The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [17]
In the countryside, they really went wild, painting every rock, fence-post, and barn with names of salves, elixirs, and potions. An English visitor in the 1870s lamented that travelers to the United States couldn’t “step a mile into the open country, whether into the fields or along the high roads, without meeting the disfigurement.” Niagara Falls, Yosemite, and Yellowstone Park were all covered in painted ads. One enterprising laxative maker even offered $25,000 to help build the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal in exchange for posting “Fletcher’s Castoria” in giant letters on it for a year (fortunately, the U.S. government turned him down). When, just before the Civil War, the number of newspapers exploded, patent medicine makers discovered a new way to reach the masses. It was a perfect match: Newspapers needed money, and patent medicine makers needed something on which to spend their obscene profits. By 1847, there were 11 million medicine ads in some two thousand papers nationwide. In some, they took up half the ad space. Oftentimes they consisted simply of the name of a tablet or salve repeated over pages and pages of dense text. But with increasing competition, the ones that succeeded were those that used the most creative or memorable slogans or artwork to sell their products.
As one medicine proprietor said, “I can advertise dish water, and sell it, just as well as an article of merit. . . . It’s all in the advertising.” Some early ads appealed to patriotism: “The Army protects our country against internal Dissension, Pe-Ru-Na protects our country against Catarrhal Diseases.” Others, like Hembold’s Extract of Buchu, peddled exotic ingredients, with pictures showing “Hottentots” gathering buchu leaves off the Cape of Good Hope. Then, of course, there was that old standby, T&A—with ads featuring a flash of cleavage or a half-robed girl entering or exiting a bath.
It was only a matter of time before other industries began to take a page from patent medicine makers to advertise their own products. “The greatest advertising men of my day were schooled in the medicine field,” said advertising pioneer Claude C. Hopkins in My Life in Advertising. “It weeded out the incompetents and gave scope and prestige to those who survived.” In many ways, advertising became a necessity for products sold nationally for the first time after the Civil War. In order to recoup packaging and shipping costs, companies such as Uneeda Biscuit, Quaker Oats, and Campbell’s Soup needed something to persuade customers to pay a premium over the generics in the cracker barrel or sugar loaf.
In part, the new packages themselves served as ads. Tobacco companies literally branded their icons into the leaves with a hot iron—creating the concept of a “brand” as something that didn’t involve cattle. But to keep up with the new demand for newspaper advertising, ad agencies transformed from mere middlemen to one-stop shops employing copywriters and artists to design ads for clients. Royal Baking Powder was the first company to picture its product in a newspaper advertisement in the 1870s. Quaker Oats did one better with the creation of its smiling behatted symbol, personally reassuring customers of the superior quality of its most pedestrian product. Manufacturers borrowed a toned-down version of the patent medicine maker’s repetitive sales pitch, developing cloying catchphrases to figuratively brand their names into the mind of the consumer—“Do Uneeda Biscuit?” or “Good morning! Have you used Pears’ Soap?”
The Coca-Cola Company used a bit of all