Present at the Birth of Modern Advertising

By KENNETH ROMAN

In the nascent days of advertising, in the first half of the 20th century, no one was more successful—or more influential—than Albert Lasker. Under his energetic leadership, the Lord & Thomas agency promoted new habits as well as new products and became for a period the country's largest agency. He devised a way to help women overcome their shyness in buying sanitary napkins (Kotex), helped break the prejudice against women smoking (Lucky Strikes) and made orange juice a part of the American diet (Sunkist).

Bettmann/Corbis

Albert Lasker and his Lord & Thomas advertising agency in Chicago transformed the industry a century ago.

Lasker is the subject of "The Man Who Sold America" by Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz, a former chief executive officer of Foote, Cone & Belding, the successor agency to Lord & Thomas. As the authors note, Lasker's influence extended well beyond the confines of the advertising world. "He is the super-salesman of the generation," said Will Hays, who managed the 1920 presidential campaign that, with the super-salesman's help, put Warren Harding in the White House.

A major investor in his beloved Chicago Cubs, Lasker persuaded owner William Wrigley to change the name of Cubs Park to Wrigley Field— Lasker wanted to help the chewing-gum magnate sell more product. When the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal threatened the sport, Lasker came up with the plan to restructure major-league baseball and appoint Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as its czar.

Lasker, a lifelong Republican, helped elect a president— Harding's 1920 campaign is considered a landmark in the convergence of politics and advertising—but he also became the president's close friend, dining or lunching at the White House several times a week. Harding appointed him chairman of the Shipping Board—making Lasker one of the few Jews, in addition to Louis Brandeis on the Supreme Court and Bernard Baruch on the War Industries Board, to achieve a position of public influence during that era.

"The Man Who Sold America" shows us the advertising industry well before the age of "Mad Men," when the promotional brilliance of Lasker and his shop helped turn Kleenex, Pepsodent toothpaste, Quaker Oats, Goodyear tires and Palmolive soap into household brands. An authorized Lasker biography in 1960, "Taken at the Flood" by John Gunther, was richly readable but felt incomplete; Messrs. Cruikshank and Schultz fill in the gaps and along the way provide an equally engrossing account.

The second child of prosperous German Jewish immigrants who settled in Galveston, Texas, Lasker was born in 1880. He was a precocious child: In 1892, a cogent endorsement for a Texas gubernatorial candidate appeared in the Galveston Free Press—a newspaper written, edited and owned by 12-year-old Albert. While still in high school, he wrote for the Galveston Daily News and aimed for a journalism career after graduation. But then his father, put off by the notorious drinking habits of newspapermen, intervened and called in a favor from a friend. Lasker would work in the slightly more respectable advertising business, with the Lord & Thomas agency in Chicago.

When Lasker moved to Chicago in 1898, advertising agencies were still mainly brokers of space in newspapers and magazines. Lord & Thomas employed just one graphic artist and a part-time copywriter. All that was about to change. America's population was swelling, and manufactured goods were flooding into the market; the emergence of large-circulation newspapers and national magazines like The Saturday Evening Post meant companies had new and inviting places for promotion.

Lasker, not yet out of his teens, was an instant success at Lord & Thomas. With his inventive mind and engaging personality, he easily won clients; he became a part-owner of the business at 24 and was running the agency (and its sole owner) within a few years. Messrs. Cruikshank and Schultz note that he could be a dictatorial chief—his staff and clients admired Lasker's vitality and magnetism but were exhausted by his demands. "To his subordinates," the authors write, "he could be alternately inspirational, baffling, and demoralizing. He could be cheerful, playful, irascible, generous, or petty—and he could shift from mood to mood with bewildering speed."

The Man Who Sold America

The Man Who Sold America

By Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz
Harvard Business Review Press, 417 pages, $27.95

• Excerpt: 'The Man Who Sold the World'

At the turn of the century, advertising was largely understood as a matter of keeping your name in front of the public. Lasker instinctively felt that there must be something more and was searching for a broader definition of the business. He was instantly receptive when John E. Kennedy, a free-lance direct-mail writer ("a troubled and inebriated genius"), broached a new way of thinking about advertising. It boiled down to three words: salesmanship in print. Advertisers, Kennedy said, should come at readers as a salesman would a prospective buyer: offering "reason why" advertising that made an argument, a creative one, for a product or service. "Finally," the authors write, "there was an idea on the table which Lasker could work with."

Kennedy moved to a New York firm in 1906 and was succeeded by copywriter Claude C. Hopkins, lured to Lord & Thomas by Lasker's unprecedented offer: $1,000 a week. Hopkins was already a legend in the business and his fame would only grow at Lord & Thomas. He and Lasker created hugely successful campaigns for Quaker Oats Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat cereals ("foods shot from guns"), for the "beauty appeal" of Palmolive soap and for Goodyear "all-weather" tires. They branded California raisins as "Sun-Maid" and California oranges as "Sunkist." Lord & Thomas encouraged the production of glass juice extractors for home use—essentially inventing orange juice as a popular American beverage.

Lasker was involved in all parts of the business, writing and editing ads, but more than anything else providing counsel and ideas for his clients. The complete advertising man. He set high ethical standards and made advertising more respectable than the patent-medicine ads that had come before. He didn't believe in expensive consumer research—one reason for his agency's much-envied profitability. Regarding the early days of marketing Kotex, Lasker years later recalled, "we didn't have to make investigations among millions of women. Just a few of us talked to our wives."

The at-home research led the agency to propose to Kotex that the company put its product in plain wrapped packages on the retailer's counter so women wouldn't be embarrassed to ask for them. Lasker was especially adept at appealing to women: Kleenex tissues were transformed, to great effect on sales, from a "cosmetics remover" to a "disposable handkerchief." Working with the irascible George Washington Hill of American Tobacco, Lasker persuaded women that smoking Lucky Strikes would ultimately be good for their figures: "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet." ("Candy manufacturers screamed," the authors note.) Pepsodent toothpaste went to the top in the 1930s with radio—as did the Pepsodent-sponsored show's host, a heretofore not particularly successful comedian named Bob Hope.

Sunkist Growers, Inc

Instead of just keeping an advertiser's name in front of the public, he used 'salesmanship in print' to promote brands including Sunkist, Goodyear, Palmolive and Pepsodent.

By 1938, Lasker had made a fortune, which he spent on himself and others. He advanced millions to friends during the Depression and at times lent money to clients to finance their advertising campaigns. In 1942, tired and bored, he abruptly decided to leave the business—and take the agency's name with him, selling its assets for a token amount to Emerson Foote, Fairfax Cone and Don Belding. He had made lucrative investments and up to that point had been paying himself $1 million a year ($13 million today). He lived a baronial life; the 480-acre weekend estate he built outside Chicago had a staff of 55 and a challenging golf course where he hosted friends and clients—if they were also friends.

His third wife, Mary, introduced him to fine art—they collected Impressionists—and philanthropy. The Laskers became major contributors to the American Cancer Society, the National Heart Institute and, in part because he suffered from debilitating depression all his life, the National Committee for Mental Health. With his "energetic advocacy," Lasker "reshaped philanthropy," the authors write, by using "the tools he had embraced in the commercial context, including radio, to change the way the nation thought about cancer and other diseases." Another sign of his influence: Lasker suggested that the Birth Control Institute change its name to Planned Parenthood.

Except for a six-hour staff talk in 1925, Lasker made no speeches and wrote nothing for publication. Mary had to persuade him to put his name on the Lasker Awards for medical research. He died in 1951 at 72. The authors liken him to the Great Oz in Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz," "the man behind the curtain" who operated with relative invisibility. "The Man Who Sold America" pulls back the curtain and shows us a remarkable life spent shaping much of the world we know today.