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

  Lasker was deeply introspective: a trait that sometimes helped him. Seeing self-destructive tendencies in himself, for example, he found and methodically courted a mate. But in an astoundingly cruel twist of fate, Flora became permanently disabled less than two months after their marriage. The financial burdens, psychological upset, and guilt imposed by her illness were staggering.

  The melodramatic death of Ambrose Thomas pushed him closer to the edge. Now he was running the business that he had planned to run away from. He was trapped—by the business and by the grinding financial needs of his family. By April 1907, Lasker couldn’t stop crying.

  It was only the first of many such episodes, which—on their own schedule—broke into his world and stole him away.

  Chapter Six

  The Greatest Copywriter

  FOR LORD & THOMAS, and for Albert Lasker in particular, Frank Van Camp—the head of the Indianapolis-based Van Camp Packing Company—was an extremely important client. Van Camp’s confidence in his young account manager had led directly to a major shake-up at Lord & Thomas, to Daniel Lord’s abrupt retirement in 1904, and to Lasker getting his original ownership stake in the agency.

  Van Camp was also a demanding client. When the gifted but erratic John E. Kennedy, copywriter for the Van Camp account, left Lord & Thomas in 1906, Van Camp insisted that Lasker come up with a writer who was as good as Kennedy—or better. This was a formidable challenge, and Lasker didn’t know how to meet it.

  The Van Camp Packing Company was founded by Gilbert C. Van Camp in 1862. Gilbert and his wife Hester ran a small store in Indianapolis, selling fruits and vegetables that they canned themselves. Gilbert, an accomplished tinsmith and tinkerer, gradually built up the business, improving his canning techniques and constructing one of the nation’s first cold-storage warehouses.1 Gilbert’s and Hester’s three sons—Frank, George, and Cortland—all joined the business, although Cortland soon departed to start a hardware company. Although tinned foods had been produced for nearly a century, cost and quality-control problems restricted their use mainly to the military. The perfection of new canning techniques—especially ways of preventing solder from getting into the food—and the advent of new distribution channels opened up unprecedented opportunities in the 1890s. Now, food companies like Franco-American and H.J. Heinz began producing an array of canned goods aimed at consumers.

  In 1894, George figured out a way to can pork and beans in tomato sauce, thus broadening the company’s base beyond its standard vegetable, chicken, and turkey products.2 Frank, meanwhile, put a half-dozen salesmen on the road to push Van Camp canned goods, and commissioned some rudimentary advertising.3 Also in 1894, the Joseph Campbell Soup Company, headed by the visionary John T. Dorrance, introduced a line of canned condensed soups. Dorrance invested $5,000 in streetcar ads in 1899; the results were so gratifying that the company increased its ad budget by 50 percent within six months. By 1905, Campbell’s was selling 20 million cans of soup a year.4

  Albert Lasker wrote some of Lord & Thomas’s early copy for Van Camp. That work—including the “Ludwig and Lena” campaigns, which featured cartoons of two children in Hansel-and-Gretel outfits holding cans of pork and beans—was forgettable, at best. (“It’s the intangible, subtle element which has taught you to think Van Camp whenever you think of pork and beans,” the text of one ad ran.5) “I confess that I was responsible for Ludwig and Lena,” Lasker later said ruefully, “who prated some kind of nonsense in the Van Camp advertising.”6

  Together, Kennedy and Lasker helped solved a knotty problem for Van Camp. Just after the turn of the century, the company had gone into the evaporated-milk business. Evaporating (or condensing) milk meant putting raw milk into large vacuum pans and removing two-thirds of the water. This condensation process, which involved high temperatures, also sterilized the milk and prevented it from spoiling. Housewives could use the product undiluted as a substitute for cream, or could add two pints of water to turn it back into an approximation of milk.7

  Kennedy started searching for ways to market Van Camp’s milk, which was generally a weak competitor, trailing Borden’s and other leading brands. He came up with an ad that featured a bold headline—Now a cow in your pantry—and a picture of an eye-catching creature: a cow with Van Camp milk cans for its body and legs, can openers for horns, and a serving spoon for a tail.8 Even Lasker, who generally disapproved of illustrations (because they were a distraction from the copy), acknowledged the power of this concept.

  Lord & Thomas persuaded Van Camp to run test campaigns in Peoria, Indianapolis, and Jacksonville, and these tests revealed a problem. Van Camp’s Evaporated Milk—like its competitors—didn’t taste very good. Housewives, seduced by the prospect of a “cow in their pantry,” were willing to try Van Camp’s tinned milk, but most disliked the scalded aftertaste.

  Lasker and Kennedy first persuaded Van Camp to change the name of its product from “evaporated milk” to “sterilized milk.” Next, they proposed that Van Camp simply own up to the slightly objectionable taste of the product and recast it as a virtue. As the Lord & Thomas case history—probably dictated by Lasker—later put it: “We tried to find something that would nicely describe that scalded taste, and we finally hit upon, ‘Be sure and taste the milk and see if it has got the almond flavor. If it has not the almond flavor, it is not the genuine.’”9

  “It is like telling an Aladdin fairy tale,” the account history bragged, “to tell you how it went.”10 Van Camp quickly displaced Borden as the leading evaporated milk in key markets like New York City. “No one else had a chance with milk [in New York],” one of Lasker’s business associates later commented, “while [Lasker] was carrying on his campaign.”11 Van Camp’s overall sales soared 30 percent between 1904 and 1905.12

  With this success, of course, came greatly increased billings for Lord & Thomas. Frank Van Camp, Lasker recalled, “had made up his mind that the world was his if he advertised well, and widely.”13

  The problem for Lasker now was that the mercurial John E. Kennedy had departed, and Frank Van Camp knew it. The Indianapolis packer wanted to put substantial resources into marketing his company’s old standby: pork and beans. Up to this point, he had restricted his pork-and-bean advertising to selected magazines, assuming that there was only a limited market for the product. Now he was willing to double or even triple his advertising dollars—in fact, he was willing to make the huge leap to national newspaper advertising of pork and beans—but only if Lasker could find an outstanding copywriter to replace Kennedy.

  “So I was up against it,” Lasker later recalled.

  Sometime in 1907 (as Lasker told it), he was riding on a train. Seated across from him was Cyrus H. K. Curtis, the powerful founder of the Curtis Publishing Company, whom Lasker considered to be a shrewd judge of advertising. A former ad salesman, Curtis had launched a weekly magazine, the Tribune & Farmer, in 1879. His wife Louisa’s popular column in that periodical led to a spin-off in 1883—the Ladies’ Home Journal. In 1896, Curtis bought a broken-down publication called the Saturday Evening Post with ad revenues of less than $7,000 per year; by the time he was sharing a train compartment with Albert Lasker, the Post was bringing in $1 million a year.14

  Lasker at first didn’t recognize the celebrated publisher, who was partially concealed behind his newspaper. After they finally exchanged greetings, Curtis told Lasker that he had just read an extremely effective ad in his newspaper. “Lasker,” Curtis supposedly said, “I am just about to order a bottle of beer as a result of an advertisement that I read, and you ought to go get the man who wrote that advertisement for your advertising business.”15

  Lasker knew that Curtis was a near-teetotaler who didn’t permit the words “beer” and “wine” to appear in his Ladies Home Journal.16 Now, here he was, heading off to the bar car in search of a beer. Which beer, exactly? Lasker looked at the ad that had caught Curtis’s eye. “Poor Beer vs. Pure Beer,” the headline read. It was an ad for Schlitz—a second-tier compet
itor to mighty Anheuser-Busch of St. Louis, which happened to be a Lord & Thomas account. “The beer that made Milwaukee famous,” read the tag line below the prominent Schlitz logo. Lasker read the copy with interest:

  Both cost you alike, yet one costs the maker twice as much as the other. One is good, and good for you; the other is harmful. Let us tell you where the difference lies.

  Poor beer, the copy claimed, involved “no filtering, no sterilizing, [and] almost no aging, for aging ties up money.” Pure beer, by contrast, “must be filtered, then sterilized in the bottle,” and must be “aged for months, until thoroughly fermented, else it causes biliousness.”17 Schlitz’s product was a pure beer, and therefore a “healthful” beer. One proof was the Schlitz brewery, with its plate glass windows that gave visitors a clear view of the brewing process. “You’re always welcome to [visit] that brewery,” the ad concluded cheerily, “for the owners are proud of it.”

  Lasker was amused and intrigued. Without exactly saying so, the copywriter had effectively accused Schlitz’s competitors of being unsanitary and inducing in beer drinkers the nasty-sounding “biliousness.” The copy had suggested that Schlitz welcomed scrutiny of its brewing process in a way that other brewers could not. Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous, had nothing to hide!

  Upon returning to Chicago, with the urgent demands of Frank Van Camp very much in his mind, Lasker began making inquiries: Who is writing the Schlitz campaign? The answer came back: an odd duck named Claude C. Hopkins.

  Much of what is known about Claude Hopkins’s early years comes from My Life in Advertising, his charming and maddening autobiography. Written in 1927 and today considered a classic, this slim volume’s appeal grows out of its idiosyncratic authorial voice:

  I do not know the reactions of the rich. But I do know the common people. I love to talk to laboring-men, to study housewives who must count their pennies, to gain the confidence and learn the ambitions of poor boys and girls. Give me something which they want and I will strike the responsive chord. My words will be simple, my sentences short. Scholars may ridicule my style. The rich and vain may laugh at the factors which I feature. But in millions of humble homes the common people will read and buy.18

  At the same time, My Life In Advertising frustrates because it is so remarkably devoid of facts. Perhaps Hopkins had no records at hand as he sat down to write. Or perhaps he saw no particular advantage in making it easy for his readers to connect the dots in ways that might reflect unfavorably on him or his family. In any case, it would be hard to find another autobiography with such a shortage of people, places, and dates.

  We know from other sources that Hopkins was born on April 24, 1866.19 He grew up in Hillsdale, Michigan, until his father—Fernando F. Hopkins, a college-educated printer—bought a partial interest in a weekly newspaper based in Ludington, Michigan, which Hopkins described only as a “prosperous lumbering city.”

  In his writings, Claude Hopkins claimed that his mother was “left a widow” when Claude was ten years old, but the sketchy available evidence suggests that Fernando may have abandoned the family. In either case, for the next decade, Hopkins struggled alongside his mother to keep the family housed and fed. He sold his mother’s silver polish door-to-door. He cleaned two schoolhouses at the beginning and end of each school day. He delivered the Detroit Evening News to sixty-five houses before dinner. On Sundays he worked as a church janitor, and during summer vacations he did farm work. For the rest of his life, even after becoming an extraordinarily wealthy man, he feared slipping back into the desperate poverty of his youth. As a result, he maintained a seven-day-a-week, twelve-hour-a-day work regimen: “If I have gone higher than others in advertising, or done more, the fact is not due to exceptional ability, but to exceptional hours. It means that a man has sacrificed all else in life to excel in this one profession. It means a man to be pitied, rather than envied, perhaps.20

  Sometime around 1883, Hopkins graduated from high school and became a minister and teacher. Neither profession satisfied his aching ambition. Perhaps a year later, he enrolled at Swensburg’s Business College in Grand Rapids, which he later dismissed as a “ridiculous institution.”21 But it led him to a job keeping the books—and sweeping the floors, and cleaning the windows—at the nearby Grand Rapids Felt Boot Company.

  In the course of what may have been a year at the Felt Boot Company, Hopkins met Melville R. Bissell, president of the Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company. In 1876, Bissell had patented his carpet-cleaning device—which he had invented to lift sawdust off the rugs in the small crockery store that he and his wife operated—and by 1883, he was constructing his first factory. Bissell offered Hopkins a bookkeeping job at his new factory for substantially more money than he was making at the boot factory.

  Once at Bissell, Hopkins again went looking for opportunity. One day, a mediocre draft for a new brochure arrived at the factory, written by a celebrated advertising man who had not bothered to learn much about carpet sweepers. Hopkins asked for the chance to rewrite the text on his own time. His skeptical superiors said yes, and Hopkins beat out the celebrated out-of-towner with a much-improved text.

  He then began figuring out ways to drum up demand for his company’s product. First, he pushed carpet sweepers as Christmas presents—a notion that had not occurred to anyone before—and generated a staggering one thousand orders through a combination of letter writing and store displays. Next, he hatched a scheme to offer Bissell Carpet Sweepers in a dozen different woods, “from the white of the bird’s-eye maple to the dark of the walnut, and to include all of the colors between.”22 Using both the carrot and stick with the company’s dealers—and again overcoming the deep skepticism of his colleagues in Grand Rapids—Hopkins sold 250,000 exotic-woods carpet sweepers in three weeks.

  In the parlance of the day, Hopkins had become a “scheme man,” and a marketing talent like this would not remain in Grand Rapids for long. Sometime in 1891, when Albert Lasker was still an eleven-year-old boy down in Galveston, Lord & Thomas got in touch with the dazzling young talent up in Grand Rapids and offered him a job. As Hopkins recalled:

  They had a scheme man named Carl Greig, who was leaving them to go with the Inter Ocean to increase the circulation. Lord & Thomas, who had watched my sweeper-selling schemes, offered me his place. The salary was much higher than I received in Grand Rapids, so I told the Bissell people that I intended to take it. They called a directors’ meeting. Every person on the board had, in times past, been my vigorous opponent. All had fought me tooth and nail on every scheme proposed. They had never ceased to ridicule my idea of talking woods in a machine for sweeping carpets. But they voted unanimously to meet the Lord & Thomas offer, so I stayed.

  Not for long, however. Probably later in 1891, Hopkins saw an ad for a position as advertising manager at Swift & Company, in Chicago. He got the job and moved to Chicago, only to find that the huge packing firm viewed his profession—and by extension, him—as a necessary evil. Founder Gustavus Franklin Swift, a transplanted Yankee from Massachusetts who had founded the packing company a half-decade earlier, regarded business as a form of warfare and advertising as an expensive distraction from the business of war-making. As Hopkins put it: “I was more unwelcome than I supposed. Mr. G. F. Swift, then head of the company, was in Europe when I was employed. It was his first vacation, and he could not endure it, so he hurried back. When told that I was there to spend his money, he took an intense dislike to me, and it never changed.”23

  Hopkins’s first big challenge was to promote a Swift product called Cotosuet, which was a mixture of cottonseed oil and beef suet, packed in tin pails and used as an inexpensive substitute for lard and butter. It was no different from, or better than, or cheaper than, its entrenched competitor, Cottolene. Hopkins struggled to come up with a way to push Cotosuet on an indifferent public. He soon settled upon a scheme to bake the “world’s biggest cake” using Cotosuet, and put it on display in a new department store that was about to open i
n downtown Chicago. Traffic stalled on State Street as huge crowds flocked to behold the monstrous dessert. Over the course of a week, more than 100,000 people climbed four flights of stairs to see it. They were encouraged to try a sample and to win prizes by guessing the weight of the cake—but only after buying a pail of Cotosuet. “As a result of that week,” Hopkins wrote, “Cotosuet was placed on a profit-paying basis in Chicago.”24

  Next, apparently in 1895, Hopkins left Swift and began a six-year stint in Racine, Wisconsin, working for Dr. Shoop’s Family Medicines—the manufacturer of patent medicines that subsequently employed John E. Kennedy.25 In later years, Hopkins looked back with some embarrassment on his efforts to promote remedies that were either ineffective or dangerous, but he never stopped thinking of that experience as the “supreme test” of the copywriter’s skills. “Medicines were worthless merchandise,” he wrote, “until a demand was created.”26 Hopkins came up with various “pull-through” schemes to compel druggists to carry Dr. Shoop’s elixirs.

  In 1902, Hopkins was contacted by Chicago-based entrepreneur Douglas Smith, who had made a small fortune manufacturing the Oliver typewriter. While building a typewriter factory in Toronto sometime around 1898, Smith had learned of a supposed germicide—Powley’s Liquified Ozone—that came highly recommended by local users. Smith picked up the product for $100,000, changed its name to “Liquozone,” and started marketing his new product through the newly formed Liquid Ozone Company, which he headquartered in Chicago.