Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising

by Christopher Wixson

  Even three decades later, in The Story of Advertising (1958), James Playsted Wood uses both campaigns as poster children for the troubled torrent of testimonial advertising in the 1920s:A London department store published letters by Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells , and Arnold Bennett , together with pictures of the popular writers, saying that they could not and would not lend their names to product endorsements. The advertisements worked as well as if the novelist and playwright had testified with the same earnestness as Douglas Fairbanks or Ty Cobb. A mattress manufacturer used testimonials and photographs of Henry Ford, Guglielmo Marconi, Shaw, and others, presumably in praise of his products. The letters were in favor, not of the mattress, but of sleep. 133

  A seemingly unshakeable legacy from advertising’s early decades, apprehensiveness over “insincere copy” and the loss of public faith (especially in celebrity testimonials ) continued to be widespread. The profession needed to better figure out how to ensure best practices in the field but also how to rehabilitate consumer perception of its rhetoric and navigate around what Shaw, in his Harrods letter, had condemned as “the last depravity of corruption in literature.” 134

  In any case, on or about December 1924, American advertising executive and novelist Walter O’Meara declared in The J. Walter Thompson News Bulletin that the nature of marketing had changed:For the advertisement has, in a few decades, developed characteristics quite as distinctive and definite, in their way, as those of the lyric, drama or novel. … The advertisement of today is, by all the critical standards, a unique literary form. It produces, or seeks to produce, a single definite effect. It has its own laws of structure. Like the motion picture, it is sui generis. 135

  Just as High Modernists mimicked their publicity tactics to produce a new template for authorial personality, advertising agencies sought the prestige and influence of the literary to enhance their clients’ commodities and their work in promoting them. Both attempting to capitalize literary authors, the Harrods and Simmons campaigns appear at the end of a decade of significant maturation for the industry that saw “the international consolidation of advertising interests, as well as important national mergers that produce the mega-agencies” and occasion “the coalesce of techniques, technologies, business styles, and economic change that translate into the modern advertising apparatus.” 136 Both campaigns indicate how these new corporate entities sought to sidestep increasing public suspicion towards testimonial advertising and set the parameters for the concept of modern celebrity, even helping to shape the contours of High Modernism. For Shaw, the page space presented another opportunity to articulate the rationale for his presence in the media. As he wrote to Mabel Shaw in 1928, for him, “the question of becoming a professional writer is a pretty deep one when the intention behind it extends to becoming a prophet.” 137

  Notes

  1.James W. Egbert. “Making the Testimonial Worth More.” Printers’ Ink 77.8 (23 November 1911): 76–8. 76.

  2.Michael Holroyd. Bernard Shaw: The One Volume Definitive Edition. New York: Random House, 1997. 466–7.

  3.T. R. Nevett. Advertising in Britain: A History. London: The History of Advertising Trust, 1982. 145.

  4.Kerry Segrave. Endorsements in Advertising: A Social History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2005. 23–4.

  5.Ibid., 14.

  6.James Playsted Wood. The Story of Advertising. New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1958. 392, 394.

  7.Ibid., 393, 394.

  8.H. S. Gardner. “The Paid Testimonial Is Taking the Cure.” Advertising & Selling 13.12 (17 April 1929): 17–18, 46. 17.

  9.Jackson Lears. “Uneasy Courtship: Modern Art and Modern Advertising.” American Quarterly 39.1 (Spring 1987): 133–54. 143.

  10.Jonathan Goldman. “Celebrity.” In George Bernard Shaw in Context. Ed. Brad Kent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 255–64. 255.

  11.Helen Powell. “Advertising Agencies and Their Clients.” In The Advertising Handbook, 3rd edition. Eds. Helen Powell, Jonathan Hardy, Sarah Hawkin, and Iain MacRury. London: Routledge: 2009. 13–23. 14.

  12.Stanley Resor . “Personalities and the Public: Some Aspects of Testimonial Advertising.” The J. Walter Thompson News Bulletin 138 (April 1929): 1–7. 1.

  13.Ibid., 5.

  14.“Mr. Resor Leads Discussion on Personality Advertising.” The J. Walter Thompson News Letter 10.8 (13 April 1928): 137–50. 139. Resor explicitly rejected the term “testimonial advertising” which not only must have sounded old-fashioned but also carried with it the taint of turn-of-the-century controversies over fraudulent patent medicine marketing.

  15.Ibid., 140.

  16.Quotes appropriated from canonical literary works had been staples in periodical advertisements for decades, and companies had actively sought before to make connections between famous living authors and their products. In the late nineteenth century, manufacturers seized upon references to brand name products in novels, plays, and even poetry and courted their authors for endorsements. For their part, literary writers on both sides of the Atlantic were far from averse to lending their likeness or approbation to commodity advertisements, one of the most notorious being J. M. Barrie ’s association with Craven Tobacco in the 1890s which was savaged in the pages of Punch. See Phillip Waller. Writers, Readers, & Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 329–63.

  17.Aaron Jaffe. Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 16.

  18.Jonathan Goldman. Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 3.

  19.In addition to Jaffe’s Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity and Goldman’s Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity, Mark Morrisson’s The Public Face of Modernism, Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism, and Marketing Modernisms, edited by Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt, are all cornerstone texts in this area.

  20.Michael L. Ross. Designing Fictions: Literature Confronts Advertising. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. 23. In addition to Ross, the task of charting the broader contours of a sometimes adversarial, sometimes dialectical discursive relationship between literature and advertising has been taken up by critics such as Theodor Adorno, Jean Baudrillard, Simone Weil Davis, Jennifer Wicke, and Raymond Williams.

  21.“Should the Advertiser Be the Author’s Paymaster?” Advertiser’s Weekly 61.824 (15 March 1929): 440–1, 466–7. 440.

  22.F. McVoy. “Harrods of London Score the Biggest Scoop in Advertising History.” Printed Salesmanship 53.3 (May 1929): 214–5, 274–6. 214.

  23.“Why London Department Store Advertised in New York.” Printers’ Ink 146.12 (21 March 1929): 73–4.

  24.Ibid., 73.

  25.“Arnold Bennett and Harrods .” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (19 March 1929): 16.

  26.“H. G. Wells and Harrods.” The New York Times (14 March 1929): 15.

  27.“Bernard Shaw and Harrods .” The New York Times (15 March 1929): 15.

  28.Alice McEwan. “Commodities, Consumption, and Connoisseurship: Shaw’s Critique of Authenticity in Modernity.” SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies 35.1 (November 2015): 46–85. 62.

  29.Gordon Honeycombe. Selfridges: Seventy-Five Years, The Story of the Store, 1909–1984. London: Park Lane Press, 1984. 172.

  30.Elizabeth Outka. Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 192n32.

  31.“Bernard Shaw and Harrods.” The New York Times (15 March 1929): 15.

  32.Lears, “Uneasy Courtship,” 134.

  33.McEwan, 77.

  34.C. H. Sandage and Vernon Fryburger. Advertising Theory and Practice, 7th edition. Homewood, IL: Irwin, 1967. 31.

  35.Sidney Webb. “Introduction.” G. W. Goodall, Advertising: A Study of a Modern Business Power. London: Constable & Co., 1914. ix–xvii. xvi–xvii.

  36.Archibald Henderson. George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century, vol. 2. New York:
Da Capo Press, 1972. 762.

  37.John Strachan and Claire Nally. Advertising, Literature and Print Culture in Ireland, 1891–1922. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 24.

  38.A single-page version of the ad containing all three letters continued to run in regional American newspapers.

  39.Advertiser’s Weekly 61.824 (15 March 1929): 441.

  40.“Why London Department Store Advertised in New York,” 73.

  41.“Ingenious Advertising.” New York Times (15 March 1929): 18.

  42.“Irish Refuse to Give a Degree to Shaw.” New York Times (13 March 1929): 4.

  43.Henry Robinson Luce. “Holy Ghost.” Time 13.12 (25 March 1929): 51.

  44.“Why London Department Store Advertised in New York,” 74.

  45.“Should the Advertiser Be the Author’s Paymaster?,” 440.

  46.“Copywriting or Paid Testimonial?” Advertiser’s Weekly 61.823 (8 March 1929): 393.

  47.“Should the Advertiser Be the Author’s Paymaster?,” 440.

  48.McVoy, 276.

  49.“Authors as Copywriters.” Advertiser’s Weekly 61.814–26 (1929): 490.

  50.George Rowell. “The Little Schoolmaster’s Classroom.” Printers’ Ink 146.12 (21 March 1929): 200, 202. 202.

  51.“Should the Advertiser Be the Author’s Paymaster?,” 441.

  52.Ibid., 441.

  53.Ibid., 441.

  54.Ibid., 441.

  55.Lears, “Uneasy Courtship,” 138.

  56.“Bernard Shaw and Harrods,” 15.

  57.James C. Moffett. “Should Advertisements Be ‘Signed,’ Like Articles.” Printers’ Ink 76.1 (6 July 1911): 58, 60–1. 58, 60, 61.

  58.Alta Gwinn Saunders and Herbert LeSourd Creek, eds. The Literature of Business. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1920. 467.

  59.E. McKenna . “The Dramatization of Advertising Ideas.” Printers’ Ink 112.8 (19 August 1920): 93–6. 93.

  60.Somewhat disappointingly, McKenna ultimately seems more to advocate the structure of melodrama rather than the drama of ideas as a model; the “well-built advertisement” for him should be “based upon a struggle between contending forces or a triumph won over obstacles” (93, 96).

  61.Rod Rosenquist. “Copywriting Gertrude Stein: Advertising, Anonymity, Autobiography.” Modernist Cultures 11.3 (2016): 331–50. 341.

  62.“Should the Advertiser,” 440.

  63.“Why London Department Store Advertised in New York,” 73.

  64.Ibid., 73.

  65.Ibid., 73, 74.

  66.Luce, 51.

  67.Carine and Will Cadby. “London Letter.” Photo-Era Magazine: The American Journal of Photography 62 (January 1929–June 1929). Wolfeboro, New Hampshire: The Photo-Era Publishing Company, Inc. 334.

  68.H. F. J. Kropff. “The Tables Turned or Harrods and the Three Great English Authors.” Trans. E. T. Scheffauer. Gebrauchsgraphik: International Advertising Art 6.9 (1 September 1929): 47–51. 47.

  69.McVoy, 276.

  70.“Should the Advertiser Be the Author’s Paymaster?,” 466.

  71.“Copywriting or Paid Testimonial,” 393.

  72.James Thurber. “Let’s Have a Set of Rules for Our Testimonial Industry.” The Magazine of Business 55 (May 1929): 538.

  73.Sinclair Lewis . “Sinclair Lewis Looks at Advertising.” Advertising & Selling 13.2 (15 May 1929): 17–18, 60, 62, 64–66. 64. The choice to go to Lewis is not necessarily a surprise. In 1922, Printers’ Ink ran a book review of Babbitt that exclaimed it was a novel “every advertising man ought to read” because of how “the fabric of advertising is [so] skillfully interwoven” (89). Earnest Elmo Calkins. “A Ballyhoo for Babbitt.” Printers’ Ink 121 (12 October 1922): 89–90, 93.

  74.Frank Swinnerton. “British Schools Hit by Teacher’s Novel; Shaw Boosts ‘Ads’.” Chicago Daily Tribune (10 January 1931): 10.

  75.Odds Bodkins. “The 8pt. Page.” Advertising & Selling 16.9 (4 March 1931): 46.

  76.Gerald Blake. “Un-sinned Sins.” Advertising & Selling 23.2 (24 May 1934): 22, 24. 22.

  77.“Advertising and Literature.” Newspaper World & Advertising Review 2453 (13 January 1945): 19.

  78.“H. G. Wells on Advertising.” Printers’ Ink 216.8 (23 August 1946): 126.

  79.“How Advertising Has Helped to Build the House of Harrods .” The Newspaper World and Advertising Review 2674 (23 April 1949): 113–4. 113.

  80.“Authors as Advertisers.” The Publishers’ Weekly 115.14 (6 April 1929): 1674.

  81.Francis Hackett. “The Post-Victorians.” The Bookman 71.1 (March 1930): 20–6. 20.

  82.Ibid., 20.

  83.Ibid., 21, 22.

  84.Ibid., 22, 23.

  85.Ibid., 23.

  86.Ibid., 23.

  87.Ibid., 23, 24. 23.

  88.Ibid., 24.

  89.Ibid., 24.

  90.Stephen Spender. The Struggle of the Modern. Oakland: University of California Press, 1963. 73. His views on the Harrods campaign initially appeared in a short essay in The Listener (11 October 1962) entitled “Moderns and Contemporaries” (555–6).

  91.Ibid., 75.

  92.Ibid., 75.

  93.Ibid., 75.

  94.Ibid., 76.

  95.Jackson Lears. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books, 1994. 300. Building upon early work by Andreas Huyssen, recent scholarship by (among others) Elizabeth Outka, Thomas Strychacz, Kevin J. H. Dettmar, and Stephen Watt has also problematized this binary understanding of the relationship between Modernists and the commercial marketplace.

  96.Quoted in Segrave, 14.

  97.Luce, 51.

  98.Interestingly, at a moment when High Modernists are hastily propping up distinctions of highbrow and middlebrow and also consolidating an elite authorial identity category, it is striking how in the Harrods campaign authors that might be considered of different “brows” are grouped together and how in the Simmons campaign they appear alongside figures from other fields, both “high” and “low.” Their value for campaigns is determined solely by the notoriety of their brand.

  99.Esther Eaton. “Making the World ‘Sleep Conscious’: Fifteen famous men talk on sleep through Simmons Advertising.” JWT Company News Letter 11.47 (1 December 1929): 1, 3. 1.

  100.Ibid., 1.

  101.Marlis Schweitzer and Marina Moskowitz, eds. Testimonial Advertising in the American Marketplace: Emulation, Identity, Community. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 9.

  102.Denise H. Sutton. Globalizing Ideal Beauty: How Female Copywriters of the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency Redefined Beauty for the Twentieth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 86.

  103.Eaton, 1.

  104.Ibid., 3.