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

  Four years and four ad managers later, he was desperate to find a way to sell the stuff. Hearing that Hopkins was the best scheme man and copywriter in Chicago, Smith approached him with an unusual proposition: If Hopkins would sign on with Liquozone and agree to work for no salary, Smith would give him a quarter of the company. After a great deal of anguish about leaving his comfortable perch in Racine for a situation where he would be living off his savings while trying to rescue a dying company, the deeply conservative Hopkins took the plunge. In February 1902, he moved to Chicago and began promoting another product nobody much wanted.

  “Night after night I paced Lincoln Park,” Hopkins wrote, “trying to evolve a plan.”27 The plan he came up with resembled one he had developed earlier for Dr. Shoop. The company would offer a fifty-cent bottle of its germicide free to anyone who responded to a newspaper ad. (Getting the consumer to ask for the sample was a key part of many schemes devised by Hopkins.) Liquozone would send a coupon redeemable at a local druggist, where the recipient of the free sample would also be offered a money-back guarantee on five $1 bottles of the product. Beginning with a test market—Hopkins believed fervently in testing his “schemes” before asking his client to plunge—the company found that requests for free samples cost 18 cents to generate. Thirty days later, it was clear that the average coupon redeemer was spending 91 cents on Liquozone. Over the next three years, Smith and Hopkins gave away 5 million free samples. By 1904, Liquozone was advertised in seventeen languages and sold around the world, and Hopkins was a rich man.

  Here the chronology again starts to get tangled. Beginning sometime in the early years of the twentieth century—probably while he was still with Dr. Shoop’s—and continuing through his days at Liquozone, the peripatetic Hopkins moonlighted as a freelance copywriter for the Chicago-based J. L. Stack Advertising Agency. Stack was a Lord & Thomas–trained ad man who, around the turn of the century, had gone into competition with his former employers.28 He recognized the copywriter’s formidable talent, and put him to work with a number of key clients, including Montgomery, Ward & Co., and—notably—Schlitz.

  Hopkins toured the Schlitz brewery in Milwaukee and was impressed. When he asked his clients why they didn’t boast of their pure water, their white-wood-pulp filters, their filtered air, their four separate washings of their bottles, the Schlitz executives responded that everyone brewed beer in this way. No matter, said Hopkins. If you tell a good story, and tell it first, it will be your story:

  So I pictured in print those plate-glass rooms and every other factor in purity. I told a story common to all good brewers, but a story which had never been told. I gave purity a meaning . . .

  Again and again I have told common facts, common to all makers in the line—too common to be told. But they have given the article first allied with them an exclusive and lasting prestige.

  That situation occurs in many, many lines. The maker is too close to his product. He sees in his methods only the ordinary. He does not realize that the world at large might marvel at those methods, and that facts which seem commonplace to him might give him vast distinction.29

  On the strength of Hopkins’s efforts to “give purity a meaning,” Schlitz jumped from fifth in sales to a near-tie with mighty Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis.

  On the day that Albert Lasker read Claude Hopkins’s Schlitz ad on the train in 1907, Hopkins was no longer working for Liquozone. In fact, for the first time since he was ten years old, he was not working at all.

  In My Life In Advertising, Hopkins says that he signed on with Doug Smith’s company in 1902 and worked there for five years—in other words, almost up to the day Lasker spotted him. We also learn that he had a breakdown toward the end of those five years, which forced him to consult a doctor in Paris. The French doctor told Hopkins that the only thing that could save him would be for him to go home and rest. Hopkins (who lived out of hotels, and didn’t have a home) retreated to the sleepy town of Spring Lake, Michigan, near the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, where he had worked as a farmhand decades earlier. There, he spent three months “in the sunshine, sleeping, playing, and drinking milk.”30

  What Hopkins does not mention in his autobiography, and which surely must have been a contributing factor to his breakdown, is a series of events that surely represented calamity to the one-quarter owner of the Liquid Ozone Company. The disaster kicked off on October 7, 1905, when Collier’s magazine carried an article entitled “The Great American Fraud” by an enterprising young writer named Samuel Hopkins Adams. Adams was one of America’s first investigative reporters, and he was extremely good at his trade. “This is the introductory article to a series which will contain a full explanation and exposure of patent medicine methods, and the harm done to the public by this industry,” Adams began, “founded mainly on fraud and poison.”31

  At the end of the article, Adams apologized in advance that he would not be able to expose all of the vile potions and elixirs that were out there, bilking Americans of some $75 million per year and discouraging them from seeking legitimate medical help. There were simply too many of them, and “many dangerous and health-destroying compounds will escape through sheer inconspicuousness.” But Adams promised he would go after the worst offenders in each of several categories: the alcohol stimulators, the opium-containing soothing syrups, the headache powders, and the “comparatively harmless fake, as typified by that marvelous product of advertising and effrontery, Liquozone.”32

  A subsequent installment in the series was devoted to Liquozone. In his attack, Adams combined wit, scorn, and science in roughly equal measures. A typical passage mocked the Liquid Ozone Company’s claims that their product consisted of “liquid oxygen”: “Liquid oxygen doesn’t exist above a temperature of 229 degrees below zero. One spoonful would freeze a man’s tongue, teeth, and throat to equal solidity before he ever had time to swallow. If he could, by any miracle, manage to get it down, the undertaker would have to put him on the stove to thaw him out sufficiently for a respectable burial.”33

  In fact, as Adams compelled the Liquid Ozone Company to reveal, their product was 98 percent water, with trace amounts of sulfuric and sulfurous acids. Collier’s paid the Lederle Laboratories in New York to test Liquozone’s efficacy against anthrax, diphtheria, and tuberculosis (all of which supposedly were warded off by the internal or topical use of Liquozone). In every case, all of the test animals—those treated with Liquozone and those not treated—contracted diseases.

  Nor did the senior executives of the Liquid Ozone Company escape Adams’s scourging. Douglas Smith was dismissed as a “promoter” with a “keen vision for profits.” Adams called Claude Hopkins the “ablest exponent of his specialty in the country,” and admitted that he might not be the most culpable in a generally guilty group:

  An enormous advertising campaign was begun. Pamphlets were issued containing testimonials and claiming the soundest professional backing. Indeed, this matter of expert testimony, chemical, medical, and bacteriologic, is a specialty of Liquozone. Today, despite its reforms, it is supported by an ingenious system of pseudoscientific charlatanry. In justice to Mr. Hopkins, it is but fair to say that he is not responsible for the basic fraud; that the general scheme was devised and most of the bogus or distorted medical letters arranged before his advent.34

  This was a public-relations disaster of the first order, and it kept getting worse. No matter that Hopkins believed in Liquozone—and believed that its use had saved his daughter’s life. In response to the Collier’s revelations, North Dakota banned the sale of Liquozone. So did San Francisco and Lexington, Kentucky. In 1906, partly owing to the public outcry caused by Adams’s articles, Congress passed the federal Food and Drugs Act, which compelled manufacturers to state exactly what was in the preparations they were selling to the public.

  It is not surprising, then, that Claude Hopkins called his five years with Liquozone “strenuous,” and that by the spring of 1907, he was on a milk diet along the quiet shores
of Spring Lake.

  Albert Lasker was well aware of the troubles plaguing the Liquid Ozone Company. In fact, he had had a similar experience. Early in his tenure at Lord & Thomas, the agency represented a patent-medicine concern called the Kalamazoo Tuberculosis Remedy Company. The company was exposed as a fraud, and as soon as Lasker took the reins at Lord & Thomas, he steered the agency out of the patent-medicine business.35

  Lasker had followed the Liquozone campaigns carefully, going so far as to cut out a particularly effective ad and study it “a hundred times.”36 He admired the company’s clever use of coupons, which made Lasker think of the Liquozone writer as a “kindred spirit.”37 Now, as he made his discreet inquiries in 1907, he discovered that the same person—Claude C. Hopkins—was behind both the Schlitz ads and the Liquozone campaigns.38

  He learned this from a friend, Stephen Hester, who owned a small stake in Liquozone. Lasker asked Hester how he might persuade Hopkins to come work for Lord & Thomas. Hester—an invalid who rarely left his Chicago hotel rooms and had both the time and the inclination to conspire with Lasker—came up with an elaborate ruse for recruiting Hopkins, whom he regarded as “a quiet man, a highly sensitive man, a man who is stingy with money in small things.”39

  Hopkins, Hester explained to Lasker, had spent nearly his whole life in advertising. By most accounts, he was the greatest advertising man alive—and yet, he was now “disgraced, and disheartened.” And to further complicate things, Hopkins was worth something like $1 million, so he didn’t need to work. Rumor had it that Hopkins was going to get out of business and become an author.40

  Hester proposed to introduce Lasker to Hopkins at lunch. Lasker would tell Hopkins about his problems with Frank Van Camp, and explain that he would consider it a great personal favor if Hopkins would compose a few ads just to get the new campaign started. Hester strongly advised Lasker not to offer to pay him. Instead, Hester said, he should offer to buy a new electric automobile for Hopkins’s wife. “His wife wants an electric automobile for $2,700,” Hester told Lasker, “and he won’t give it to her. This will solve the most pressing problem he has.” Lasker agreed to the scheme.

  He may have been surprised, on the day of the luncheon, at the relatively unprepossessing manner and appearance of his man. Slightly foppish, with a thin mustache and protruding front teeth, Hopkins spoke with a lisp, so that when he introduced himself as “C. C. Hopkins,” it came out as “Thee-Thee.” (This became his nickname around the office for the next seventeen years, although to his face, Thee-Thee was always addressed as “Mr. Hopkins.”) Lasker followed Hester’s script to the letter, and Hopkins agreed to jumpstart the Van Camp campaign.

  Hopkins’s account of that lunch adds some interesting details. He recalled Lasker showing him a contract for $400,000 from the Van Camp Packing Company, contingent on satisfactory copy being submitted to Frank Van Camp. According to Hopkins:

  Mr. Lasker said, “I have searched the country for copy. This is the copy I got in New York, this in Philadelphia. I have spent thousands of dollars to get the best copy obtainable. You see the result. Neither you nor I would submit it. Now I ask you to help me. Give me three ads, which will start this campaign, and your wife may go down Michigan Avenue to select any car on the street and have it charged to me.”

  As far as I know, no ordinary human being has ever resisted Albert Lasker. He has commanded what he would in this world. Presidents have made him their pal. Nothing he desired has ever been forbidden him. So I yielded, as all do, to his persuasiveness. I went to Indianapolis that night.41

  Shortly afterward, Lord & Thomas publicly announced that it had retained the services of Claude C. Hopkins. Lasker assembled the office staff one morning and told them about the new hire, who would be paid the astounding sum of $1,000 per week—more than twice what John Kennedy had commanded only two years earlier. “My instinct for showmanship was fully gratified,” Lasker later remembered, “when I heard a voice at the rear of the crescent-shaped clustering of our people repeating with awestruck emphasis, ‘—a week!’”42

  That same morning, in conversations with groups of staff members, Hopkins began imparting his theory of copywriting. We should never brag about a client’s product, he said, or plead with consumers to buy it. Instead, we must figure out how to appeal to the consumer’s self-interest. The group we call “everybody” is actually a collection of individuals, each mainly concerned about him- or herself. “We must get down to individuals,” he stressed. “We must treat people in advertising as we treat them in person.”43

  Hopkins had begun his adult life as a teacher, and he saw himself as a teacher still. But he was also a doer—and the task at hand was pushing pork and beans.

  Van Camp presented some interesting challenges, including the fact that its pork and beans product was undistinguished. (At the Van Camp factory, Hopkins laid out a spread of a half-dozen rival brands with no identifying labels; no one could figure out which was Van Camp’s.) But this wasn’t the most pressing concern. As Hopkins soon discovered, something like 94 percent of housewives cooked their own pork and beans and weren’t interested in a canned alternative. So Hopkins decided that he first had to soften up that uninterested 94 percent of the potential market: “I started a campaign to argue against home baking . . . I told of the sixteen hours required to bake beans at home. I told why home baking could never make beans digestible. I pictured home-baked beans, with the crisped beans on top, the mushy beans below . . . Then I offered a free sample for comparison. The result was an enormous success.”44

  Next, Hopkins set about “differentiating” Van Camp’s product from the competition:

  We told of beans grown on special soils. Any good navy beans must be grown there. We told of vine-ripened tomatoes, Livingston Stone tomatoes. All our competitors used them. We told how we analyzed every lot of beans, as every canner must. We told of our steam ovens where beans are baked for hours at 245 degrees. That is regular canning practice . . . We told just the same story that any rival could have told, but all others thought the story was too commonplace.45

  Hopkins then acted on an observation he happened to make on the streets of downtown Chicago. At the restaurants and lunch counters into which Hopkins poked his head, a large number of the men at the tables and counters were consuming factory-baked pork-and-bean products. This, of course, was simply semantics: by definition, commercial establishments couldn’t provide “home-cooked” meals, so diners who liked pork and beans for lunch took what they could get. But Hopkins realized that many housewives were ready to quit the onerous, sixteen-hour process of making pork and beans from scratch. He told them that their “men folks were buying baked beans downtown,” and “told them how to quit easily.”46

  Soon, Van Camp was able to command a premium for its unremarkable pork and beans, and emerge as the dominant national brand.

  An overlapping story begins in 1908, when the head of the American Cereal Company, Henry Parsons Crowell, got in touch with Lord & Thomas. Crowell—a devout Christian who went into business to serve God after recovering from a childhood bout with tuberculosis—had bought the run-down Quaker Mill in Ravenna, Ohio, in 1881. One of the first manufacturers to start packaging and selling oats directly to consumers, beginning with its “Pure Quaker Oats” in 1884, Crowell had created one of the nation’s most successful branded cereals. In 1901, he joined forces with three other cereal magnates to found American Cereal (henceforth “Quaker”), headquartered in Chicago.47

  Over its early history, Quaker employed a variety of ad agencies.48 Quaker felt that it didn’t need Lord & Thomas’s help in selling its flagship oats; on the other hand, as Crowell informed Hopkins at a 1908 meeting, the company had a portfolio of products that were only bumping along. Impressed with Lord & Thomas’s recent string of successes, he offered to put $50,000 into promoting a Quaker product of Hopkins’s choosing.49

  Hopkins soon settled upon two odd products—Puffed Rice and Wheat Berries—which had been introduced
as novelties at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. They were manufactured by a similar process: Raw grains were placed in long metal cylinders that looked something like rifle barrels. Hot compressed air was then injected into these tubes, and the kernels of grain expanded to something like eight times their original size. When the cylinder was opened, the compressed air exploded out, carrying with it the “puffed” cereal.

  Hopkins loved it. It was visual, counterintuitive—and patented. Quaker controlled the puffing machinery, and for the time being, at least, nobody else could make puffed cereals in just this way; this made it a far better business than corn flakes. Into Hopkins’s head popped the soon-to-be-immortal phrase: Food shot from guns.

  Of course, Lord & Thomas still had to lay the groundwork for a successful campaign. Looking at the economics of cereal manufacturing and distribution, Hopkins and Lasker realized that the rice and wheat products had to be sold together to justify the cost of advertising them. This meant that Wheat Berries needed a new name: “Puffed Wheat.” Quaker agreed. Next, Lord & Thomas argued for a price increase: from 10 cents to 15 cents a box for Puffed Rice, and from 7 cents to 10 cents for Puffed Wheat. Quaker worried that this would kill sales of two products that were already in decline; Lord & Thomas argued that the price increases would pay for the advertising needed to drive up sales.50 Once again, Quaker acquiesced. The agency contacted retailers and suggested that they stock up before this price increase, which had the welcome effect of driving up sales.51