Adland (2 page)

01

Pioneers of persuasion

‘The duly authorized agent'

W
hen exactly did advertising begin? It's doubtful that the ancient Egyptians and Greeks were insensible to the benefits of product promotion. The Romans certainly knew how to make a convincing sales pitch, and early examples of advertising were found in the ruins of Pompeii. A roguish adman told me that one of these was a sign promoting a brothel, which is an appealing idea: the two oldest professions benefiting from one another. Others claim that prehistoric cave paintings were a form of advertising, which seems altogether more fanciful. But it's safe to say that advertising has been around for as long as there have been goods to sell and a medium to talk them up – from the crier in the street to the handbill tacked to a tree.

Advertising took a leap forward, of course, with the appearance of the printing press and movable type – an invention generally credited to German former goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg in 1447. Other important names loom out of the murk of early advertising history: notably that of 17th-century French doctor, journalist and unlikely adman Théophraste Renaudot.

Born in Loudon in 1586 to a wealthy protestant family, Renaudot studied medicine in Paris and Montpellier. A doctor by the age of 20, he was considered too young to practise medicine, so he travelled instead to Switzerland, England, Germany and Italy. On his return, through a family connection, he met and befriended the future Cardinal Richelieu. This fortuitous encounter led to Renaudot's eventual appointment as official doctor to Louis XIII.

But Renaudot was a writer and a thinker as well as a physician. His reflections on the Parisian poor led him to create, on the Île de la Cité, what he called a
‘bureau des addresses et des rencontres'
– a recruitment
office and notice board for the jobless. This establishment soon became a veritable information clearinghouse for those seeking and offering work, buying and selling goods, and making public announcements of all kinds. To disseminate this information more widely, Renaudot created in 1631 the first French newspaper, which he called
La Gazette
(inspired by the unit of currency he'd discovered in Italy, the
gazetta
). Thus he became the first French journalist – and the inventor of the personal ad.

An industry takes shape

However, most histories of advertising start later, in the mid 19th century. When the advertising group Publicis published a book of groundbreaking ads from throughout history, it was called
Born in 1842
. A hunt for the earliest ad in
The Creative Director's Source Book
(compiled in 1988 by Nick Souter and Stuart Newman) unearths a newspaper advertisement from 1849. (Bizarrely, it is for a new method of measuring your head, thus accurately determining your hat size.)

Everyone agrees, then, that advertising got into its stride with the industrial revolution – aided and abetted by the rise of the newspaper as a mass medium. Advances in technology meant consumer goods could be produced and packaged on a previously undreamed-of scale. This glut of food, clothing, soap, and so forth, encouraged manufacturers who had previously been confined to doing business in their backyards to seek far-flung new markets. Some of them established chains of retail outlets. Others distributed their wares through wholesalers and intermediary retailers. In order to blaze the names and virtues of their products into the memories of consumers, they branded their goods – and began to advertise them.

In Britain, one of the most prominent clients of the day was A&F Pears, makers of Pears' Soap. The company's success was assured by prototype adman Thomas J Barrett, who joined the firm in 1862. As well as securing one of the first celebrity endorsements – from Lillie Langtry, actress, courtesan and mistress of the Prince of Wales – Barrett convinced the popular artist Sir John Everett Millais to sell him a painting of a young boy gazing at rising soap bubbles. Not only that, but he persuaded Millais to add a bar of Pears' soap to the scene. Queasily sentimental, ‘Bubbles' became one of the earliest advertising icons, and set the tone for a highly successful campaign.

In his 1984 book
The
Complete Guide to Advertising
, Torin Douglas recounts: ‘Firms such as Cadbury and Fry started packaging their products, not simply to protect them and preserve their quality, but also to
establish
their quality by the use of the company's own name. Instead of leaving it to the retailer to determine which company's products a customer would buy, they began to build their own relationship with the customer.'

As Douglas points out, the essential argument for advertising was established right here. By advertising their products to the public, manufacturers were able to boost sales dramatically: ‘Since that also increased the retailers' turnover, both sides of the business benefited. So too did the customers, since they had a wider choice of brands and a stronger guarantee of the quality of the goods.'

Meanwhile, the same technology that had powered the industrial revolution was overhauling the printing industry, making newspapers far cheaper to produce – and to buy. From being precious items gingerly passed from reader to reader, they became suddenly accessible to everyone. Magazines, particularly those aimed at women, also became more commonplace and affordable.

In France, the poster was about to enter a golden age. (
The Creative
Director's Source Book
, by the way, tells us that the word ‘poster' derives from the wooden roadside posts to which advertising messages were often attached.) In 1870s Paris the printing house Chaix and the artist Jules Chéret were taking advantage of the development of lithography – which allowed for richer colours and larger print-runs – to produce groundbreaking posters for the Folies Bergère cabaret. These bright, vivacious advertisements were so popular that the high-kicking girls depicted on them became known as ‘Chérettes'.

Chéret's images were complemented by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's equally vibrant work for the rival Moulin Rouge nightspot. Known as ‘The Spirit of Montmartre', the nocturnal painter was the natural choice for capturing the debauched appeal of a Parisian cabaret. Simple yet evocative, the posters took their unlikely cue from Japanese art, which Lautrec admired.

Another towering talent of the era was the inimitable Alphonse Mucha. Born in Moravia (in the modern-day Czech Republic), Mucha was the archetypal struggling artist in Paris until he was commissioned to come up with a poster for Sarah Bernhardt's play,
Gismonda
, over the Christmas holidays. (Legend has it that he got the commission because
he was the only painter left in town.) The result was the first of the gloriously intricate images – not only for the theatre, but for brands such as Moët & Chandon champagne and Lefèvre Utile biscuits – that brought the Art Nouveau style to advertising and fame and fortune to Mucha. Throughout history, art and advertising have often dovetailed in the French capital.

On the other side of the Atlantic, advertising was off to a more rambunctious start. Among the earliest goods advertised on a national scale in the United States were ‘patent medicines'. Familiar today via a stock character in Western movies – the quack doctor who stands on a crate in a dusty frontier town, extolling the virtues of his dubious potions – they generated profit margins that left plenty of room for advertising expenditure. As Stephen Fox recounts in his book
The Mirror Makers
(1984) – a superlative account of American advertising history up until the 1970s – these were the first products ‘to aim directly at the consumer with vivid, psychologically clever sales pitches, the first to show – for better or for worse – the latent power of advertising'.

Unfortunately, the American public began to associate patent medicines with advertising, to the detriment of both.

Early advertising agencies

It is generally accepted that the first advertising agency in the United States was opened by one Volney B Palmer in 1842. Located at the ‘NW Corner of Third and Chestnut Street, Philadelphia,' Palmer's office was an unlikely precursor of today's agency monoliths. Nevertheless, there he is in a local directory, describing himself as ‘the duly authorized agent of most of the best newspapers of all the cities and provincial towns in the United States and Canada, for which he is daily receiving advertisements and subscriptions…'

The earliest advertising agents worked for newspapers rather than for advertisers. Acting as intermediaries, they sold space and took a commission out of the fee. As well as offering endless opportunities for corruption, this arrangement meant that they had nothing to do with creating ads. In
The Mirror Makers
, Stephen Fox cites this juicy morsel dished out by a client to another early advertising agent, Daniel M Lord, who had dared to criticize his ad: ‘Young man, you may know a lot about advertising, but you know very little about the furniture business.'

Along with the negative image engendered by the hollow claims of the patent medicine pushers, the lowly status of these early admen suggested that advertising was barely an honest trade, let alone a profession.

The next figure to move the industry on was George P Rowell, a Boston-based advertising agent who, at the prompting of a client, had compiled a directory of advertising rates covering almost every newspaper in New England. His main income, however, came from buying newspaper space in bulk and selling it, piecemeal, at a profit. In 1869 – by which time his business had expanded considerably – Rowell came out with the first media directory: a guide to more than 5,000 newspapers across America, including their circulations and advertising rates.

If Rowell's directory nudged advertising towards respectability, the industry was given a further shove in the right direction by Francis Wayland Ayer, founder of NW Ayer & Son. (He named the operation after his father, an instinctive marketing ploy that provided the agency with a reassuring family background.) Ayer brought transparency to the business of buying and selling space, charging advertisers a fixed commission of 12.5 per cent. This later rose to 15 per cent, which remained the standard commission fee for advertising agencies for many years to come.

But while these people were prototypes for today's media buyers, where were the creatives? The first such creatures to emerge from the primordial swamp of advertising were freelance copywriters. And the most influential of them all was John E Powers, described by
Advertising
Ag
e
as ‘the father of creative advertising' (The Advertising Century:
adage.com/century/people
). Little is known about this intriguing character's early career, although he seems to have been an insurance agent and then a publisher of
The Nation
(he apparently started out in the subscriptions department) before finally turning to commercial writing. The department store tycoon John Wanamaker snapped him up in 1880 after seeing one of his ads for a rival store. By the late 1890s he was earning more than US $100 a day writing copy.

Powers was stern and reticent, with a neatly cropped beard and piercing eyes emphasized by round, steel-framed spectacles. It was the face of a man who believed in honesty and plain speaking. Indeed, Powers once claimed that ‘fine writing is offensive'. He concentrated on facts and regarded hyperbole as anathema. He was once hired by a Pittsburgh clothing company that was on the verge of bankruptcy: ‘There is only one way out,' Powers told his client, ‘tell the truth… The only way to
salvation lies in large and immediate sales.' The resulting ad read: ‘We are bankrupt. This announcement will bring our creditors down on our necks. But if you come and buy tomorrow we shall have the money to meet them. If not we will go to the wall.' Impressed by the directness of the ad, customers rushed to save the store.

The success of Powers inspired another notable copywriter, Charles Austin Bates, who went on to found his own agency. Positioning himself as an ‘ad-smith', the outspoken Bates flaunted his expertise by becoming the first professional advertising critic, establishing a weekly column in the trade journal
Printer's Ink
. Arch self-promoter though he may have been, Bates was a crucial figure in the history of advertising, as his agency became a cradle of creativity.

Central to this development was a man called Earnest Elmo Calkins, who started out as a copywriter, yet did more than most of his peers to take advertising design away from the client and into the agency. Deaf due to childhood measles, but blessed with a heightened visual sense, Calkins was recruited by the Bates agency in 1897 when he won a copywriting competition, of which Charles Austin Bates had been a judge. Initially shining in his new role, Calkins soon clashed with the agency's art department – one of the few in the industry at the time. Frustrated that he could not improve the look of the ads that bore his copy, Calkins took evening classes in industrial design. He had come to the conclusion that fancy copy was no longer enough: consumers needed to be assailed by visuals that stopped them in their tracks.

With Bates unwilling to let him explore this potentially costly theory, Calkins set up his own agency with Ralph Holden, the firm's former head of new business. Designing ads for clients rather than merely placing them, Calkins & Holden effectively became adland's first creative hot shop.

Arrow to the future

While European advertisers often commissioned established artists to design posters for their brands, in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century a new generation of illustrators working on a commercial basis began to emerge. The images they created were accessible yet compelling. For the first time, advertising was to have a major impact on popular culture.