Anatomy of Humbug

How to Think Differently About Advertising

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• Publisher: Matador
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781784628468

How does advertising work? Does it have to attract conscious attention in order to transmit a 'Unique Selling Proposition'? Or does it insinuate emotional associations into the subconscious mind? Or is it just about being famous... or maybe something else? In Paul Feldwick's radical new view, all theories of how advertising works have their uses - and all are dangerous if they are taken too literally as the truth. The Anatomy of Humbug deftly and entertainingly picks apart the historical roots of our common - and often contradictory - beliefs about advertising, in order to create space for a more flexible, creative and effective approach to this fascinating and complex field of human communication. Drawing on insights ranging from the nineteenth-century showman P.T. Barnum to the twentieth-century communications theorist Paul Watzlawick, as well as influential admen such as Bernbach, Reeves and Ogilvy, Feldwick argues that the advertising industry will only be able to deal with increasingly rapid change in the media landscape if it both understands its past and is able to criticise its most entrenched habits of thought. TheAnatomy of Humbug is an accessible business book that will help advertising and marketing professionals create better campaigns.

Part One: Salesmanship

Advertising is selling, and the great satisfaction of selling is closing the sale.

The advertising man can never close a sale; in fact, he can never be certain that it was his effort that made the sale possible.

Martin Mayer, Madison Avenue USA, p.39

Chapter One: The Mountie Gets His Man

John E. Kennedy, AIDA, and the Reason Why.

One afternoon in the Spring of 1904, two men sat talking together in a comfortable office in the city of Chicago, high up on the corner of Wabash and Randolph. The elder of the two wore a wing collar, a watch on a heavy gold chain with an elk tooth fob, and a relaxed, superior manner. His name was Ambrose Thomas, and you might have taken him for a well-off retired broker or banker. The younger man, Albert Lasker, had a modern suit, dark wavy hair and an air of suppressed energy.

Thirty years after the great fire which destroyed most of the downtown area, Chicago was a booming city, the fourth largest in the world. Only one block away stood the Masonic Temple, at twenty two stories the tallest building in the world. Nearby, at State and Madison, more of the new ‘skyscrapers’ were rising around what was called ‘the world’s busiest corner’. Toward the South Side lay the huge expanse of the stockyards, where ever increasing numbers of immigrants from just about every European country were employed, in horrific conditions, to slaughter millions of pigs and steers for the whole United States. Chicago’s position as the hub of the national railroad system made it the crossroads of the rapidly growing US economy. For the same reason, in the more salubrious air of the downtown ‘Loop’, the city was the centre of the nation’s rapidly expanding advertising business.

Mr Thomas and Mr Lasker were the managing partners of advertising agency Lord and Thomas - the fastest growing agency in the US, and soon to overtake N.W.Ayer to become the largest. Its recent success owed everything to the drive and leadership of Albert Lasker, who had recently bought out the share of the eponymous Mr Lord on his retirement. Yet it was only six years since Lasker, in order to pay off a gambling debt, had joined the agency as an office boy. Today, a partner with an annual salary of $52,000, he was still only 23 years old.

The two men’s conversation was interrupted by a knock, and a clerk entered with a note. Thomas glanced at it, pulled a face, and handed it to Lasker. The note was handwritten and read as follows: ‘I am in the saloon downstairs, and I can tell you what advertising is. I know that you don’t know. It will mean much to me to have you know what it is and it will mean much to you. If you wish to know what advertising is, send the word ‘yes’ down by messenger.’ It was signed, ‘John E. Kennedy’.

Thomas was most disinclined to see this unknown man, but Lasker was intrigued: the stranger had offered to answer the question that was just then most on his mind. Although his own extraordinary energy and flair for organisation had already more than doubled the agency’s billings, Lasker still worried endlessly about how he could define the principles that would make advertising more of a profession and less of a gamble. Was advertising ‘news’, as he had often been told? Was it ‘keeping your name before the public’ (as one of his competitors claimed)? He had pondered and discussed the question with many experienced people, but still lacked a convincing answer.

Kennedy’s sheer nerve must also have appealed to Lasker, who was himself capable of similar effrontery. At the age of twelve he had founded a newspaper in his home town of Galveston, Texas, and personally solicited all the advertising for it. At nineteen, as a junior at Lord and Thomas, he had called without invitation on Mr Abe Rheinstrom of Rheinstrom’s Brewery - at his home, in the middle of the day! - to pitch and win the account for the agency. So Lasker said, ‘Let me see him. What have we got to lose?’.

A tall, muscular man in his late forties, with a flamboyantly curling moustache, was shown into Lasker’s office. Lasker later described him as ‘one of the handsomest men I ever saw in my life’. When he spoke, his accent was Canadian – he had been, among many other things, a member of the Canadian Mounted Police.

‘Thank you for seeing me, Mr Lasker. I am sure you won’t regret it. May I ask you first of all - what do you believe advertising is?’

‘Well, Mr Kennedy, I am far from certain. But I believe it is to do with news.’

‘No, sir. News is a technique of presentation, but advertising is a very different thing. I can give it to you in three words.’

‘I am hungry. What are those three words?’

‘Advertising is this: Salesmanship in print.’

The two men talked for an hour, after which they adjourned to the saloon downstairs, and went on talking until midnight. By that time, Lasker had already decided to offer Kennedy a job as head of copy.

*

What are we to make of this story? It presents itself as one of the foundation myths of modern advertising; in Lasker’s own version, and the retelling by his biographer John Gunther (from which I in turn take my own), the episode is clearly intended as the moment when advertising emerged from the dark ages of muddle and superstition into the clear light of reason and accountability.

When I call it a myth, I do not mean that it never happened: I know of no reason to doubt the historical truth of the story. What I mean by a myth is a story that encodes, in a memorable form, deep beliefs about the way things are. In that sense, it seems to me, the story is a powerful myth.

Not only does the story tell us that ‘advertising is salesmanship’. It also shows us, in a very particular way, what ‘salesmanship’ is. Kennedy has come to sell one thing, himself, to one person – Lasker. He knows that Lasker is the most powerful person in advertising. He believes he has something that Lasker needs and wants, his knowledge. His first challenge is to get in to see Lasker – to do this he has to get both his attention and his interest. His bold move of sending in a handwritten note gets the attention, and the words he uses – straight to the point – get Lasker’s interest. Once he is inside, neither party wastes any time in small talk. Lasker indeed professes himself ‘hungry’ for the information Kennedy has promised. So Kennedy gives him the information – the main point first, and then goes on giving more and more information, until it is late in the evening . And the sale has been closed.

Selling had, itself, been dramatically systematised in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In 1887 John H. Patterson of National Cash Register introduced the first sales manual containing scripts for salesmen. One of his employees during this period was E. St Elmo Lewis, who later became head of advertising for Burroughs and in time a member of the Advertising Hall of Fame; it is Lewis who is generally credited with inventing the famous mnemonic AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. (But see Dragon for a more nuanced history.)

Kennedy’s pitch to Lasker demonstrates every phase of this formula. And when he says that advertising is ‘salesmanship in print’, he is introducing AIDA-type thinking to advertising. We may forget today that AIDA and its early variants were invented as models for personal selling, not for advertising. It was only as a result of equating advertising with selling that this, and the many related ‘hierarchical models’ that followed on from it, became commonly accepted as a natural description of advertising effects.

‘What then’, asked Lasker later that evening, ‘is the secret of good salesmanship? What is it that actually makes people buy?’

‘That too is simple’, said the tall Canadian, drawing on his cigar. ‘You have to give them a reason why.

‘Imagine - if the proprietor of a grocery store should simply invite people to come in and buy, for no definite reason – he would get nowhere! But if he were to explain why his products are better – or why they are sold at a cheaper price yet are just as good as the other fellow’s – if he could present convincing arguments to prove his superiority – then the chances are, like as not, people will flock to him.’

So after this evening, Lasker made Lord and Thomas into the home of ‘reason why’ advertising. He offered Kennedy a job as a copywriter. (He had some trouble obtaining approval for this hiring from Mr Thomas who had taken an unexplained dislike to Kennedy from the outset, but finally agreed ‘on condition I don’t ever have to see the fellow’.) Then, at Lasker’s request, Kennedy taught him everything he knew about advertising. Every evening after work, they sat together discussing advertisements and how they could be improved.

At that time, the writing of copy was not regarded as a serious job in advertising agencies, who saw their role as brokers for the media. There was only one copywriter at Lord and Thomas – and he was paid $35 a week. But smart advertisers valued good copy, and would pay small fortunes to employ the best writers themselves. Kennedy at the time was working for Dr Shoop’s Restorative, and to lure him away Lasker had to pay him $17,000 a year – a figure which would soon rise to $75,000. Lasker and Kennedy both saw that copy – the actual writing of advertisements – would in future become the most important way for an agency to create value for the client and their own competitive advantage. So Lasker moved some filing cabinets to create new office space, and began to hire and train journalists as copywriters. This was the beginning of modern copywriting practice.

Kennedy, despite his extrovert sales pitch to Lasker, turned out to be a morose and difficult character. He refused to teach the new copywriters because he found it difficult to talk to more than one person at a time, so Lasker himself took on this task. In 1907, after some perceived slight, Kennedy left the agency – he spent the rest of his life freelancing and doing various odd jobs, and died in 1928. But the ideas of ‘salesmanship in print’ and the ‘reason why’ continued to flourish at Lord and Thomas, soon under the guidance of an even more successful copywriter – Claude Hopkins.

Chapter Two: The Great Majority of the Sane and Thrifty

Claude Hopkins and Scientific Advertising

In 1908 Albert Lasker was travelling by train to Philadelphia when he met an acquaintance, Cyrus Curtis, the proprietor of the Saturday Evening Post. Curtis said ‘Lasker, I am just about to order a bottle of Schlitz beer as a result of an advertisement that I read, and you ought to go and get the man who wrote that advertisement’.

This was especially remarkable as Curtis was a virtual teetotaller who never allowed any advertising for alcoholic beverages in his own magazines.

The Schlitz advertisement had the headline ‘Poor Beer vs. Pure Beer’. It was an excellent example of the ‘reason why’ philosophy that Kennedy had drummed into Lasker. It left the reader with the impression that to drink any beer other than Schlitz would be to court immediate disease from impurities, cheap ingredients, and fermentation.

Lasker discovered that the man who wrote the Schlitz ad was called Claude Hopkins. Hopkins was the son of a clergyman from Michigan, and had been brought up in considerable poverty in a strict nonconformist household. He had had to work for his living from the age of nine, first as a janitor in a church, later as a travelling lay preacher and then as a salesman for patent medicines. From these formative experiences he then moved into copywriting, which had made him extremely rich. ‘You’ll never get Hopkins by offering him money’, a friend advised Lasker. ‘But you could get him by offering to buy his wife an electric automobile.’ This was surprising advice considering Hopkins’s wealth, but his penurious upbringing had left him so incorrigibly mean that although an electric car was his wife’s dream he could not bring himself to buy her one.

Lasker took Hopkins to lunch, and asked him if, ‘as a token of his admiration’, he might present his wife with an electric car. So Hopkins was won – admittedly, at a salary of $185,000 a year plus bonuses. He was to work for Lord and Thomas for the next eighteen years.

Shortly before his retirement in 1924, Claude Hopkins published a short book called Scientific Advertising. Although, as I mentioned earlier, it is not universally known today, it sold eight million copies and became an important influence on subsequent generations of advertising practitioners, including David Ogilvy and Rosser Reeves.

The title of Scientific Advertising echoes – no doubt deliberately – a bestselling management book from ten years earlier, Frederick W. Taylor’s Scientific Management. Taylor was the original ‘time and motion man’. He had discovered that by strict measurement and control of workers, managers could achieve major increases in productivity. ‘Efficiency’ was the management buzz word of the age. Hopkins cannily reflected this in the supreme confidence of his opening paragraphs, which are worth quoting again:

The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science. It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analysed until they are well understood. The correct methods of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic laws.

Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become, under able direction, one of the safest of business ventures.

What were Hopkins’s ‘methods of procedure’? They build directly on the concepts of ‘salesmanship in print’ and the ‘reason why’, and may be summarised as follows:

1. An advertisement exists for no reason other than to sell. It should be evaluated by how many sales it makes.

2. A headline should ‘hail a few people only’ – those who are ‘prospects waiting to buy’. It should not attempt to attract the attention of others.

3. Long copy sells. Use as many words, as many facts as possible. ‘The more you tell, the more you sell’. Use smaller typefaces than editorial. Those who are interested in your product will read it; the others don’t matter.

4. A good salesman is serious and respectable and g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Praise for ‘The Anatomy of Humbug’
• Foreword
• Prologue: How the Ad Industry Thinks about its Past
• Part One: Salesmanship
• Part Two: Seduction
• Part Three: Six Aspects of the Elephant
• Epilogue