Made In America - Bill Bryson [154]
Advertising was already a well-established phenomenon by the turn of the twentieth century. American newspapers had begun carrying ads as far back as the early 1700s and magazines had soon followed. (Benjamin Franklin has the distinction of having run the first magazine ad, seeking the whereabouts of a runaway slave, in 1741.)6 By 1850 the country had its first advertising agency, the American Newspaper Advertising Agency, though its function was to buy advertising space rather than come up with creative campaigns. The first advertising agency in the modern sense was N. W. Ayer & Sons of Philadelphia, established in 1869. To advertise originally carried the sense of to broadcast or disseminate news. Thus a nineteenth-century newspaper that called itself The Advertiser meant that it had lots of news, not lots of ads. By the early 1800s the term had been stretched to accommodate the idea of spreading the news of the availability of certain goods or services. A newspaper notice that read, ‘Jos. Parker, Hatter’, was essentially announcing that if anyone was in the market for a hat, Jos. Parker had them. In the sense of persuading members of the public to acquire items they might not otherwise think of buying – items they didn’t know they needed – advertising is a phenomenon of the modern age.
By the 1890s advertising was appearing everywhere – in newspapers and magazines, on billboards (an Americanism dating from 1850), on the sides of buildings, on passing streetcars, on paper bags, even on books of matches, which were invented in 1892 and being extensively used as an advertising medium within three years.
Very early on, advertisers discovered the importance of a good slogan. Ivory Soap’s ‘99 44/100 per cent pure’ dates from 1879. Schlitz has been calling itself ‘the beer that made Milwaukee famous’ since 1895, and Heinz’s ‘57 varieties’ followed a year later. Morton Salt’s ‘when it rains, it pours’ dates from 1911, the American Florist Association’s ‘say it with flowers’ was first used in 1912 and the ‘good to the last drop’ of Maxwell House coffee, named for the Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville, where it was first served, has been with us since 1907. (The slogan is said to have originated with Teddy Roosevelt, who pronounced that the coffee was ‘good to the last drop’, prompting one wit to ask, ‘So what’s wrong with the last drop?’)
Sometimes slogans took a little working on. Coca-Cola described itself as ‘the drink that makes a pause refreshing’ before realizing, in 1929, that ‘the pause that refreshes’ was rather more succinct and memorable. A slogan could make all the difference to a product’s success. After advertising its soap as an efficacious way of dealing with ‘conspicuous nose pores’, Woodbury’s Facial Soap came up with the slogan ‘The skin you love to touch’ and won the hearts of millions.7 The great thing about a slogan was that it didn’t have to be accurate to be effective. Heinz never actually had ‘57 varieties’ of anything. The catch-phrase arose simply because H. J. Heinz, the company’s founder, decided he liked the sound of the number. Undeterred by considerations of verity, he had the slogan slapped on every one of the products he produced, which in 1896 was already far more than fifty-seven. For a time the company tried to arrange its products into fifty-seven arbitrary clusters, but in 1969 it gave up the ruse altogether and abandoned the slogan.