The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century

by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank

  Perhaps because of the enormous stress he was putting on himself, Lasker resumed the bad habits that he had picked up back in Galveston, including drinking with newspaper reporters. There are hints, too, that he kept company with an actress he had met in Galveston who occasionally performed in Chicago.

  Weekend antics were a welcome, even necessary antidote to the increasingly demanding, high-stakes work that he did during the week. When he wasn’t drinking with the newspaper crowd, he was gambling with his work colleagues; it was in fact Charles Touchlin who introduced Lasker to the Griddle Club and arranged for Lasker to become a member.

  The Griddle, located on the top floor of an old four-story building, was a favorite gathering place. It was here, one evening, that Lasker met an affable man who invited him to join a poker game. Lasker had left the Touchlins’ house that evening with $50 in his pocket. He sat down at a round table in the back room of the club, and was dealt in. The cards did not break his way, but he kept at it—and then kept at it some more. By the end of the evening, Lasker owed $500. It was a third of his annual salary, and more than many at Lord & Thomas earned in a year.

  Lasker realized that he had been taken in by a card shark, but this excuse would not appease his father. Desperate to keep his secret from his family, Lasker approached Ambrose Thomas the next morning. He begged his employer to lend him the $500, saying that learning of the debt would “kill” his father.

  Thomas’s expression through much of this appeal was unpromising. He sat with his chin in his hand, eyes fixed on the ceiling.52 Lasker, seeing his future collapsing in front of him, envisioning a much-dreaded return to Galveston in disgrace, pulled out even more stops. “I will promise you this,” Lasker went on. “I don’t want any salary . . . I will go out on the road and I will work as no one ever worked for you. I will work so there can’t be any temptations.”53

  Thomas declined Lasker’s offer to work for free, keeping him at his recently increased salary of $30 per week.54 The card shark was paid off.55

  The misadventure at the Griddle Club proved to be a turning point. Lasker learned that he was valuable. He had escaped the long shadow of his father, and an exciting path was open to him. For this lesson, $500 was a modest price to pay.

  Several months after the gambling incident, Lasker learned of a territory that was opening at the agency. Determined to work his way up—both to repay his debt more quickly and to satisfy his growing ambition—he applied for the job.

  The territory comprised Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. It had been the turf of William R. Emery, the salesman who had failed to impress the Rheinstrom Brothers in Cincinnati. Lasker asked Ambrose Thomas for the opportunity to “practice” on the sleepy accounts.56 In fact, there wasn’t much real risk in Lasker’s proposition, given that Emery hadn’t been particularly productive in recent years, so Thomas was inclined to grant Lasker’s request. But the decision wasn’t his alone: he had to convince Daniel Lord to go along with the plan. Lord told his partner that he was skeptical—Lasker was only nineteen years old, and looked even younger than his years. He also observed that Lasker needed some help with his wardrobe. Years later, Lasker told the story to his office staff: “Ambrose Thomas was tactful. By repeating some of Mr. Lord’s points in opposition, he gave me valuable steering. The first thing I did when I left the office that day was to hustle to the tailoring establishment of H. M. Stephenson. I knew Marshall Field had his clothes made there, and that Wilton Lackaye, the actor, came from New York to have fittings. I asked for haste in the making of two blue suits of serge.”57

  Newly fitted out, Lasker was ready to conquer new lands. Near the top of his list was Kalamazoo, Michigan, where several food-processing companies looked like promising clients. Lasker headed to Kalamazoo armed not only with his extraordinary energy but also with a new feeling of calm determination: “That was my territory, do you see? I had this tremendous feeling of responsibility. It just fell on me like a mantle, and I grew to maturity on that ride, and I have been mature ever since and have never been without responsibility. Mr. Thomas trusted me.”58

  Lasker felt a strong “presentiment,” as he rode northward on the train, that he was destined to remain with Lord & Thomas for a long time. His first working day in Kalamazoo must have reinforced this conviction. His predecessor, William Emery, had been working closely with several potential clients and had built up substantial good will toward Lord & Thomas. (Emery was, in Lasker’s subsequent estimation, “a fine man, but he wasn’t a closer.”59) Thanks to Emery’s spadework, Lasker was able to sign a $3,000 contract with the Kalamazoo Pure Food Company on his first day in the north woods—and he landed almost $50,000 of additional orders over the next several months. The boyish salesman from Chicago quickly became (as he later put it) “the talk of the line.”

  All of this was enormously gratifying, even intoxicating. But Lasker understood better than anyone else that he had already harvested most of the low-hanging fruit left behind by William Emery. Meanwhile, he was beginning to suspect that advertising agencies, certainly including his own, were leaving an enormous amount of money on the table.

  Emboldened by his successes, Lasker pushed Ambrose Thomas to think more broadly about the creative aspects of advertising. But Thomas and his partner Lord were content to continue on as the middlemen they always had been. “That was the line,” Lasker later reflected. “They felt fine if they could do good copy, but it never occurred to them that copy could make a tremendous difference . . . If you put your name on it, mentioned your goods, had a pretty picture—that was advertising.”60

  Lasker pushed for a broader conception of advertising. In part, this was self-interest. He realized that if he kept doing business the way Lord & Thomas was accustomed to, he was trapped. “I quickly saw,” he said, “that I would get nowhere under the status quo, because it took so much of my time to handle the business Lord & Thomas already had in the territory when I took hold.”61 And much of that business was only marginally profitable. He once spent an entire day driving fifteen miles in a sleigh to a school in Indiana that had an advertising budget of $300 a year. Such an account would land a 10 percent commission for Lord & Thomas—thirty dollars, minus expenses.

  Lasker felt sure that he could build the business, and boost Lord & Thomas’ commissions, if he could improve the agency’s copywriting. Before the year was out, therefore, Lasker asked Ambrose Thomas to put him in charge of a few accounts that were not making any money so he could practice copywriting. With little to lose, Thomas agreed.

  Lasker teamed up with newspaperman Eugene Katz, whom he had met in Galveston and who had relocated to Chicago. Together, they made an unorthodox proposal to one of Lord & Thomas’s clients: the Louisville, Kentucky–based Wilson Ear Drum Company. Wilson, which manufactured a primitive hearing aid out of paper cones, was then paying a 6 percent commission—well below the industry standard of 10 percent, and even further below the 15 percent that industry-leading N. W. Ayer almost always commanded. Lasker, determined to close these gaps, proposed that his firm write the copy and develop the artwork for future ads. If the new ads showed good results, the advertiser would then agree to pay a 15 percent commission.

  Company owner George Wilson, agreed. Lord & Thomas’s graphic artist—whom Lasker later said looked like the “deafest man you ever saw”—had a picture taken of himself cupping his hand to his ear. The headline read, “You Hear! When you use Wilson’s Common Sense Ear Drums.”

  “Much to [George Wilson’s] surprise and ours,” Lasker later recalled, “it worked.”62 Wilson increased its monthly ad budget from $2,000 to $6,000, and—more important—agreed to pay the 15 percent commission that Lasker demanded. Instead of making $1,440 annually on the account, Lord & Thomas would now earn $10,800.63

  From that point on, Lord & Thomas offered two tiers of service. Clients who wrote their own copy and wanted only space brokering would pay a 10 percent commission; clients who wanted their copy written by Lord & Thomas would pay 15
percent.64

  Gradually, Lasker built up a cadre of six copywriters. Both Ambrose Thomas and Daniel Lord encouraged him in these experiments; on the other hand, they resolutely stayed away from the side of the business that eventually became known as “creative.”65 This hands-off stance gave Lasker room to operate, but it also put more pressure on him to resolve his uncertainty about the substance of advertising. What, exactly, was good advertising?

  Lasker felt compelled to discover the essence of advertising. “If somebody had handed me the money to pay back the five hundred dollar debt,” he said a half-century later, “I couldn’t have quit. I had to find out what advertising was about.”66

  Chapter Four

  Salesmanship in Print

  SHORTLY AFTER arriving in Chicago, Albert Lasker wrote a letter to his father. He was worried, he confessed, because he couldn’t resolve his fundamental confusion about the advertising business: “The great force of advertising has been shown to me in the short time I have been here. People are spending what to you and me are inconceivable sums. They are getting results, or they could not keep it up. Yet I haven’t been able to find the man who could tell me what advertising is.”1

  Lord & Thomas’s slogan was “Advertise Judiciously.” But no one at the firm could explain exactly what that meant. “Well, spend your money carefully, in the right papers,” his colleagues told him.2 At the rival N. W. Ayer agency, the corresponding slogan was “Keeping Everlastingly at It Brings Success.” Lasker sat down with a counterpart from Ayer one day, and grilled him on the meaning of this slogan:

  “Now,” I said, “here, let me ask you this. Supposing I start wrong and I keep everlastingly at it. Where is that going to get me?”

  “Well,” he said, “what they meant was, keeping everlastingly at it right would achieve success.”

  “Well,” I said, “What is ‘right’ in advertising? Can’t you define it for me?”

  “Why,” he said, “keeping your name before the people.”

  “Well, I said, “supposing I can’t live that long. Supposing I go broke; that I can’t keep my name before the people. There must be something else to this thing.”3

  Lasker started scrutinizing all the ads in newspapers and magazines and on the new advertising phenomenon—billboards. Most of what he saw only puzzled him further, because there appeared to be no underlying theory. Advertisers seemed to have no plan. Lasker loved ideas, and his industry seemed bereft of them:

  Well known advertisers were the Gold Dust Twins, that showed a picture of a couple of little cupids and said, “Let the Gold Dust Twins do your work.” Another was a picture of a nice little girl, and it said, “How would you like to have a fairy in your home? Use Fairy Soap . . .

  Another was Armour’s “Ham what Am.” The Negro would say, “The ham what am—Armour’s.” And the next time you would see that ad, it would be an Italian, and he said, “The ham was ees—Armour’s.” The next time you saw him, he would be a German, and he said, “The ham vat iss—Armour’s” . . .

  Well, that was what advertising was, do you see, keeping the name before the people. And of course, in the competition to keep it before the people, most of them got to kidding their own names—about the worst thing you can do.

  That was advertising: sloganizing.4

  Gradually, though, Lasker became aware of the work of a Chicago-based competitor: the Charles H. Fuller Company. Fuller had recently signed up breakfast-food maker C.W. Post, and the advertising that began to appear in support of Postum and Grape-Nuts struck Lasker as decidedly different from the vapidity of the Gold Dust Twins. Fuller wrote and ran ads that looked exactly like newspaper copy—in the same typeface as the newspaper—and told stories about happy users of the products in what Lasker called a “newsy” way.

  Maybe, Lasker speculated, that’s the answer: Advertising is news.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t. Other departures in advertising also intrigued Lasker. A patent medicine firm in Racine, Wisconsin—Dr. Shoop’s Family Medicines—was running an ad with a provocative headline: “What Tea-Drinking Does for Rheumatics.” Every time he saw this ad, Lasker stopped and read it, even though he didn’t use patent medicines, didn’t have rheumatism, and didn’t drink tea. Why was that concept so striking? It wasn’t “newsy,” exactly. So what was it?

  One evening in May 1904, around 6:00 p.m., Lasker was in Ambrose Thomas’s office discussing the business of the day. A messenger boy came into the office and handed Thomas a note. The older man scanned the note, chuckled, and tossed it across the desk to Lasker.

  Written in a striking hand, the note read:

  I am in the saloon downstairs. I can tell you what advertising is. I know you don’t know. It will mean much to me to have you know what it is, and it will mean much to you. If you wish to know what advertising is, send the word “yes” down by the bell boy.—John E. Kennedy

  Thomas dismissed the note as the work of a crank, and suggested that Lasker ignore it. But Lasker, intrigued, sent his response back downstairs: Yes.

  He retreated to his office and awaited the arrival of his visitor. Within a few minutes, a man strode in looking every bit as striking as his handwriting—six feet tall, with piercing blue eyes and a heavy blond mustache. Kennedy’s wavy dark blond hair crowned an expansive forehead—a physical characteristic that Lasker considered a sign of high intelligence. Although he was then in his late forties, he looked years younger. Lasker thought his guest to be “one of the handsomest men I ever saw in my life.”5

  Lasker got straight to the point: “Well? What is advertising? Tell me.”

  But Kennedy was not forthcoming. In subsequent years, Lasker told the tale of this initial meeting many times, and each version was slightly different. Reminiscing in 1938, Lasker recalled that Kennedy was “reluctant” to answer the question. Before giving anything away, Kennedy made it clear that he wanted to strike a business arrangement with Lord & Thomas—and that he “wanted to make it guaranteed.”6

  So Kennedy bought time and fueled Lasker’s curiosity by telling stories in a commanding tenor voice about his allegedly colorful past:

  The caller told me that for several years previous, he had been in the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police. And for reasons unfathomable to me, he had become interested in advertising.

  Vivid in my mind are his tales of long, lonesome days and nights in the snowy emptiness of Northern Canada. Meditative days and nights spent in academic concentration. Not on the externals of advertising copy. Not on the by-products of advertising. But in deep, scholarly contemplation to isolate a fundamental concept of true advertising—which is copy.7

  In a conversation some years later, Lasker elaborated on the theme: “He carried himself in a military way—spoke his words in a short, choppy manner. He impressed you as a man who had lived alone, and within himself, as a man there in those northern vastnesses would have to do . . . He was a typical lone-wolf type . . .”8

  Much of this, it later turned out, was malarkey. Subsequent inquiries failed to turn up any “John E. Kennedy” among the ranks of the Mounties. Kennedy was Canadian by birth, but it appears that the closest he ever got to the “snowy emptiness of Northern Canada” was the Hudson’s Bay Company’s department store in Winnipeg, for which he wrote some undistinguished copy at the turn of the century. He subsequently bounced around—working on a Montreal newspaper, writing ads for a shoe company in Boston, and even promoting his own designs for shoes and clothing.9 He did some work for cereal-maker C.W. Post in 1903, although it is unclear whether he worked for Post directly, or through the Charles H. Fuller agency.10

  Lasker was intrigued, in part because it emerged that the handsome stranger across the desk from him had written the ads for Dr. Shoop’s Restorative. Now he was all the more determined to learn Kennedy’s definition of advertising. When he pressed him, Kennedy countered by asking Lasker what his conception of advertising was.

  “It is news,” Lasker replied.11

  “N
o,” Kennedy said. “News is a technique of presentation, but advertising is a very simple thing. I can give it to you in three words.”

  “Well,” Lasker exclaimed impatiently, “I am hungry! What are those three words?”

  “Salesmanship in print,” Kennedy said.

  A century later, this doesn’t sound like a particularly powerful insight. But to Lasker’s ears, it was a revelation. He knew about salesmanship: he was an excellent salesman. Advertising, Kennedy was telling him, was simply a stand-in for him when he wore his salesman’s hat. Great advertising did the same work as a great salesman. Advertising multiplied the work of the “salesman” who wrote it a thousand-fold. “The minute he told me that,” Lasker later recalled, “the very second he told me that, I understood it.”12 Finally, there was an idea on the table which Lasker could work with.

  While Lasker was thinking through this insight, Kennedy dropped another thunderbolt: a letter to Lord & Thomas from Dr. Shoop. The letter stated that Kennedy was under contract to his patent-medicine firm for the balance of 1904 at an annual salary of $16,000—a staggering sum. (Lasker’s six copywriters were then commanding something like $1,400 a year for their full-time services.) Shoop wrote that both he and Kennedy wanted to end the arrangement, and proposed that if Lord & Thomas would take over the contract for the balance of the year—$8,000—he would contribute half of that sum, or $4,000.13