Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising
Page 13
92.It would, of course, mark the start of one of Shaw’s most creative and prolific periods as a playwright, a decade that would see the arrival of Heartbreak House, Saint Joan, Back to Methuselah, and a Nobel prize, buoyed by what Michael Holroyd deems a “recovery of interest” in his earlier plays through productions in Ireland, America, England, and across Europe (467).
93.“Mr. Resor Leads Discussion” 139. The innovative Stanley Resor took over as president and co-owner of the J. Walter Thompson agency in 1916.
94.Stanley Resor. “Personalities and the Public: Some Aspects of Testimonial Advertising.” New Bulletin 138 (April 1929): 1. J. Walter Thompson Information Center Records, Box 4, Testimonial Advertising, 1928–1977. John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University, 1.
95. O’Toole , 308.
© The Author(s) 2018
Christopher WixsonBernard Shaw and Modern AdvertisingBernard Shaw and His Contemporarieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78628-5_4
4. “The Biggest Scoop in Advertising History”: Personality Marketing, G.B.S., and the Near-Testimonial
Christopher Wixson1
(1)Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL, USA
Christopher Wixson
Email: cmwixson@eiu.edu
In the fall of 1911, as the testimonial sought to put its association with patent medicine far behind it, James W. Egbert wrote a five-part series in Printers’ Ink on the technique in the spirit of rehabilitation. He noted “a certain prejudice” against the testimonial “on the part of the general public,” proceeding less from “a determination not to be influenced by them [than] a tendency to skip them – to regard them as rather dull and uninteresting affairs.” His advice in one column is to endow them with “some attention-getting qualities,” 1 and agencies sought in the decade after the war ways to not only differentiate their testimonial marketing from that of their competitors but also distance it from its own checkered past. The “G.B.S.” brand too had suffered a challenge to its efficacy after the publication of Common Sense about the War in 1914 but showed signs of recovery when Shaw was invited to tour the Front in 1917 and witnessed a resurgence of stagings of his plays in Britain, Ireland, Europe, and the United States. 2 Heading into the 1920s, advertising, the testimonial technique, and Shaw were on the rebound.
If his involuntary participation in the Formamint campaign demonstrates the ways in which his brand could be appropriated by others, he seems with “O’Flaherty V.C. ” to be turning the testimonial inside out, laying the groundwork for his “near-testimonial” contributions to product campaigns in the next decade. Shaw is vehement that his play is not satirical but a genuine recruitment pamphlet in which the central character refuses to endorse enlistment in terms dictated by the British army but lays bare motives for young Irishmen to sign up. In that sense, the play is not an “anti-testimonial” but perhaps more accurately characterized as a “near testimonial ,” the phrase used by an advertising executive to describe Shaw’s contribution to a commercial campaign for Harrods in 1929 but one that just as aptly fits his participation in later campaigns for Simmons and Pan-American World Airways.
Characterized by T. R. Nevett as “the golden age of advertising,” 3 the interwar period saw enormous growth in the industry, fierce competition between newspapers, the advent of new media (most notably radio and cinema), and an increase in both professional and governmental regulation to enhance credibility. In addition,all facets of the endorsement industry grew strongly in the 1920s, including ads featuring testifiers who were ordinary citizens, and sometimes companies. However, the concept of the unsolicited testimonial letter arriving in the morning mail was mainly fiction. They were actively sought. 4
If the theater had been integral to the phenomenon of testimonial endorsement in the late nineteenth century, it is the Hollywood “star system” in the 1920s that reanimated the testimonial industry but regrettably allowed its endorsers much less autonomy than stage actresses had enjoyed. Making “it a custom to prevent its stars from signing any letters of endorsement [without] permission,” 5 the studios often would receive a portion of the proceeds for loaning a performer out and eventually exploited such arrangements as part of the cycle of publicity for films. In The Story of Advertising (1958), James Playsted Wood retrospectively characterizes the advertising of the 1920s as “exaggerated, devious, [and] strident,” and attributes the hyperbolic proliferation of endorsements more to mass culture than economics:With the eagerness of newly made converts at a prayer meeting, celebrities pressed to testify to their exclusive use of one brand of cigarettes to coffee, soap or automobile [for] the publicity and the fees. 6
As a result, by the end of the decade, as it had at the turn of the century, the industry grew concerned that this critical mass of testimonials as well as the lingering stigma of scandal would not only torpedo an effective marketing strategy but call into question the whole business of advertising itself:Alarmed, the advertising trade press inveighed against “tainted testimonials,” as Printers’ Ink called them. … The Federal Trade Commission passed a ruling against the use of testimonials unless the advertisements containing them stated that a fee had been paid to the endorser whose name was used. The Better Business Bureau published a recommended code saying that testimonials should be honest, sincere, and reliable. None of this made much difference. 7
In 1929, executive and one-time president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, H. S. Gardner wrote,The advertising world has been bitten badly by the prostituted testimonial and the hue and cry which has been set up in protest is providing the publicity needed for the cure. The surest way to stop this business of commercializing matinee idols, heroes, debutantes, society leaders and royalty is to do more of what we are doing now – i.e., increase the agitation against the practice. If the searchlight of publicity is turned on full force it will soon become unpopular to practice the testimonial chicanery. 8
Shaw’s participation in two product campaigns in 1929, one for Harrods and one for Simmons mattresses, plants him in the middle of the industry controversy over what to do with the testimonial.
Throughout its journey from the mid-nineteenth century to early twentieth century, on behalf of proprietary health products, beauty supplies, and cosmetics, the narrative structure of the testimonial endured, drawingdirectly on patterns of evangelical culture [and] closely [resembling] the standard accounts of conversion experience: the cries of the converted testified to the soul’s deliverance from suffering. In the patent medicine literature, soul-sickness took bodily form and required physical intervention. 9
In typical Shavian fashion, Shaw’s near-testimonials never followed such an arc, and their appeal for advertisers is not difficult to understand, as their uniqueness worked to erase any association with patent medicine marketing. Just as his early plays turned the conventions of melodrama inside-out, his copy flouted expectation, exploiting the opportunity not only to creatively evolve his personal brand but to do so on behalf of Creative Evolution itself. As Jonathan Goldman maintains, Shaw “became a totem of individuality, an icon whose self-production parallels that of the greatest celebrities and the most exemplary modernist writers of his time.” 10 On the industry side, despite the taint, the continued turn towards “personality marketing” provoked innovation in form, the professionalizing of writers within the industry, and the delineation of modern advertising.
Always styling itself at the vanguard of groundbreaking industry practices, the J. Walter Thompson company originated the business model for the modern advertising agency, offering “clients a ‘full service’ based around the four pillars of creative work, research, media planning (print, radio, cinema and outdoor) and account managements, the bridge in the relationship between client and agency.” 11 In a March 1929 address delivered to agency executives, JWT President Stanley Resor officially announced that a new cycle in advertising was u
nderway:“People like to read about other people.” That simple discovery has changed the complexion of every existing medium through which public opinion is formed. It has affected profoundly the editing of newspapers, magazines, books, lectures, movies, and the radio. It has raised up an army of publicity men, propagandists, “public relations counselors,” and “ghost writers.” 12
Resor went on to assert that, since “advertising is in direct competition with editorial features for the reader’s attention [and] when practically every publication of large circulation relies on personalities to secure and hold readers, it is obvious that the public will relish personalities when properly employed in advertising.” 13
A year before that address, the April 13, 1928 issue of The J. Walter Thompson News Letter provided an account of a “discussion” at a recent “production meeting” led by Resor , on the subject of what he called “personality advertising ” in an era in which “the public imagination is captured by personalities.” 14 During the presentation, previous JWT campaigns for “Ponds, Royal, Lux, Fleischmann, Simmons , Pennsylvania, Woodbury, Carter were called to the stand to bear witness to the power of personality in advertising” as department heads summarized the process of their creation, including the solicitation and compensation of celebrity endorsers. 15 The mandate was to create novel methods of commercially deploying “personalities” drawn from the theater, the movies, high society, and professional fields such as sports, science, industry, and occasionally even literature. 16
Of course, the manufacture and marketing of personality were also consuming occupations of literary culture at the same time. Seeking to bridge the vexed relationship between High Modernism and mass culture via the emergent discourse of modern celebrity, a flurry of recent scholarship has charted a genealogy that usually credits Oscar Wilde with laying the conceptual groundwork for the branding techniques of James Joyce , Ezra Pound , and Gertrude Stein (among others) that reconceived the notion of authorship. Aaron Jaffe , for instance, posits an “unavoidable kinship between modernism’s exaggerated forms of authorial immanence and the exaggerating work of publicity, promotion, and celebrity.” 17 Similarly, Jonathan Goldman maintains that placing “modernism’s view of the author alongside the production of popular celebrity [reveals] the relationship between these supposedly divergent spheres of culture as more of a collaboration than a parting of ways of cultural production.” 18
Goldman and Jaffe , among others, have compellingly illuminated the ways in which High Modernists appropriate promotional strategies from the marketplace to produce a discourse of elitist authorship that valorized the imprimatur in order to create distance between their work and mass culture. 19 This critical work attempts to ford the impasse created by the “long history of friction between champions of literature on the one hand and advertising on the other,” each striving to impose a hierarchical and “radical incongruity” on their relationship. 20
As scholars have mapped productively the branding machinations of High Modernist authorship, this chapter seeks to texture further this “collaboration” by providing insight into how executives and writers in the industry worked to render profitable mergings of literary personality with commodities. For their part, High Modernists were eager to efface rather than embrace any symbiotic affinity between the worlds of literature and commerce. On the advertising side, executives wrangled to harness the potency of personality but avoid certain stigmas of testimonial endorsement when employing literary authors, including questions of compensation and authority that potentially undermine its effectiveness. As Advertiser’s Weekly put it in March of 1929, “while most of the authors, naturally enough, concern themselves with the possible menace of advertisement writing to literary standards, the advertising menace, also naturally enough, is apprehensive of the effect the practice would have on advertising standards.” 21
Illustrating what is at stake in the proximity between the two fields, two campaigns in the late 1920s garnered considerable transatlantic fanfare for crafting “near-testimonials” from literary authors as a way to ward off the specter of impropriety and maintain the integrity of stakeholders, each pursuing their respective aims. The influence of a Harrods campaign involving Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells , and Arnold Bennett is unusually far-reaching within the evolution of modern advertising and the fashioning of literary modernism. JWT’s Simmons campaign situates literary authors at the center of a controversy over the celebrity testimonial as a marketing technique. Taken together, both are case studies for how the advertising industry, like the High Modernists, emerges from their “collaboration” with new concepts in professional identity and strategies for the promotion of personality.
In his April 1927 speech at the opening of the British Industries Fair in Birmingham, the Prince of Wales directed “young business and professional men” to “adopt, adapt, improve” their methods; in particular, he urged them to investigate those American practices that had produced a “wave of industrial prosperity” and the degree to which they could be imported and implemented in England. His comments triggered an immediate reaction in the country’s private sector and became an opportunity for professional self-assessment in many fields, including commercial promotion. As a way to “adapt and improve” methods of salesmanship, the marketing department at Harrods in May 1928 developed the idea of approaching England’s most famous living writers because, according to one executive,we have long felt that advertising has not been keeping pace with the display of goods and the organization and art of business. Nor has the story of this firm and its romance ever been adequately presented by the written word as great writers are capable of presenting it. We went to the three leading writers of the world, hoping we might enlist their aid in improving the whole tone and the whole future of advertising. … You cannot expect the man who makes the goods, and the man who sells them, to preach the gospel about them as these great writers could do. And that is why we approached them to give the benefit of their literary genius to the future of advertising. 22
Arnold Bennett was the first author solicited because, according to Charles Wildes , director of Harrods , “he [had] long been an enthusiastic customer of the store.” 23 The pitch was to be that, since “the stock of Harrods is 95 per cent British owned,” creating a series of signed advertisements would enable Bennett “to repay the country for a lifetime of benefits received.” After the author expressed concern that his book sales would suffer if he participated, Wildes claimed that Bennett then “was challenged to write an advertisement on the basis that he was unpatriotic and cowardly not to do so.” 24 The author eventually agreed and, in a response entitled “I Will Not Flout Public Opinion,” claimed that he was quite interested in accepting Harrods’ offer but was forced to turn it down because of “public opinion in Britain,” which was “not yet ripe to approve the employment of responsible imaginative writers to whom it has granted a reputation, in any scheme of publicity for a commercial concern.” 25 While he disagreed with such a perception, Bennett was unwilling to “lose caste by attempting to create a precedent which could result, for [him], in nothing save a disadvantageous notoriety.” Nevertheless, the first half of Bennett’s rejection letter, in ostensibly reiterating Harrods’ proposal for the reader, slyly provides ample suitable endorsements for the store:You remind me that, as is well known, your business is among the largest, most comprehensive, and most famous of its kind in the world. You say that it counts notably in the industrial and mercantile life of the community, that your regular staff comprises an immense and constantly increasing number of citizens of both sexes, and that you use every honest endeavor to be of commercial service to the community. You say further that you buy the best available materials and commodities that research can procure, and that you employ the best organisers, technicians, artists, designers, architects, and craftsmen of every sort that you can discover.
Over the next nine months, negotiations with H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw took place, each invited by Harr
ods to write periodical publicity on any aspect of the store that inspired them. The store took a risk in not mandating complimentary pieces but made anything the writers produced the intellectual property of the store. Rather than simply refuse, both authors wrote letters of apologia as well.
Wells grounded his opposition in the idea that “in his heart [the writer] classes himself not with the artists but with the teachers and the priests and the prophets” and that his “only paymaster ought to be the reader.” 26 Shaw’s, the most elaborate, argues that his obligation to the common good prevented him from accepting the offer: “A writer who has been concentrated by Fame to the service of the public, and has thus become prophet as well as author, must take wages in no other service.” 27 He begins with the assertion that “there is nothing new in what you call the linking of forces between the commercial and literary world,” citing the examples of Callisthenes and the Fortnum and Mason catalogues as “two triumphs of commercial literature.” They represent the perfect balance of posterity value in the future and consumer tantalizing in the present, “treasured by collectors and … read by me with delight, and with just that watering of the mouth that they are intended to provoke.” As Alice McEwan points out, Shaw’s “satire ironically evokes Harrods’s rival in elite consumption Fortnum and Mason, and simultaneously mocks the relationship of connoisseurs to this form of shopping (himself included).” 28 Original readers also would have immediately recognized “Callisthenes” as the author of numerous short “article-advertisements” opining on matters of commercial industry that appeared daily in newspapers for nearly thirty years. While some at the time suspected these pieces were written by Shaw, “Callisthenes” was actually the pen name used by another industry competitor, Gordon Selfridge , who supposedly “spent £60,000 pounds on this particular kind of advertising” that was adorned only with “the company’s name, at top or bottom.” 29 Selfridge’s unique pieces, according to Elizabeth Outka , “achieved wide cultural capital; they were quoted in sermons, reprinted in periodicals such as the Harvard Business Magazine, and used as models of writing in schools.” 30 This cheeky nod to two of Harrods’ promotional antagonists sets the stage for Shaw’s declinature.