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The Redemption of Advertising: The Advertising Business in the Early 1900s

In the twenty-first century, advertising is an integral aspect of popular culture. We are

inundated with advertising, from signs on billboards to signs on the back of bathroom stall doors.

We buy and wear merchandise and clothes featuring brand logos and thus become a medium for

advertising messages ourselves. Advertising permeates films and TV shows in the form of

product placement. It makes its way onto blogs and into other privately-constructed electronic

media as we become advocates for the products we like. In our quest for information and

entertainment, we are sometimes audiences for advertising in ways that we do not consciously

understand because marketers are creative and opportunistic. For example, in autumn 2009 in

Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada, a person driving a BMW X5 inadvertently crushed a Hyundai

Elantra in a parking lot and a video of it ended up on YouTube.1 At the end of October 2009, the

local Hyundai dealer gave the owner of the crushed car a 2010 Hyundai, an act which of course

was filmed and used as a marketing conquest.

However, without the efforts of the earliest advertising agents writing “how-to” books in

the early twentieth century, advertising might not have gained the foothold in popular culture

that it now has. In the early 1900s, advertising suffered from a seemingly irredeemably` bad

reputation. Because of its almost total association with patent medicine, advertising was

considered, at worst as fraud and at best as hucksterism; it was the oily spiel of medicine men out

to turn a quick buck by peddling so-called “medicines,” whose main ingredient was alcohol, to

an unsuspecting, and sometimes desperate, public. The business itself was corrupt and

advertising agents were as distrusted by businesses as much as the discourse itself.

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Admen and Patent Medicine:

Advertising historian Roland Marchand points out, “Advertising leaders chafed under

public suspicion of their craft.”2 Advertising was considered a transgressor in societal

discourse; thus, the early “madmen” were involved in something very pragmatic. They had a

very clear objective in mind: the salvation and redemption of advertising discourse. The popular

view that advertising was mere “puffery”3 provided the problem they had to solve. The writers

declared they had a highly practical purpose: to teach others about advertising. But their works

were also instrumental in another way: they functioned to change the way the public perceived

advertising, showing its potential to help strengthen the commercial enterprises of a nation and

build the character of a nation and its people.4 It was in this context that writers like Earnest

Elmo Calkins, Albert Lasker, and Claude Hopkins began to reshape how the general public and

business people understood advertising by challenging the fundamental assumptions that society

held about advertising.

The assumption that the early admen challenged was this: “Advertising sells snake oil.

Snake oil is fraudulent; therefore, advertising is fraudulent.” Since “Patent medicines had

loomed large in nineteenth-century American advertising, the lingering effects of that association

continued to fuse images of the modern advertising man with recollections of carnival barkers,

[and] snake-oil salesmen.”5 In fact, patent medicine was the mainstay of advertising agencies.6

Patent medicine ads made outrageous claims and this fact seemed a characteristic associated with

all advertising. Because of its prominence, “advertising” as a concept evoked images of

hucksters and charlatans selling fakery from the back of a covered wagon. Advertising’s

redemption occurred through a convergence of technology, commercial and economic

development, and social changes, but the earliest advertising men had rhetorical work to do to

transform and redeem advertising as a public discourse.

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Advertising and Respectable Business

In the 1800s, “advertising was considered an embarrassment” and “[a] firm risked its

credit rating by advertising; banks might take it as a confession of financial weakness. Nobody

. . . took responsibility for it. . . . In the absence of any government regulation, the entire business

was conducted in a half-light of bunkum and veiled appearances.”7 The cultural scene provided

a rhetorical exigence, a problem that needed to be solved and could be solved with one of the

most important campaigns advertising would ever run: the one that not only made it a

respectable business discourse, but also one that would influence popular culture as it promised

audiences transformation from their flawed selves and transcendence from their banal existence.

But before advertising could become a salvational discourse, it first had to undergo redemption

itself.

All in all, advertising tried to sell “snake oil” to the public and was an enterprise in which

scam artists flourished. Historian Stephen Fox observes that “polite magazines of the era [late

1800s] took pride in not imitating” a pulp magazine that was created simply as ad space.8 As a

result of patent medicine’s reputation, respectable magazines were reluctant to accept any kind of

advertising, fearful of what their readers would think.9 Some magazine editors were willing to

say “no” to the profit patent medicine ads could generate because a magazine’s reputation could

be jeopardized and advertising dollars could not buy back an audience. According to Fox,

monthlies such as The Atlantic and Scribners were underwritten “by publishing houses that filled

back pages with ads for their own books. . . [but] allowed only a few pages of advertising for

outsiders . . . Harper’s none at all.”10 It seems that for the editors of these magazines, retaining

the respect of intelligent readers was more important than turning a great profit.

If media and business were suspicious of patent medicine advertising, the general public

was particularly hostile to the claims of patent medicine. According to advertising historian E.S.

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Turner, 1890 - 1914 saw “the mounting of vigorous attacks on the more presumptuous of the

medicine men. If advertising were to be made respectable, it was necessary to dissipate two

centuries of distrust created by curemongers.”11 For advertising to become a tool for commercial

enterprise, it had to be re-imagined for both the general public and for business because “many

reputable firms refused to advertise in the same columns as the medicine vendors.”12 Some of the

publishers of magazines decided to do something about patent medicine claims. Colliers and

Ladies Home Journal led the way to expose “dishonesty and chicanery by the medicine men.”13

These magazines mounted a journalism campaign that resulted in “many publications, usually

the more prosperous ones, [being] persuaded to ban or to censor patent medicine copy.”14

The tension between advertising as a discourse that promoted and perpetuated the lies of

charlatans and one that benefited people and a nation had to be resolved. Eventually, according

to Fox, “two leading women’s magazines, Godey’s and Peterson’s, did surrender their back

covers to the Great American Tea Company, but . . . [still] restricted advertising to less than a

page per issue.”15 Print media were careful about the ads they accepted, in part so as to not

compromise their reputations.

Salvation and Redemption for Advertising

Into this scene came some of America’s earliest and most influential advertising men who

gave the world a new way to understand advertising. Some of the earliest admen who helped

with the redemption of advertising included Earnest Elmo Calkins, Albert Lasker, and Claude

Hopkins. These men wrote, in part, to deflect the assumptions that people made when they

thought of advertising, and they ushered in the era of modern advertising. Their writings about

advertising helped to redeem it from its earlier incarnation as snake oil salesmanship and to

resurrect it not only as a respectable and necessary business discourse, but also as a discourse

that would influence popular culture and social practices.

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Each man wrote memoirs to offer advertising advice, to document his own contribution

to advertising, and to redeem advertising’s reputation. Calkins, with business partner Ralph

Holden, wrote Modern Advertising in 1905 and envisioned it as art; The Lasker Story: As He

Told it is a transcription of a six-hour lecture Albert Lasker gave in 1925 at Lord and Thomas

which was taken down verbatim by a secretary, published in 26 installment in Advertising Age,

and finally published in book form in 1963. Lasker envisions advertising as a powerful force

which only the best admen can control effectively. Hopkins wrote Scientific Advertising and My

Life in Advertising in 1933 and 1937 respectively. He envisions advertising as a scientific pursuit

and a civilizing force. Each revisioning of advertising contributed to its redemption. Men like

these chose metaphors of science and religion so that advertising could be understood in new and

different ways. As these men redeemed advertising’s reputation, they in turn elevated the

profession of the advertising man.

In fact, the influence exerted by the earliest advertising practitioners would, perhaps

indirectly, result in Calvin Coolidge, in a 1926 speech to the annual meeting of the American

Association of Advertising Agencies declaring, “Advertising ministers to the spiritual side of the

trade.”16 The earliest “madmen” helped the general business person to believe that advertising

should be understood as a discourse that assisted in building a competitive economy; they helped

the editors of media outlets, such as magazines and newspapers, believe that advertising

enlightened audiences about the latest, most innovative products, and they presented advertising

as an evangelical discourse that helped its audiences understand that their deficiencies were

inherent and one that proselytised about products that could save audiences from social sins

ranging from body odour to bad coffee.

Each of these pioneering admen saw himself as doing something more important than

strategizing how to sell products and developing something more than just a discourse that would

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support business enterprises. In fact, these men were shaping and changing the belief systems of

a nation. Their work would resonate into the future changing not only the business of

advertising, but perhaps more importantly, how advertising was perceived by society, and its role

in popular culture. People like Calkins, Lasker, and Hopkins were driven by the idea that they

were creating new kinds of interactions between people and products. However, they were

instrumental in creating a culture of consumption and, indeed, creating consumers. They had an

enormous task before them before advertising could become the mainstream discourse we now

see.

The earliest admen’s language choices in their memoirs reshaped and re-imagined both

the work of advertising men and the role of advertising discourse; however, their acts of

redemption were not monolithic and were effective, in part, because of a shifting orientation of

society as a whole and its new communication technology. While the authors were certainly

aware that advertising was considered an embarrassment, they also saw its potential, and they

chose to talk about it in terms that would give both it and them the respectability they believed

advertising and admen deserved. Because of the works of these early admen, eventually,

business people could advertise without fear of being seen in the same light as quacks and

thieves.

Metaphor and “Madmen” of Twentieth Century Advertising

Calkins, Lasker, and Hopkins very much saw themselves as creating and directing a

powerful force. Each man made a unique contribution to redirecting how both the public and

producers and manufacturers understood advertising. Calkins contributed the metaphor that

advertising is art, while elevating the image of admen from shysters to men of whom a nation

could be proud. Lasker contributed metaphors that positioned advertising as a discourse

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comparable to religious discourse. For Lasker, advertising was a form of energy that was

supernatural in its power and, of course, those who could control that force were superior beings.

Additionally, Lasker originated the concept of social contract by linking advertising with

entertainment. He understood that people would be more amenable to advertising if they were

being entertained by it as the same time as it tried to promote a produce. By the time Hopkins

published his work in the 1930s, advertising was being sold as a science and through admen,

civilization was being maintained. In their works advertising is sometimes represented as a force

that comes through nature, but sometimes as a spiritual force. Accordingly, advertising men

implicitly accrue an aura of respectability and power as the ones who can control this force. In

the next sections, each man’s unique contribution will be examined.

Earnest Elmo Calkins: Advertising is Art

Earnest Elmo Calkins was a different kind of formative influence on advertising, known

for changing the face of print advertising, literally, by crafting artful designs. He contributed the

metaphor that advertising is art. Admen are the best men to be found in society, and advertising

is connected to patriotism. He was born in 1865 in Galesburg Illinois into a strongly Baptist

family.17 As a youngster, he became deaf after a bout with the measles and, by the time he was in

high school, he worked for a print shop setting in type patent medicine ads.18 According to

advertising historian T.J. Lears, while Calkins was attending Knox College and editing a

newsmagazine, George Rowell, the founder of Printer’s Ink, invited him to promote Rowell’s

magazine in return for a free subscription. Calkins did so and after familiarizing himself with the

trade magazine, decided to try a career in advertising. He started writing copy for the Bates

agency in 1891 and, with Ralph Holden, opened an agency in 1903.19 Calkins brought to

advertising the concept that visual imagery persuades the atmosphere created in print ads were in

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themselves persuasive. Whereas “reason-why” copy offers denotative logic to persuade

audiences of the benefits of products, image offers connotative logic. Calkins recognized that

images create associations, not arguments, and convince not through reason but through the

visual power of transformation: seeing is believing. He understood that the associations of visual

persuasion were not articulated, but evocative in nature, and therefore, particularly useful to

advertising.

Calkins’ belief in the efficacy of advertising art was not embraced by all. An article in a

1908 edition of Printer’s Ink suggested that “picture pretty” ads did not work. Calkins did not,

however, allow critiques of his advertising style to change that style and persisted in visual

“puffery” imagining and portraying mundane objects in images of mystery and beauty. Lears

notes that Calkins was “nearly a caricature of the detached aesthete.”20 However, Calkins was a

canny advertising agent too, saying, “A picture . . . can say things that no advertiser could say in

words and retain his self-respect.”21 In many ways, Calkins’ advertising philosophy predicted

how modern advertising would function since aesthetics and atmosphere have a compelling

persuasive power is a foundational belief of modern advertising.

It was Calkins work that, in part, helped to rehabilitate advertising discourse from its

reputation of being empty bombast that served the interests of only admen and commerce,

because, according to Calkins, advertising brought “corporate sponsored art to the masses.” 22

Thus advertising, as Calkin’s understood it, helped to give birth to a discourse that would shape

popular culture. Relying on the power of imagery to imply messages that simply could not be

refuted or debated, advertising began a powerful identification process with its audience. Calkins

brought the advertising industry to the realization that layout and design, in short, visual appeal,

were just as important, if not more so, than copy. In fact, his ads were almost all picture, 23 and

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through his influence, print advertising came into its own as a visual media more so than a

textual one.

Calkins published many books over the course of his career, but his 1905 book lays out a

view of advertising that emphasizes aesthetics as a persuasive element. Calkins and Holden

billed their agency as the “first full service agency” because in addition to space brokerage and

media selection, they offered copy writing and design services to their clients. 24 While Calkins

has been called the aesthete of the early advertising world,25 he pragmatically called attention to

advertising’s contribution to commerce. For Calkins, art is not separate from commerce, but

helps commerce function. He reshaped the adman’s image as well as the ad agencies’ art with

business, depicting admen as both astute and creative, and selling the idea of advertising as the

art form of popular culture.

Admen are the Best of Society

Calkins shaped the public’s perception of advertising men by linking them to classic

artists involved in creating religious imagery. He constructed an analogy that linked copywriters

and ad designers to Michelangelo.26 Calkins linked admen with one of history’s greatest artistic

innovators, when he claimed, “the specifications with which [the advertising artist] approaches

his work do not differ greatly from those given Michelangelo when he painted . . . the Sistine

Chapel. . . .The quality which makes art does not depend on the fact that Michelangelo painted

religion instead of motor cars, but in the fact that Michelangelo was a great artist. His work was

applied art, and advertising is in the same category.”27 Calkins was instrumental in establishing

the idea that entertainment, art, and advertising were “all of a piece.”28 Calkins established the

metaphor that allowed commercial discourse to be understood as artistic endeavour as well as

cultural practice.

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For Calkins, advertising is the discourse that holds a nation together and one that attracts

the best people: “the advertising of manufactured articles – the real bone and sinew of commerce

– is today the great field in which the best energy and best ability are being used.”29 Calkins goes

on to assert that “Young men. . .who, in any other country, would fill places in the church, or

state . . .and who in any other age would be makers of history, are the ones who . . .are building

up the circulation of publications converting them into assets of great value, and who are making

the names and trade-marks of articles advertised vastly valuable.”30 Admen are characterized not

only as leaders of nations, but also as inspirational leaders.

In advancing his view of the role of advertising men in society, Calkins initially depicts

them as nation builders: “Napoleon himself is the fairest prototype of the advertising man . . .

With the passing away of Napoleon, passed from the modern world the opportunities for such

work as his. Other fields were left, however, for the man like him with a genius for organization,

knowledge of human nature, capacity for tireless study of cases and effects, of conditions and

remedies.”31 These other fields include business, and advertising as an aspect of business. For

Calkins, advertising men are the best of society and they elevate the world they operate in; he

claims that “Such men have gone into business, and with that advent business has been elevated

to a field of endeavor greater in its rewards than any other offered by the world today.”32 The

advertising business is the highest order of business and commercialism is the highest valued

concept.

Calkins further suggests that advertising men elevated business from petty

commercialism to something much finer: “Such men found business commonplace and petty, but

made it a profession; they introduced into it the ability and methods that formerly had changed

the world’s maps, founded dynasty and created political parties.”33 Advertising men exerted as

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much power and influence as explorers, progenitors of significant lineages, and innovators who

built new political structures.

Advertising business

In addition to being an astute advertising artist, Calkins also advocated for the advertising

industry to adopt standards that would put it in the same professional realm as the law and

medicine; the knowledge and expertise needed to enter the profession would be defined and

classified and passed on to prospective agents.34 His metaphors and analogies helped to detach

advertising it from its strictly economic moorings and to make it a living, breathing part of

popular culture, practised by legitimate professionals, not racketeers.

Calkins relies on images that ground advertising’s strength in the power of its original

media: the press. He states “modern advertising” is a result of the “the shop and the newspaper

joining forces.” 35 He appeals to national pride when he says “America has forged from her

press a power which has helped to make her shopkeeping the most wonderful in the world.” 36

This power is advertising. Calkins was able to sell an attitude about a product as much as the

product itself.

Advertising is Transformation

Calkins was also responsible for a campaign that made explicit what is implicit in all

advertising discourse, the theme of transformation. In developing advertising which persuaded

audiences that products could effect in transformation, he was ahead of his time. Calkins

designed a breakfast cereal ad campaign that drove home advertising’s ability to sell a product

by selling the product’s transformative powers. Calkins was responsible for creating the brand

character of the popular, funny, “Sunny Jim” of the Force cereal commercials. “Sunny Jim”

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started out the Force ad campaign as Jim Dumps, a sour and unhappy character who is

transformed by the cereal product into a happy and successful fellow.37 Over the course of the

marketing campaign, Jim Dumps transcends his own unhappiness and has his character

transformed and improved by his use of a product. The Sunny Jim campaign was one of the first

campaigns to create, with a high degree of success, identification with its audience as it held out

an ideal for the audience to aspire to that was dependent on a product. Modern advertising relies

on this type of transformative practice.

For Calkins, advertising is a force that is comparable to forces of physics and nature. He

says, “advertising is that subtle, indefinable, but powerful force whereby the advertiser creates a

demand for a given article in the minds of a great many people or arouses the demand that is

already there in latent form.”38 Here he claims the power of advertising to arouse in people a

sense of what they lack and to inspire desire to have more. He is not talking about desiring

fulfilment from intangibles, but about desiring material abundance, when he comments, in 1905,

that advertising “has been successful far beyond the expectations, certainly beyond the

knowledge, of many who produced it.” 39 He then compares advertising men and electricians,

saying “There are many working electricians who, while familiar with all the practical

requirements of their work are ignorant of the actual nature of electricity. So with the advertiser .

. . Neither [the advertising man nor the manufacturer] has appreciated the real nature of the force

employed.”40 Calkins advises his audience, however, that the advertising expert is the man to

employ the “force” effectively.

Calkins believes that advertising men, using the power of advertising discourse, are

changing the world in significant ways. He pinpoints the heart of the transformation that

advertising has made when he says, “Advertising has come to mean not merely the printed

announcements of the merits of an article or an institution, but that high and unusual power of

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impressing a great number of people with a given idea.” 41 Advertising has ascended from mere

announcement to a discourse that provides identificatory meaning among masses of people.

Appealing to masses of people was a concept that was further developed by Albert Lasker as he

proposed the marriage of commerce and entertainment in advertising.

Albert Lasker: Advertising as Social Contract and Religious-like Discourse

Albert Lasker, a German Jew from Texas, differed from Calkins and other earlier

“madmen” because he was outside both the geographical and religious mainstream.42 However,

like his colleagues, he exerted a strong influence on the advertising industry. Albert Lasker was

the first proponent of market research, and he pioneered the concept of advertising as a social

contract: he viewed advertising as an exchange and recognized the potential interface between

advertising and entertainment: offer people free entertainment, and they, in turn, will not protest

advertising. Additionally, he contributed the metaphor that implicitly compared advertising

discourse to discourses of a religious nature. Lasker ran the advertising firm of Lord and Thomas

in Chicago for forty years, but unlike his peers, Lasker did not write memoirs or “how to” books;

however, an informal six hour lecture, or “sermon” as Lasker termed it, on advertising was

transcribed by Lord & Thomas and kept in the agency’s files.43

Lasker pioneered market research while proving advertising`s power. He challenged

clients to test their “usual copy in one city . . . against Lord & Thomas copy in another.”44 The

challenge was issued in a pamphlet created to promote Lord & Thomas, with a result of bringing

in “hundreds of letters a week from inquiring manufacturers.”45 Lasker was determined to prove

that advertising was neither art nor literature, but “salesmanship-on-paper.”46 Lasker shunned

general publicity, arguing that “‘keeping [the advertiser’s] name before the people’ is wrong,”47

and that the only copy that counted was copy that actually sold goods.

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Advertising is Entertainment

One of the most important revisions that Lasker contributed to advertising was that he

recognized that entertainment could be a vehicle for advertising messages; he saw this potential

in the advent of radio. Lasker made impressive inroads in radio advertising because he

introduced what advertising historian E.S. Turner calls “the element of aggressive

salesmanship.”48 Lasker pioneered the idea of a brand name programme. He realized that clients

could “sponsor” entertainment so that in essence, a show would become an advertisement. He

illustrated how advertising and entertainment could be successfully married with his creation of

the Pepsodent programme which gave the popular duo “Amos ‘n’ Andy” their start and turned

them into household names in America. We may conclude then that Lasker believed that the

public would tolerate the intrusion of advertising into their living rooms in exchange for free

entertainment. Thus Lasker contributed the metaphor of “the social contract” of advertising.

Advertising Business and Advertising Men

Lasker appropriates the respectability of medicine and its institutions to advertising,

comparing his agency to the Mayo clinic; in describing the success of Lord and Thomas when he

is talking about how two other advertising agency heads came to him for advice, he says, “You

can liken this institution to the Doctors Mayo at Rochester, Minnesota.”49 The Mayo clinic

represented the most modern medical practice, the most advanced science, and housed the best

medical practitioners in the country, balancing of research and practice.50 By comparing the ad

agency to the Mayo Clinic, Lasker accrues its qualities to his agency. Lasker’s comparison

suggests that advertising can cure a public who suffers from an illness of spirit which manifests

in a lack of motivation to consume. The admen can alleviate that malaise. They are specialists

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who will worth together with their patients, consumers and producers, to produce innovative,

perhaps even life saving, techniques.

Lasker claims advertising is a “great force” 51 with “strength, power, potentiality” and the

advertising agent is an “accessory” to that force with the same characteristics.52 Advertising is a

physical force and one that is potentially dangerous. Lasker advises that in the wrong hands,

“Advertising can blight. Kill, kill, kill.”53 Lasker sees dire consequences for the uninitiated who

attempt to direct the force without training. He compares himself before he learned strategic

advertising writing to “the fellow who uses electricity but doesn’t know what force it is.”54

Advertising, like electricity, is an invisible presence, but one that carries a charge that can either

energize or kill. Sometimes Lasker’s work treats advertising as a natural force, but sometimes as

a manmade force. For example, Lasker likens advertising to “a high powered rifle.”55 In all the

metaphors though, advertising is powerful with the ability to harm people as well as help them.

The role of admen becomes clear by the implication of the metaphors about what

advertising is. Lasker claims, “Advertising is a force that is very hard to use. It is like radium,

can cure the incurable or burn and scar.”56 By likening advertising to radium, Lasker implies

that admen are skilled, scientific, and even heroic because good admen can handle a dangerous

material without causing harm to themselves or to others. Admen are not just scientists, they also

have a touch of the magician about them as can be seen when Lasker says, “Every account we

touch multiplies as if by magic.”57 Lasker, determined to emphasize the power of advertising,

draws upon religious metaphors as easily as scientific ones.

Advertising and Religion

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Lasker compares advertising to gospel and admen to preachers, in part because these

were the analogies that best seemed to fit his enterprise of explaining advertising. Lasker

believes that admen have the responsibility to their profession and fellow businessmen to be able

to teach the limits and benefits of advertising. He says of the Lord and Thomas ads that the limits

and benefits are “those things we are undertaking to preach in our copy and that I want to

impregnate you with.”58 [My emphasis]. In this metaphor, teaching other admen and

businessmen about advertising is preaching, but Lasker also implies that admen are progenitors

and creators. He uses the phrase “impregnate you with” twice in his speech,59 suggesting as an

adman, he can achieve a kind of linguistic immaculate conception, planting his ideas about copy

in the heads of advertising people. Lasker’s language choices link advertising discourse and its

practitioners with religion; teaching others about advertising is likened to religious proselytising.

Lasker describes his doctrine of advertising saying, “This is the kind of gospel I want to preach,

that is the kind of service we are going to give.”60 He insists that “agreeing on that gospel we

must be consumed with a fire of energy and enthusiasm to spread it, not only for our own profit,

but for service to our art and to our profession,”61 sounding like a preacher.

Lasker prefaces his speech to Lord and Thomas employees with the statement, “This is

like a Sunday morning sermon: I am making the announcements of the different activities of the

church for the coming week and having finished it I will get to the main text and preach on it.” 62

He is the preacher, the copy writers the neophytes and congregation. Lasker sees admen as

seekers and sharers of knowledge. He says admen at L & T are “groping for light,” “seeking

more light,” and wanting to “give out light.”63 His words echo with biblical allusions to light in

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his insistent associations between admen and light.1 Thus admen are responsible for illumination

and guidance of both future admen and their clients.

Lasker also makes it clear that knowing how to use language does not necessarily infuse

it with the persuasive spirit. Thus, not all admen are created equal because some will write with a

quality of magic, while others will not. Lasker says, “I learned that reason why wasn’t words any

more than the Gettysburg address was words or the Lord’s Prayer or the 10 commandments.” 64

In this comparison, the language of ads is compared to the language of politics and of prayer and

sacred commandments. Lasker implies that advertising is more than words: it is iconic; it

remakes the world symbolically and changes how people think.

Lasker seems to revere advertising, saying it is an awesome force that should be feared,

respected, admired, a “glorious force”65 and a “wonderful force.”66 He believes in trying to bring

advertising to its full “glory.” 67 These descriptions suggest that advertising is “awesome” in its

full sense of the word, inspiring both wonder and fear. Lasker’s text is homage to the potential of

advertising. Lasker refers to the mystical potency of advertising when he says that “the

experienced advertising agent knows that it is advertising itself that is the miracle, not its

accoutrements.”68 Thus advertising’s power may be greater than the sum of its individual parts,

which means that advertising men may be a force through which advertising runs.

Despite Albert Lasker’s non-Christian background, he makes explicit use of Christian

religious language and metaphors, perhaps because he recognized that the language of

evangelical Protestantism would resonate with his audience. In Lasker’s work, admen play

several roles such as preachers and heroes who bend a dangerous force to do their will. The

1 The most relevant “light” metaphors include Genesis 1:30 where light is the first thing created by God

and, seemingly, the “guide” by which all else is created; Matthew 4:16, which according to Cruden’s Biblical Concordance is about the gospel as spiritual comfort (370); in Matthew 5:14: “Ye are the light of the world;” in John 1:9 which refers to Jesus as the “light”; in Psalms 119:105 which refers to God’s word as a “light unto my path;” and in Luke 16:8 and Ephesians 5:8 which refer to those who have been enlightened by salvation.

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discourse itself is treated as a sacred object with otherworldly power. Lasker stresses that if

handled clumsily, advertising can be a killing force, while insisting that advertising men are

similar to doctors, thereby implying that these men can wield the power of advertising with

surgical finesse. Claude Hopkins worries about advertising being handled clumsily too, but

rather than seeing advertising as a force that can blight or kill, he understands it as one that can

be harnessed, steered, and controlled with scientific methods.

Claude Hopkins: Advertising is Science

Claude Hopkins is another extremely influential voice in advertising, whose works

Scientific Advertising and My life in Advertising were published in 1933 and 1937 respectively.

He contributed the metaphors which enabled people to see advertising as a “science,” promising

that specific techniques would net specific results and furthering the idea of market research.

Hopkins’ philosophy of advertising, using psychological and logical appeals resulted in a

rhetorical balance that made his advertising campaigns some of the most effective in the history

of advertising. In his texts, he positions himself as a guide and a guard, theorizing his successful

campaigns and analysing the failure of others. Fox calls him one of the “greatest copywriters of

all time,”69 and Hopkins’ attitude toward his own success reflects the same belief. Hopkins,

trained as a preacher and preaching occasionally by the time he was 17, was raised in a

religiously strict home. When he rejected his strict Methodist upbringing, he applied what he

knew about preaching the gospel of religion to preaching the gospel of advertising. Fox claims

that “in advertising Hopkins found a secular replacement for the suffocating Christianity of his

youth.”70 For Hopkins, advertising was a vocation, not merely a job.

Hopkins knew that the most effective ads created a demand for the product, as he notes

when he describes patent medicine advertising by saying, “Thirty years ago, medicine

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advertising offered the ad.-writer [sic] his greatest opportunity. It formed the supreme test of his

skill. Medicines were worthless merchandise until a demand was created.”71 By the time

Hopkins’ work is published, he can recall advertising’s association with patent medicine because

advertising has become accepted in both business and popular culture. He demonstrates how

reason and logic married with psychology can result in making the advertised product desirable

and in motivating the consumer to action. Hopkins tried to scientize human needs and wants and

defined effective advertising as that which increased product sales.

Hopkins sets the stage for others to see advertising as a scientific discipline and the

admen as heroic explorers and trail blazers, and perhaps even omnipotent. Hopkins proclaims his

methods as scientific, advocating the view that advertising is a scientistic discipline and calling

for disciples to accept his guidance or face “catastrophe” and “conspicuous disaster.”72 Hopkins

reveals admen as healers and guides, scientists and heroes. Hopkins promises to protect

manufacturers from disaster and catastrophe, while guiding other admen in their jobs and in

doing so, he reveals the “natural” laws of advertising that only Hopkins can explain to his

readers.

Admen as Scientists, Explorers, and Heroes

 In My Life in Advertising, Hopkins says, “every advertising venture in its initial stage

means simply feeling the public pulse.”73 Advertising men can access the heart of popular

culture and by taking the “public pulse”, they can diagnose both what the consumer needs and

what the manufacturer needs. There is the suggestion that the nation is ill and suffering and that

the admen heal it by inspiring faith in advertising. This metaphor suggests admen can offer

advertising consultations that are as authoritative as medical consultations and, in fact, diagnose

public illness. Hopkins identifies an exigence for the public, a nation in need of healing, and then

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implicitly offers consumption as a solution to the problem. In Hopkins’ work, the admen use

advertising as medicine. Hopkins attempts to accrue to himself the professionalism and rigor of

medical training when he says, “I have gained what others gain by medical research, by spending

their lives in a laboratory.” 74

Hopkins conceives of advertising as a science and associates it with the pursuits through

which civilizations are built, such as exploration; by extension then, the admen become

scientists, navigators and pilots, and pioneers or trail blazers who make advertising safe for those

who will come after them. Navigation in particular is a science that depends on a navigator’s

sense of geography as well as his ability to “read” the territory accurately and interpret it

correctly. In My Life Hopkins refers to “advertising men who pilot some big and costly ship to

the rocks,” saying that “Pilots who prove reckless are forever feared.”75 He asserts, “I have seen

scores of promising men in this line wreck themselves with their ships, just because they

ventured with all sails spread on some uncharted course.” 76

Hopkins thus sees himself as a map maker and guide. He urges those he intends to teach

to take advantage of his book, which chronicles fundamentals of advertising. Those who do not

heed his advice face dire consequences. For example, Hopkins likens admen who are not guided

by previous advertising work to “a Columbus starting out to find an undiscovered land.”77 These

admen, if they achieve success, do so simply by accident, as Columbus “discovered” America,

not because of a specific purpose. Before Hopkins, “men were guided by whims and fancies –

vagrant, changing breezes” and rarely “arrived at their port” except “by accident.”78 He says that

when “each early mariner . . . mapped his own course” the “wrecks were unrecorded, so

countless ventures game to grief on the same rocks and shoals.”79 Hopkins explicitly brings order

to what was the chaotic world of early advertising.

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According to Hopkins, admen are navigators who have travelled extensively in the

territory of advertising. They know the dangers and can circumvent them. They have explored

unknown territories, charted these mysterious places and come back to bring the good news to

those who want to travel, but fear the unknown. They are courageous and fearless heroes and

leaders who have made advertising safe for others. Scientific admen are “safe pilots” because

they have “sailed the same course”80 and recorded the results of their experiments. Hopkins

himself is heroic because he has travelled the dangerous road and can assist others in their

journey.

Hopkins implicitly positions his teaching book as a cross between a physics text and

scripture. In it, he advises his readers that “no wise advertiser will ever depart from these

unvarying laws.”81 The claim of unvarying laws suggests advertising is analogous to physics.

This analogy means that admen, like physicists, can – after careful observation and

experimentation – safely state “laws” or givens that are unvarying or absolutely predictable.

From these givens, all sorts of other inroads can be made in understanding the “force” of

advertising. Hopkins further insists that “success is a rarity, maximum success impossibility,

unless one is guided by laws as immutable as the law of gravitation.” 82

However, it is Hopkins who “reveals” the natural laws of advertising, rather than the

universe. Hopkins declares that the purpose of Scientific Advertising is to set down these “laws”

so that others may flourish. In fact, he believes that he “owes a statement to successors” and that

“every pioneer should blaze his trail.”83 He proposes that his book will deal with “universal

principles” claiming that there is “technic in advertising as in all art, science, and mechanics.”84

Hopkins elevates advertising to what he believes is its rightful place, next to those practices that

can be taught by observing the axioms at work in the discipline. For example, advertising is

likened to law and art. He observes that many men will “recognize technical knowledge in

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vocations [such as law or art,] but not in advertising,” which “seems so simple to them because it

aims at simple people. They do not realize that no life time is long enough to learn much more

than the rudiments.”85 Hopkins believes that the practice of advertising is a complicated one,

even as he claims that advertising is scientific and that there are tried and true methods that

achieve results.

Moreover, in Scientific Advertising the metaphors that Hopkins uses invite his readers to

understand advertising as a scientific pursuit. He intends the book as a text for students of

advertising and as a “safe guide” for advertisers, and his stated intention is to remove any

uncertainty from the pursuit of advertising. Hopkins also attempts to build faith in advertising by

linking advertising to science and therefore accruing society’s faith in science to advertising. He

claims that “the only uncertainties pertain to people and to products, not to methods,”86

reinforcing the idea of his own omnipotence. Hopkins emphasizes that advertising has “basic

laws”87 and chooses to see it as a scientific discipline, claiming, “[a]dvertising in some hands has

reached the status of a science.”88 Like a scientist, the adman is searching for and observing the

“universal laws” of advertising, which identifies advertising with natural laws and the laws of

physics that underpin it.

On an ethical level, Hopkins portrays himself as the author of the “good book” of

advertising and claims for himself a superior position as both guide and guard, while

emphasizing he is a “common” person. He guides others to safety and he guards the reputation

of advertising by declaring it a science. At the same time, he insists that admen must keep in

touch with the common people. Blending the role of scientist and saviour in terms which recall

Jesus ministering to the poor, Hopkins proudly claims that poverty “took [him] among the

common people, [and that he] came to know them, their wants and impulses.”89 However, while

he may be one of the “common people,” success in advertising helps him transcend his

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commonness. Again, like Jesus, he implicitly claims to have “ascended” stating that “The higher

we ascend the farther we proceed from ordinary humanity,” but he insists “that will not do in

advertising”90 because one must be able to relate to the masses even if one is not part of the

masses. He says he has recorded his successes and failures in advertising “solely for the purpose

of aiding others to start far up the heights [he] scaled.” 91 When he uses metaphors of ascension,

he suggests he guides others to a higher plane. He gives concrete form to the idea that he is

guiding others to a destination and helping them transcend their limited understanding of

advertising. Hopkins of course is the premiere guide and pilot and, by using his book, other

copywriters will learn from his mistakes. His message has shown them the way.

Despite his protestations of commonness, Hopkins does see admen as superior to the

general public. He expresses a benevolence that can only come from superiority when he says,

“The happiest are those who live closest to nature, an essential to advertising success. So I

conclude that this vocation, depending as it does on love and knowledge of the masses, offers

many rewards beyond money.” 92 In this comment, Hopkins shows his preacherly beginnings,

partially through terms and partially through tone: “vocation” connotes religious calling, and the

tone echoes the one which preachers use to call attention to Christ’s divinity and humanity and

preach a gospel of love and tolerance. Hopkins seems to position himself and all admen as

preacherly, perhaps even Christ-like, insisting that admen must be part of “the mass,” yet

different in essence. Admen should strive to be greater than the “masses” with whom they must

be able to interact, understand, and interpret. They need to be among the masses yet are not of

them.

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Conclusion

The earliest admen’s “how-to” books helped to redeem advertising and guided it on to its

current ubiquity in popular culture. Each of the author’s discussed in this study employed

particular types of metaphors so that both the general public and business could understand

advertising as a powerful discourse that both shape and be shaped by popular culture. Calkins

observes advertising’s relationship to popular culture when he says, “Advertising modifies the

course of a people’s daily thoughts, gives them new words and phrases, new ideas, new fashions,

new prejudices and new customs. In the same way it obliterates old sets of words and phrases,

fashions and customs.”93 The earliest admen convinced producers and consumers that advertising

could transform lives, not just sell products. The men managed their act of redemption through

language choices that helped their audiences, indeed, even a nation, reconceptualise advertising

as a discourse that could provide a form of salvation itself.

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NOTES

1 “Worst Parking Job Ever- Extreme Fitness BMW X5 Parking Epic Fail (HQ)” 2 Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1930 – 1940 (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 8. 3 Nathanial Fowler, About Advertising and Printing: A Concise, Practical and Original Manual on the Art of Advertising (Boston, MA: L Barta & Co. 1899), 53-56. Nathanial Clark Fowler notes that a puff differs from an advertisement because a puff must contain newsworthy information, and it is most effective when “the puff” is not recognizably an advertisement. According to Fowler, the word originates in France, and is derived from pouff, meaning a style of headdress. Fowler claims that at least two Duchesses adorned their poufs with scenes that depicted some kind of personal victories. Thus, “puff” is kind of exaggerated boast about an event or in the case of advertising, a product. 4 Marchand, 8, describes advertising men as “missionaries for modernity” whose work both reflected and sold the American dream and built the economy. He says, “advertising leaders . . . educat[ed] consumers in everything from the use of toothpaste and higher standards of dress to a love of beauty . . . [and] . . . harness[ed] America’s modern industrial system to uplift of its citizenry”(8). 5 Marchand, 8. 6 Michael Schudson, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion, (New York, Basic Books, 1985), 163. 7 Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (Urbana, IL: 1997), 15 8 Fox, 39. 9 Ibid 10 Ibid 11 E.S. Turner. The Shocking History of Advertising (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1965), 158. 12 Ibid 13 Turner, 159. 14 Turner, 160. 15 Fox,39. 16 Fox, 97. 17 Fox, 41. 18 Fox, 41. 19 T.J. Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1994), 309 20 Lears, 311. 21 Quoted in Marchand, 336. 22 Lears, 313 23 Fox, 70 24 Lears, 309. 25 Lears, 311 26 Lears, 340. 27 Quoted in Lears, 313. 28 Lears, 310. 29 Earnest Elmo Calkins, and Ralph Holden, Modern Advertising,(New York, NY: D. Appletone and Company, 1905), 5. 30Ibid 31 Calkins, 3. 32 Ibid 33 Ibid 34 Marchand, 36. 35 Calkins, 3. 36 Ibid 37 Fox, 46-47. 38 Calkins, 4 39 Ibid 40 Ibid 41 Ibid 42 Fox, 57

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43 Bernstein, S.R. “Forward” The Lasker Story: as He Told it (Chicago, Crain Publishers 1963, RPT Chicago: NTC Business Books, 1963). Bernstein notes the document that has been turned into the book is a transcript of an informal six hour talk that Lasker gave in April 1925 to the staff of Lord & Thomas. It was first published in twenty-six installments in Advertising Age. 44 Fox 50. 45 Ibid 46 Ibid 47 Ibid 48 Turner, 369. 49 Albert Lasker, The Lasker Story: As He Told it. (Crain Publications, 1963 Rpt Chicago: NTC Business Books, 1963). 94. 50 The Mayo Clinic had its beginnings in St. Mary’s Hospital opened in 1893 by a family of three doctors. Eventually, the Mayo family’s practice became an institution partnered with a variety of physicians to create a modern hospital with a team of specialists. It developed between 1893 and 1919 evolving from a “medical partnership to The Mayo Foundation.” See “Tradition and Heritage” at http://www.mayoclinic.org/tradition-heritage/growth.html. 51 Lasker, 10. 52 Lasker, 101 53 Lasker, 73 54 Lasker, 25 55 Lasker, 134 56 Lasker, 96-96 57 Lasker, 35 58 Lasker, 95. 59 Lasker, 86 60 Lasker, 131 61 Ibid 62 Lasker, 87 63 Lasker, 88 64 Laker, 39 65 Lasker, 116 66 Lasker, 109 67 Lasker, 98 68 Lasker, 85 69 Hopkins, 53 70 Hopkins, 53 71 Hopkins, 73 72 Hopkins, 4-5 73 Hopkins, 4 74 Hopkins, 308 75 Hopkins, 4-5 76 Hopkins, 5 77 Hopkins, 317 78 Ibid 79 Ibid 80 Ibid 81 Hopkins, 316 82 Hopkins, 318 83 Hopkins, 1, 3 84 Hopkins, 316 85 Hopkins, 131 86 Hopkins, 317 87 Hopkins, 313 88 Ibid 89 Hopkins, 8

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90 Hopkins, 35 91 Hopkins, 3 92 Hopkins, 310 93 Calkins, 7

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Calkins, Earnest Elmo, and Ralph Holden. Modern Advertising. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1905. Fail, “Worst Parking Job Ever- Extreme Fitness BMW X5 Parking Epic. YouTube. 2009. www.youtube.com (accessed June 15, 2012). Fowler, Nathanial Clark. About Advertising and Printing: A Concise, Practical, and Original Manual on the Art of Local Advertising. Boston: L.Barta & Co., 1889. Fox, Stephen. The Mirror Makers:A History of American Advertising and Its Creators. Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Hopkins, Claude. My Life in Advertising & Scientific Advertising. Chicago, IL: Crain Books, 1966. James, Twitchell B. Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture. New York: Columbia Unversity, 1996. Lasker, Albert. The Lasker Story: As He Told it. Chicago: Crain Publications, 1963, Rpt NTC Business Books, 1966. Lears, Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity:1920-1940. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1985. . Mayo Clinic. Tradition and Heritage. Mayo Clinic. http://www.mayorclinic.org/tradition-heritage/growth.html. (accessed Dec 31, 2010). Schudson, Michael. Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact On American Society. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Turner, E.S. The Shocking History of Advertising. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.