overthrowing done by an army of embattled consumers and housewives rather than by the traditional revolutionary agent—Marx’s proletariat.”
They also bit the hand that fed them, attacking the new consumer clubs as efforts to foment socialism among gullible females. “Women’s clubs have put aside Oriental travel and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay as topics for discussion,” wrote one condescending critic, “and are now clamoring for speakers on ‘Consumer Education.’ Editors of women’s magazines find that their readers want fewer recipes for summer salads and more information on consumer goods specification or social consciousness.”8
But despite the brave and defiant front, advertising was in serious trouble. Like all American industry, it was damaged by the Depression. In addition to consumer resentment, it was also meeting a rising new skepticism among clients, the producers of goods and services who, facing their own declining fortunes, began to wonder whether advertising was really as effective as they had once thought; whether it wasn’t, perhaps, just a waste of money. With the economy as a whole in utter collapse, advertising outlays shrank over the 1930s to almost one third of what they had been by the end of the 1920s; several firms folded, and consumption’s former high priests and priestesses were among those left jobless. Trying to salvage some business, the remnants of the industry fell back to hard-selling patent medicine techniques that only confirmed the worst claims of critics.9
The consumer movement, meanwhile, kept up a relentless onslaught over the early 1930s, with the publication of still more books, including 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (on food and drug advertising) and Skin Deep (an attack on the cosmetic industry), as well as Eat, Drink and Be Wary, Guinea Pigs No More, and The Popular Practice of Fraud, all of them encouraging a growing sense that neither advertisements nor manufacturers were to be trusted. The combined effect raised an interesting question—just what use, if any, was advertising to the economy? Let’s consider it for a moment.10
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In classical economics, sellers supply products to consumers who want them, and the price is set by the intersection of supply and demand. But of course this model, which still dominates market analysis, leaves out plenty of details. For instance: How do consumers actually find out—or “discover” in today’s marketing parlance—what products exist in the first place? Even in an information-rich world, one sometimes doesn’t hear about things for one reason or another, and you cannot demand, much less buy, something you don’t even know about. How often have you discovered a film or a novel that you love years after its release?
Nor can the competition envisioned by classical economics and driven by differences in price and quality work unless people actually find out about the prices and quality differences that various producers offer. If I don’t know that fifteen minutes can save me 15 percent or more on my car insurance, how does competition contribute to efficiency? Put another way, if a price falls in the market and no one hears it, it doesn’t make a sound.
Information cannot be acted upon without attention and thus attention capture and information are essential to a functioning market economy, or indeed any competitive process, like an election (unknown candidates do not win). So as a technology for gaining access to the human mind, advertising can therefore serve a vital function, making markets, elections, and everything that depends on informed choice operate better, by telling us what we need to know about our choices, ideally in an objective fashion.
That, at least, is the ideal. The trouble, of course, is that most companies don’t care so much about market efficiency as maximizing profit; and so advertising rarely stops at the presentation of objective information meant to aid the competitive process.11 After all, what makes people “want” a product in the first place? There are some things, like a mother’s milk, and basic comforts that one might be born wanting; but for such items advertising is hardly necessary. Most other products in the contemporary economy are what one might call acquired tastes. No one is born wanting 4K television, a purse branded by Hermès or Louis Vuitton, or the odor eliminator product Febreze. For the advertisers, by far the most valuable function of advertising, then, is the shaping or creation of demands that would not otherwise exist.* We have seen ample examples in the creation of demand for orange juice, toothpaste, mouthwash, the Cadillac automobile, or cigarettes (among women), and in the 1920s advertising executives described this as their function. “The achievements of American mass production would fall of their own weight,” Stanley Resor observed, “without the mass marketing machinery which advertising supplies.”
At its worst, as Chase and Schlink argued, advertising actually tries to
attack and distort the mechanisms of choice, by presenting information that is either completely false (as in some patent medicine advertising), or deceptive, by, for example, failing to disclose important truths (like the fact that cigarettes cause cancer). And when advertising confuses, misleads, or fools customers, it does not aid the market process, or indeed any process premised on informed choice, but instead defeats it.
Branding, which grew to such heights in the 1920s, was subject to a slightly different criticism. As economist Edward Chamberlin, in his 1933 work The Theory of Monopolistic Competition, alleged, the creation of strong brand loyalties, having little to do with intrinsic value, was a calculated effort to foster irrational attachments by which a brand might survive competition from other brands that were as good or better. The most effective brand advertising, after all, does not try to convince you to make a choice, but rather to convince you that there is no choice—that Coca-Cola is the cola, that Camel is your cigarette, or that Harley-Davidson is the only motorcycle one would consider. It can succeed if it manages to make the brand part of your identity: One might feel the same loyalty to Miller the beer as a resident of Wisconsin feels to the state. True brand advertising is therefore an effort not so much to persuade as to convert. At its most successful, it creates a product cult, whose loyalists cannot be influenced by mere information: companies like Apple, Hermès, and Porsche are among those that have achieved this kind of immunity to competition, at least among their true believers. What is offered to adherents is not merely a good product (though often it is), but something deeper and more deeply fulfilling—a sense of meaning that comes with the surrender of choice.