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

  A month later, Luckman found himself summoned by Lasker, who asked him point-blank whether he had in fact changed the formula without approval. Luckman admitted that he had, and Lasker asked if Kenneth Smith knew.

  No, Luckman replied, he hadn’t told Smith anything.

  Lasker picked up the telephone and called Smith in Palm Beach. “Well,” he said to Smith, “your young man passed the final test. He didn’t let me put him down, but went ahead and ordered the formula changed. Isn’t that something?”58 With that, Smith and Lasker made Luckman vice president and general manager of the company. In 1941, when Smith decided to take another step back from the company, Luckman received another promotion, and was named president and CEO of Pepsodent.

  Was this a premeditated test of Luckman’s mettle? Or was an increasingly rigid Lasker simply saving face after realizing that Luckman had been right?

  A second incident, involving the buyout of Pepsodent, suggests that Lasker may have harbored resentments about Luckman’s decision to go around him. In 1944, Luckman was approached by Frederick Peyser, a representative of Lever Brothers, which was then one of the three major players in the soap industry (along with Colgate-Palmolive and Procter & Gamble). Lever Brothers wanted to buy Pepsodent, and was offering $66 per share in cash. Luckman, who by then owned 15 percent of the company, was eager to sell, and when he relayed the offer to Smith, Smith assigned him the voting rights for his 60 percent of the company stock. When Luckman met with Lasker, however, the deal fell apart. Lasker refused to sell and seemed personally affronted by the proposition. “Pepsodent’s more my baby than anyone else’s,” he told Luckman. “I am going to tell Kenneth he cannot sell . . . besides, Peyser should have come to me first!”59

  As the weeks went by, Lasker refused to budge. Luckman considered a lawsuit, though he dreaded airing the matter in court. Finally, he asked Peyser to make one last effort. He suggested that Peyser and the head of Lever Brothers call on Lasker and apologize for not bringing the offer first to him. Then, Luckman suggested, they should lay on the honey, lauding Lasker’s many contributions to the company over the years.

  Peyser agreed to try, and the effort was partially successful. Lasker agreed to sell, but he insisted that Lever Brothers pay him a dollar more per share than either Luckman or Smith. What’s more, even though Lever Brothers offered to pay him this difference out of their own pocket, Lasker insisted that the difference come from Luckman’s and Smith’s share of the profits. One last time, Lasker was asserting his dominance at Pepsodent, and Smith and Luckman were forced to accept his terms.

  It was not Lasker’s finest hour. According to Luckman, neither he nor Smith ever spoke to their former colleague again.60

  Armed with strong data from the Pepsodent experience, Lord & Thomas began recommending radio campaigns to many other clients.

  In 1934, Lord & Thomas approached International Cellucotton Products Company (ICPC) and proposed a broadcast promotion for Kleenex. The vehicle became an on-air soap opera, The Story of Mary Marlin, that was fifteen minutes long and aired five times a week.

  In November 1935, Lord & Thomas ran a Pepsodent-like promotion on Mary Marlin, offering a free packet of Kleenex to listeners who wrote in to the Chicago NBC station to keep the program on the air. The station received 67,300 responses: the largest amount of mail ever received by a station in response to a promotion. In 1936, Lord & Thomas mimicked another successful Pepsodent promotion, offering $10,000 in prizes to listeners who wrote in with naming suggestions for Mary Marlin’s baby, as well as the best way to use Kleenex for babies. Again, the response was tremendous: NBC received 168,207 responses, and Lord & Thomas attributed a 13 percent increase in sales to the promotion.61

  The company saw additional proof of Mary Marlin’s success in the case of Quest deodorant, a product launched in 1935 and advertised solely on the radio show. Within months, a consumer survey showed that the product had captured first place in the powder deodorant field, a fact that Lord & Thomas called “conclusive proof” of the success of the show.62

  But radio advertising was expensive, even for large corporations like ICPC. The Mary Marlin show was so costly, in fact, that ICPC suspended advertising in all other media while the show was on the air. The program clearly earned its keep; according to the account history, sales increases due to the program were “sensational.” Nevertheless, The Story of Mary Marlin was dropped in 1937 when Lord & Thomas concluded—as in the case of Amos ’n’ Andy—that the show had reached its saturation point. For its subsequent campaign, Kleenex reverted to print media.

  With the exception of David Sarnoff’s RCA and the General Electric subsidiaries that Thomas Logan had brought to the agency, Lord & Thomas never made significant inroads into the highest reaches of corporate America. (New York upstarts BBDO and Young & Rubicam had far more success on those circles.) For example: Lasker had worked his magic for second-tier automakers—companies like Hudson, Mitchell Motors, and Studebaker—but he had never landed the likes of Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler.

  This changed in 1935, when General Motors came into the fold. This time, though, Lord & Thomas wouldn’t be advertising cars. Instead, the agency would be advertising refrigerators for General Motors’s Frigidaire subsidiary: the leading player in a $300 million industry that was growing dramatically, thanks to the nationwide expansion of the electrical grid and the lower prices that resulted from increased sales volumes.

  Frigidaire wasn’t Lord & Thomas’s first refrigerator account. The short-lived partnership with Thomas Logan brought into the Lord & Thomas fold several General Electric products, including the “Monitor Top” refrigerator, introduced to the public in 1927. Unlike competing models of the day, which concealed their mechanical parts inside their rectangular “boxes,” the Monitor Top featured a hatbox-shaped metal box atop its cooling compartment.63 In the “hatbox” sat the refrigerator’s motor and compressor.

  One of GE’s corporate goals was to increase the overall consumption of electricity, so the Monitor Top favored a relatively inefficient air-cooled system over a water-cooled one.64 Obviously, Lord & Thomas couldn’t promote the Monitor Top as an efficient appliance—it cost about $2.60 more per year to power than competitive models—so the agency focused on “simplified electrical refrigeration” as its campaign theme, and trumpeted the appliance’s reliability as its key selling point. “Not one cent for repairs,” read the bold headlines in Lord & Thomas’s ads.

  On the strength of Lord & Thomas’s campaign, GE’s ungainly new product seized 60 percent of the refrigerator market in 1927. The rest of the industry—Frigidaire, Kelvinator, Westinghouse, and smaller players—howled in protest at the implied warranty inherent in the “not one cent” theme. In response, the powerful home-appliance industry association took a novel tack: it imposed a three-year warranty on all home refrigerators, thereby blunting the impact of GE’s campaign, and effectively relegating the Monitor Top to its previous status as an industry also-ran. Lord & Thomas and GE’s refrigeration unit soon parted company, in part because GE demanded that the agency begin spending a lot of time at individual dealerships—a strategy of which Lasker disapproved.65

  The real powerhouse in the industry—before and after the anomalous year of 1927—was General Motors’ entry into home refrigeration: the Frigidaire, which typically outsold its nearest competitors by nearly two to one. GM first got into the refrigerator business in 1918, when Will Durant applied his auto company’s mass-production techniques to refrigerators. The Frigidaire Corporation formally became a GM subsidiary in 1926, with an ambitious young executive named Elmer G. Biechler as its president and general manager. That same year, GM built a huge new Frigidaire factory in Moraine City, Ohio, vastly increasing the subsidiary’s output—and necessitating a huge increase in its advertising budget. The combination worked: by 1929, Frigidaire had sold its millionth unit.66

  In the ensuing half-decade, Frigidaire became nearly synonymous with “refrigerator”—a mixed bl
essing, in terms of brand awareness. “I heard a woman say, ‘I just bought a General Electric Frigidaire,’” Albert Lasker observed pointedly, underscoring the perils inherent in becoming a generic.67

  In the summer of 1935, Frigidaire went looking for a new agency.

  Frigidaire was blessed with considerable marketing expertise, including a network of talented distributors and dealers across the country. At an early meeting, Frigidaire representatives told Lord & Thomas about an interesting experiment then going on in the Dallas-Forth Worth region. In the previous year—1934—the Electrolux refrigerator had successfully invaded that territory, using claims of low operating costs to grab second place behind Frigidaire. Worried about this interloper, the Fort Worth distributor tested the Electrolux, and discovered that, unlike the Frigidaire, it couldn’t maintain a constant 50-degree temperature in the scorching Texas summer. In collaboration with Dallas Power & Light, the Frigidaire distributor then handed out three hundred thermometers to randomly selected refrigerator owners, and the results were the same: Frigidaire units performed extremely well and competing models came up short—with Electrolux performing worst of all.

  With this information in hand, Frigidaire counterattacked. It shipped ten thousand thermometers to Dallas, handing them out to current and prospective customers through its dealer network and also inviting competing dealers to distribute the thermometers. (The power company did its part by running ads supporting regular checks of refrigerator temperatures for safety’s sake.) The result, according to an in-house Lord & Thomas memo, was a near-complete rout:

  The effect of this campaign on Electrolux was that they dropped from second place to fifth place in one season, lost the power company as a distributor, lost a number of their active dealers, and were flooded with a warehouse full of repossessed jobs. Frigidaire’s monthly sales average in the area went from 163 before the campaign started to 298 during July and August, 1934, when the thermometers were being given away. Amazingly enough the campaign resulted in a drop in the Frigidaire service cost because the thermometers led owners to defrost oftener and to take better care of their refrigerators.68

  On the strength of this success, Frigidaire wanted to build its 1936 advertising campaign around the concept of “safety-zone temperatures”: in other words, the ability of its refrigerators to maintain foods at a safe temperature. In addition, the manufacturer wanted to promote its products’ fast-freezing capability, low operating costs, features, and five-year guarantee. These added up to a “five standards of value” story, Frigidaire told Lord & Thomas, and that was what the new ad campaign should push.

  But the agency said no. Frigidaire, they contended, was using “product thinking,” rather than talking in “consumer words.” The standards-of-value story line, Lord & Thomas pointed out, would appeal only to those who had already decided to buy a refrigerator; it wouldn’t speak at all to the millions of people who believed that they couldn’t afford electric refrigeration in the first place. Many consumers dreaded the idea of a meter spinning away in some dark corner of the house, racking up electric bills that they might not be able to pay.

  No, said Lord & Thomas; what was needed was a “potent battle cry” to win over the prospect who worried that he or she couldn’t afford an electric refrigerator. And that battle cry had to rescue the Frigidaire brand from its increasingly generic limbo.

  Albert Lasker took a personal interest in the Frigidaire account. He maintained a close personal relationship with Frigidaire’s president, Elmer Biechler.69 He also participated actively in the key internal discussions at Lord & Thomas, focusing on the battle-cry challenge. As he later recalled:

  We said, “We have to clothe it with something that makes it seem a new product, so that the name gets a new proportion” . . .

  I said, “What is the main working part of it?” And the main working part was a rotary compressor with only two parts—very ingenious—a mechanism which they had had from the beginning. They had never changed it from the first day. I said, “All right, we will name the working part. We will give it a name, and then we will say, ‘Frigidaire with the blah-blah,’ whatever that is. And then if they go to see a “General Electric Frigidaire,” they will ask, ‘Is this the General Electric Frigidaire with the blah-blah?’ And they won’t buy it unless it has the blah-blah . . .

  I said, “We can’t explain [the compressor] technically. It must be two words where the imagination of the reader will fasten on the fact that nothing is so economical as this . . . And furthermore, don’t bring me any two words that aren’t alliterative. If you are going to use two words—if you are going to fasten them in the minds of the readers—then they must be alliterative.”70

  Actually, the rotary compressor was brand-new—replacing the far less effective reciprocating model that Frigidaires had used up to this point—but Lasker got the main point of the story right. The entire Lord & Thomas creative staff was asked to submit names for the efficient new compressor (the blah-blah), and several dozen people came up with close to two thousand names. At a staff meeting, Lasker reviewed the entries, and rejected all of them. At that point, however, a young copywriter named Ted Little retrieved from a trashcan a crumpled piece of paper that included a name that he had decided wasn’t even good enough to submit: meter miser.71 “That’s it,” Lasker said immediately.

  But Lasker wanted to make sure that the phrase worked in the ears of potential consumers. Staffers had “meter miser” printed on five hundred pieces of paper, and then asked pedestrians on the streets of Chicago what the phrase implied to them. An amazing 82 percent said that it had something to do with “saving current.”72

  Clearly, meter miser was a winner. Still fighting their client’s stated preferences, the agency renamed the product “Frigidaire with the Meter-Miser” and added the phrase “Made only by General Motors.” Lasker contributed a tagline: cuts current costs to the bone.

  The first ads featuring the Meter-Miser appeared on March 6, 1936, and proved a spectacular success. GM had hoped to sell 320,000 units for the 1936 model year; the total came closer to 440,000 units (with those additional 120,000 refrigerators delivering extraordinary profits, thanks to ever-increasing economies of scale). The following year, more than 550,000 Frigidaires were sold.

  The growing power of advertising was indisputable: Lord & Thomas had found ways to sell staggering numbers of two distinct kinds of refrigerators, from two different manufacturers, within a decade. The agency, and the old master who still guided its fortunes, at least intermittently, hadn’t lost their touch. Inside Lord & Thomas, people were reminded of the importance of listening and being responsive to their clients, but at the same time, sticking to their guns. It also became clear that successful advertising was self-fulfilling: in the wake of the Meter-Miser’s astounding success, General Motors’s engineers felt compelled to make sure that the Frigidaire was stingy with current.

  Finally, the wisdom of maintaining a creative tension within the agency, and drawing on the collective talents of a team, once again became apparent. Ted Little’s inspiration, David Noyes emphasized, almost failed to make it to the table, and that would have been both the agency’s and the client’s loss:

  That is why [Lasker] has an inviolable rule that no one must sit in criticism over his creative thinking, and no man is privileged to reject his own ideas, no matter how absurd. He must always submit it for final appraisal, where the decision is made . . . Each man goes to work on the other man, and it is a sort of healthy conflict, where everybody attacks everybody else’s work with no quarter given, but no pride at stake with everything you submitted, [and] always with the idea that practically everything is going to be thrown out.73

  Frigidaire remained a Lord & Thomas account until Lasker closed the agency’s doors in 1942, and remained an account of Foote, Cone & Belding (Lord & Thomas’s successor agency) until 1955.

  In more ways than one, Lasker’s triumph at Frigidaire represented the end of an era. It was the last
big account that Lord & Thomas won and the last account on which Lasker put his personal stamp.

  In addition, it was the last time Albert Lasker developed a close personal rapport with a company’s leader—in this case, Frigidaire’s president and general manager—and did business on a peer-to-peer level. American business was becoming more stratified, divisionalized, hierarchical, and impersonal, and the kinds of personal relationships that Lasker cultivated and counted upon for his influence were increasingly difficult to establish.

  Lasker found hierarchies boring. He relished his head-to-head confrontations with the likes of George Washington Hill and David Sarnoff. He enjoyed being a player, especially a player with a significant equity stake. And he believed, with some justification, that injecting bureaucracy into the advertising process only hurt that process.

  Eventually, these changes would help drive Lasker out of advertising. First, though, he and his West Coast lieutenants would use the tools of their trade—including their newly acquired skills in radio—to change the course of American politics once again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Selling and Unselling California

  From 1900 to 1920, Los Angeles was essentially a tourist town. Like most tourist towns, it had its share of freaks, side-shows, novelties, and show-places. Ducks waddled along the streets with advertisements painted on their backs; six-foot-nine pituitary giants with sandwich-board signs stalked the downtown streets; while thousands of people carrying Bibles in their hands and singing hymns marched in evangelical parades . . . During the winter months, Los Angeles was, in fact, a great circus without a tent.1