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

  Lacking any explicit instructions from his absent superiors, Templin decided to tackle the product’s biggest failing first. He allocated between $250,000 and $300,000 to reduce the abrasiveness of the toothpaste while still preserving its cleansing ability. He later commented that Lasker’s willingness to tackle this kind of problem—even by proxy—was highly unusual in an advertising executive: “We went way further than most companies would go to eliminate this abrasive factor. There are very few men, I think, besides Lasker engaged in the advertising business [who] would have the courage and support such a program . . . Lasker was enthusiastically in favor, always, of making the product the finest it was possible to make it.”33

  Second, Templin—whose background in radio now came into play—pushed both Pepsodent and Lord & Thomas to explore this new advertising medium. “Lasker was cold to the idea of a radio program for Pepsodent,” Templin recalled, “because the few clients of his that had tried a radio program up to that time had not, so he said, been able to trace any increase in sales or any benefit from it.” In addition, of course, Lasker was a substantial stockholder in Pepsodent, which probably made him more conservative in the management of the account.

  At this time, however, Lasker was largely incapacitated, giving Templin far more leeway. In an effort to convince his new colleagues of the benefits of radio, Templin staged a full-dress “audition” in Chicago, complete with a New York announcer reading Pepsodent ads on the air. The studio audience included copywriters for Pepsodent, Lord & Thomas executives, and NBC executives—a “sophisticated and cold” group, in Templin’s estimation. Much of what they heard that day was not new, having been lifted out of existing print campaigns. But just as Templin anticipated, the old copy acquired new power and resonance when it landed on the ear, rather than the eye. “As I expected,” Templin noted, “when the people in the room for the first time heard, coming over the air, from the loudspeaker these statements about Pepsodent tooth paste, I think every man in that room was impressed tremendously.”

  Once the decision to pursue radio advertising had been made, the next challenge was to find the right vehicle. At the time, the most common radio advertising model was for a product to sponsor a specific radio program, broadcast every week (or in some cases, every day) at the same time of day. Templin wanted a program “that would be sufficiently interesting to act as a vehicle to carry this series of announcements.” Pepsodent conducted a series of auditions, but none of the acts felt “sufficiently fresh or different.”

  So Templin decided to investigate a local act that had a passionate following in the Chicago area. He first stumbled upon the program while visiting with some friends, who were so engrossed in the broadcast that the whole household stopped what it was doing and gathered around the radio to listen. Even the young children, Templin noted, were allowed to stay up past their bedtimes and listen.

  The program, called Amos ’n’ Andy, was the brainchild of Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, two bricklayers from Peoria whose on-the-job patter so amused their coworkers that they eventually tried out for radio.34 The resulting program, Sam and Henry, aired briefly in St. Louis before moving to the Chicago Tribune’s WGN station in January 1926. Originally a musical production, WGN suggested that the pair add a dramatic element to the show, creating a sort of radio comic strip.35 When the program’s creators later requested a wider distribution of the show, WGN turned them down, and Gosden and Correll left the network. In March 1928, the show found a new home on the Chicago Daily News’s radio station, WMAQ, where it was reinvented as Amos ’n’ Andy.

  Amos ’n’ Andy was essentially an extension of the traditional minstrel show format: Gosden and Correll, both white, played two black men who move from Atlanta to Chicago in pursuit of opportunity. The two open a taxi company, encounter a number of Chicago characters (all performed by Gosden and Correll), and later relocate to Harlem. An unusual combination of humor and pathos animated the series, and the show quickly became a hit. As broadcast historian Elizabeth McLeod writes:

  Amos ’n’ Andy profoundly influenced the development of dramatic radio. Working alone in a small studio, Correll and Gosden created an intimate, understated acting style that differed sharply from the broad manner of stage actors—a technique requiring careful modulation of the voice, especially in the portrayal of multiple characters. The performers pioneered the technique of varying both the distance and the angle of their approach to the microphone to create the illusion of a group of characters. Listeners could easily imagine that they were actually in the taxicab office, listening in on the conversation of close friends. The result was a uniquely absorbing experience for listeners who in radio’s short history had never heard anything quite like Amos ’n’ Andy.36

  With Smith’s backing—and over Lasker’s objections—Templin decided to run a thirteen-week test. The program first aired with Pepsodent’s sponsorship on August 19, 1929, on the NBC Blue network (one of two radio networks then owned by NBC; it later became the American Broadcasting Company) with the mellow-voiced Bill Hay announcing. This choice was inspired: Hay had been associated with the show since the early WMAQ days and was already a familiar voice to Amos ’n’ Andy fans. His calm and dignified sign-off, “Use Pepsodent Toothpaste Twice a Day—See Your Dentist at Least Twice a Year,” and the earnest and intimate quality of his voice as he read the prebroadcast Pepsodent pitch lent an immediate credibility to the product.

  Templin insisted that Hay announce only for Amos ’n’ Andy. This led the public to associate him with Pepsodent instead of with the radio station. As Templin describes it, Hay was able to entrench himself “in the minds of the public as a conservative, sincere, honest representative of the Pepsodent Company, not of the NBC.”37

  The trial failed: after thirteen weeks, sales weren’t up, and the area’s wholesalers and druggists were grumbling about the huge inventories of Pepsodent they had on hand. But Templin felt in his gut that it was too soon to pull the plug. To test his instinct, he had announcer Hay offer an autographed photograph of Amos ’n’ Andy to anyone who was interested. More than 150,000 replies poured in from all across Chicago—sufficient to silence his skeptical colleagues at Lord & Thomas and convince the naysayers at Pepsodent to underwrite another thirteen-week trial.

  This time, the evidence was unambiguous: a marked increase in Pepsodent sales. Now the toothpaste company and its ad agency decided to plunge, taking the show nationwide. The result was a phenomenon. In 1930 and 1931, at the peak of its popularity, Amos ’n’ Andy attracted some 40 million people every evening.38 Phone companies reported that telephone traffic plunged during the show, and movie chains interrupted their features to broadcast the show to patrons in their theaters.39

  Most important from the advertiser’s point of view, Pepsodent sales increased 100 percent between 1929 and 1930.40 Much of the profit was plowed back into advertising, and by 1932, Pepsodent was the second-largest buyer of radio time in the United States, topped only by George Washington Hill’s American Tobacco.41

  Pepsodent’s resurgence thanks to Amos ’n’ Andy was short-lived. While the radio show remained the most popular broadcast on the air, other shows were quickly gaining a national audience, and other brands were capitalizing on the power of the airwaves. By 1934, Lord & Thomas was being outspent on the radio by both J. Walter Thompson and Chicago’s pioneering Blackett-Sample-Hummert, and many other agencies were rapidly gaining ground.42 Blackett-Sample-Hummert was led in part by Lord & Thomas–trained Frank Hummert, a gifted copywriter whom Lasker had hoped would succeed Claude Hopkins, but who had left Lord & Thomas in 1927.43 Hummert and his wife Anne recognized the enormous potential of serial drama on the radio, and created more than one hundred successful radio series for their clients, including Colgate-Palmolive and General Mills.44

  Lord & Thomas gave Pepsodent a temporary boost in the early 1930s through a new scheme involving radio promotions. The first of these was an offer of lithographed cut-outs of Amos ’n’ An
dy characters to listeners who sent in a Pepsodent box top. It was a natural extension of Lord & Thomas’ long-standing advertising practice of offering samples with strings attached; according to Templin, however, this was the first time that the consumer had to send in a box top in order to receive the product.

  This proof-of-purchase scheme eventually became standard practice among advertisers, but Lord & Thomas did it first—and only after overcoming NBC’s strong objections. As Templin recalls: “We were the first to include in the specifications that they must send the carton of the product in. The very first. We did that to weed out the professional coupon clippers, as we call them, that never will be customers, that just write in for samples. We had a great battle for it to get the NBC company to permit such an offer to be made on the air.”45

  Like most of Lord & Thomas’s best clients, Pepsodent had strong creative talent of its own. In 1935, for example, two up-and-coming vice presidents at Pepsodent, Charles Luckman and Stuart Sherman, came up with a second write-in scheme to boost lagging sales. Luckman, then twenty-seven years old, had been trained as an architect at the University of Illinois and had gone into industry because architectural commissions were few and far between in the Depression; Sherman was a Lord & Thomas alumnus who had recently joined Pepsodent. Sitting together one night over scotches at the Drake Hotel, the two men were brainstorming new merchandising concepts when that evening’s Amos ’n’ Andy broadcast came on. Amos’s wife, Ruby, was pregnant at the time in the storyline, and the two characters spent much of the broadcast arguing about the baby’s name.

  Both Luckman and Sherman slapped the table at the same moment, shouting “That’s it!”46

  More or less simultaneously, the two had invented a baby-naming contest. They spent the next few days feverishly working out the details. The contest would run for six weeks, with the company offering a prize of $5,000 to the listener who sent in the winning name. Other prizes totaling $35,000 were also announced. (All entries, of course, had to be accompanied by a Pepsodent box top.)

  The success of the contest stunned even its creators. At a meeting with Lasker and Smith on the day following their brainstorm, all four men wrote down their guesses as to the number of entries the contest would generate. The highest guess was Lasker’s, at a million entries—but even this proved low. In only six weeks, Pepsodent received more than 2 million box tops. Sales jumped 21 percent.

  Wildly successful though it was, the baby-naming contest could only buy time for Pepsodent. As David Noyes later explained, the product’s fatal flaw was that it offered nothing special to the consumer: “It seemed that no major product improvement was possible since there were no new ingredients available and that everyone in the dentifrice business was using almost the same ingredients in varying proportions. It was made clear again that advertising could only function when it had a theme that held the consumer . . . because of the advantage to the consumer. There was no advantage at that time in Pepsodent.”47

  The company therefore began a search for a new ingredient that would differentiate Pepsodent from the competition. At a fortuitous juncture, probably some time in 1936, a somewhat shadowy “foreign inventor” showed up in New York City with the “beginning of an answer,” according to Noyes. The inventor, who had come up with a foaming detergent substance, apparently contacted every local toothpaste manufacturer on the same day, informing them of his miraculous discovery. Pepsodent cut a deal with him the following day.

  The new detergent, though promising, didn’t work in combination with any of the known polishing agents on the market, so Pepsodent began a search for a product that would be compatible with the detergent. A new agent called sodium alkyl sulphate was eventually identified, and—in combination with the detergent—showed vastly improved cleansing results in lab tests.

  The challenge for Lord & Thomas, once again, was how to market this new ingredient. Lasker decided that it needed a name—one that would spark the public’s interest. Ever sensitive to the power of euphony, he told his staff to come up with a name that had five letters: three vowels and two consonants.

  From this exercise, the made-up word “irium” was born, and once again, advertising history was made, as “Pepsodent with irium” burned itself into the national consciousness. “We didn’t go to do it on purpose,” Lasker later commented, “but it sounded like irradiated, it sounded like platinum, it sounded like something precious, and it was a success from the [first] second.”48

  The new name worked the magic that Lasker had been hoping for. The American Dental Association had to add a full-time staff member to answer queries about irium from dentists and teachers. Pepsodent received petitions from drugstores asking them to send a detailed explanation of irium so that the druggists could answer their customers’ questions.49 Within a year and a half, Pepsodent had recaptured first place in the toothpaste wars.

  Toward the end of 1937, Charles Luckman was summoned into a meeting with Lasker and Noyes. He immediately sensed a strained atmosphere in the room, but before he could ask any questions, Lasker fired one at him: should Lord & Thomas renew the contract with Amos ’n’ Andy, which expired at the end of the year, or find new radio talent?

  Luckman, suspecting that this was a test, took his time weighing his response. Finally, he told Lasker that he would recommend canceling. The program, he explained, had reached a saturation point; listeners by that time were either already sold on Pepsodent, or never would be sold. Luckman passed the test: Lasker agreed with him, and had been arguing the same point with Noyes for the past hour.50 With that, the eight-year collaboration with Amos ’n’ Andy came to an end, and Lord & Thomas began looking for a new hit for Pepsodent.

  The choice initially came down to two personalities: Fred Allen and Milton Berle. But Edward Lasker, now heading up the radio department in the New York office, had another candidate in mind. He became head of the radio department in early 1938—only weeks after Lord & Thomas made the decision to sever ties with Amos ’n’ Andy—and therefore was a new voice in these high-stakes discussions. Screwing up his courage, Edward invited Luckman to come to New York to see an obscure comedian named Bob Hope.

  Hope wasn’t a completely unknown quantity at Lord & Thomas; in December 1937, he had done a thirteen-week stint on American Tobacco’s Your Hit Parade. But George Washington Hill had been unimpressed with Hope, and so far, radio audiences seemed to agree with Hill’s assessment.51 Between 1935 and 1937, Hope had been given guest shots on several radio shows—including the Rudy Vallee show for Fleischmann’s yeast and the Woodbury soap show—but had failed to land his own long-term deal.

  Luckman, too, had reservations. Although he was impressed with Hope’s quicksilver wit, he worried that the brash young comedian might be too sophisticated for a national audience. “Does he have the touch of the common man that you see in Andy’s characterization of the Kingfish?” he asked Edward Lasker. “Jack Benny has that touch . . . Fibber McGee and Molly seem to follow the same pattern; so do Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Those are three of the top shows on radio.”52

  Edward Lasker transmitted these concerns to Hope’s agent. Hope agreed to turn some of his rapier wit on himself, and—thanks to Edward Lasker’s lobbying and Luckman’s backing—Lord & Thomas agreed to give Hope a trial. The first show aired in October 1938. Critics loved it. “That small speck going over the center field fence,” Variety raved, “is the four-bagger Bob Hope whammed out his first time at bat for Pepsodent.”53 Audiences loved him, too: after only two months on the air, Hope’s was the fourth most-listened-to show nationwide.54

  Hope’s subsequent accomplishments—as a radio, movie, and TV phenomenon and as an entertainer of U.S. troops overseas through the USO—began with that “four-bagger.” In 1943, for example, Pepsodent happily paid $225,000 to send Hope on a wildly successful tour of Army camps.

  Lasker’s involvement in Pepsodent ended unhappily after two odd incidents in which he came into conflict with Charles Luckman, who
by the late 1930s was gaining more and more authority at the company. Kenneth Smith continued to be a hands-off, frequently absent figure, and although Luckman continued to get his approval on all major decisions, these consultations increasingly became a formality.

  The first incident, which occurred soon after Pepsodent began sponsoring the Bob Hope show, grew out of Luckman’s decision to develop a creamier-textured toothpaste. He undertook this experiment on his own initiative, without notifying either Smith or Lasker. Pepsodent’s lab produced three samples of varying creaminess, which Luckman distributed to the company’s secretaries, executives, tax accountants, lawyers, and so on, asking them to choose their favorite. Almost 95 percent preferred the creamiest formula. Luckman then tested the new formula in Fort Worth, Texas, and Madison, Wisconsin, to equally favorable results. An A.C. Nielsen company survey a month after the new formula was introduced came back with results that Arthur Nielsen himself warned might be “too good to be true,” but a second survey two weeks later confirmed the dramatic findings.55

  Armed with this convincing data, Luckman made a formal presentation to Smith and Lasker, hoping to convince them to adopt the new creamier formula nationwide. According to Luckman, Lasker’s response to the presentation was both unreasonable and unwavering. “Let us get one thing straight,” he told Luckman. “If the figures say one thing, and I say another, I am right. I say no change.”56

  Lasker’s position—if reported accurately by Luckman—bears some exploration. He was a major stockholder in the company and for almost two decades he had been one of its most important guiding forces. It was about this same juncture that Lasker commented to his ghost autobiographer, “I am Pepsodent!”—an attitude that infuriated the company’s middle managers.57 This was one of those occasions. Luckman was incensed—and also convinced that Lasker was dead wrong. He decided to move ahead without his superiors’ approval, risking his job to do what he felt was right for the company.