Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [831]
The throng of top hats in this downtown lunchroom conveys the ever-increasing density—and thoroughly masculine tone—of the city’s business district during the 1880s. Harper’s Weekly, September 8, 1888. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
George P. Rowell enhanced the industry’s image when he began bringing out annual editions of Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory, which provided reasonably accurate figures on circulation and rates for over five thousand U.S. and Canadian papers. By evaluating media, he shifted the business toward representing advertisers rather than publishers. In 1888 Rowell started a trade journal, Printer’s Ink, that advertised the very notion of advertising. In the same year, Pear’s Soap obtained clerical benediction for its product, and for the practice of promotion itself, from Henry Ward Beecher’s cautious testimonial: “If cleanliness is next to Godliness, soap must be considered as a means of Grace, and a clergyman who recommends moral things should be willing to recommend soap.”
Carlton and Smith, another New York agency, also gained respectability by convincing Methodist magazines that running ads was both wise and virtuous. By 1870 the firm worked with four hundred religious weeklies, many of them headquartered in New York. William Carlton’s young assistant James Walter Thompson followed this up by persuading genteel journals like Scribner’s and Harper’s that they too could carry ads without losing integrity or offending subscribers. In 1878 Thompson bought Carlton out and renamed the agency after himself.
“Advertising is the steam propeller of business success,” Rowell claimed, and giant corporations and insurance companies agreed. They turned to professionals like Thompson, and the growing number of firms clustered around Newspaper Row, to create copy rather than simply broker it. Consumer goods manufacturers used ads to familiarize a national market with their product’s “brand name.” In the mid-1870s a New York firm, Enoch Morgan’s Sons, peddled its scouring soap by adopting a Latinsounding brand name (Sapolio) and giving retailers pamphlets that sang its praise in verse penned by Bret Harte, then scratching out a marginal living in the metropolis. In 1884 the firm hired a professional advertiser to place its proverbs (“Be Clean!” “Sapolio Scours the World”) in publications across the country, posted them in streetcars, and blazoned them on a huge sign in New York harbor.
Companies relied on metropolitan agencies to promote types of products too. Admen taught consumers to prefer breakfast cereals in boxes, rather than scooped from grocers’ barrels; to shave themselves, rather than patronize barbers. By 1889 Duke’s American Tobacco Company was spending eight hundred thousand dollars a year to expand the cigarette-smoking public, win tobacco chewers and cigar smokers over to the newer product, and force retailers to distribute his merchandise. Ad agencies placed Duke propaganda in papers and periodicals, on billboards around the city, in programs for theatergoers and handbills at ballfields and boxing matches. In the 1890s other corporate manufacturers used professional pitchmen to launch new commodities, and campaigns designed for Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive, Pabst and Postum, Coca-Cola and Cream of Wheat, similarly dwelt on the compatibility of their wares with modern urban lifestyles.
The number of ad agencies swelled from forty-two in 1870 to over four hundred by the end of the 1890s. Like law firms, they grew larger and more internally specialized. At J. Walter Thompson’s, “account executives” supervised copy writing for particular companies, then liaised with their counterparts in the corporation’s sales and marketing divisions, and with the advertising departments of New York’s newspapers as well. In the 1870s the daily press had gotten less than one-third its income from advertisements. As journalism’s costs increased, papers