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But the living standard of the ad-smiths improved rapidly. Other manufacturers, led by the makers of such simple consumer items as soap and baking powder, began to learn the lessons of trademarks, contact with the customer, expanding demand. In church one Sunday morning in 1879, Harley T. Procter, of Procter & Gamble, listened to a passage from the 45th psalm (". . . all thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they made thee glad . . .") and coined the label "Ivory Soap." In 1890, Kodak launched one of the first relentlessly successful slogans: "You press the button—we do the rest." As other manufacturers ventured into advertising's strange new land, a blaze of new slogans followed: "The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous," "Pink Pills for Pale People," "Do You Wear Pants?" Slogans temporarily gave way to jingles, alarming forerunners of the singing commercial. Illustrations (the manufacturer's face, Indians, prominent public figures, including President James A. Garfield) were used wildly and sometimes weirdly to catch the customer's eye. Then destiny struck in Chicago; a photographer named Beatrice Tonneson used pictures of live girls in ads for the first time.
By the end of World War I, the rush to put women in ads was on. Coca-Cola used a black-haired beauty and a kitten. Holeproof Hosiery pioneered cheesecake by lifting skirts and showing legs. Chesterfield made shocking history by subtly inciting women to smoke: a flapper cuddled up to her smoke-puffing boy friend and whispered, "Blow some my way."
With the motorcar had come the Fisher Body Girl. In Paris, Harvard-educated, Poet E. E. Cummings sneered:
. . . Spearmint
Girl With The Wrigley Eyes . . .
of you i
sing . . .
from every B.V.D.
let freedom ring . . .
Men of Distinction. Admen, in league with psychology, following charts marshaled by armies of researchers, plotted a never-ceasing campaign to capture the public's attention, and stab to the psychological soft spots of men & women. They appealed to fear ("Even your best friends won't tell you"), to snobbery ("Men of Distinction"), to romance ("She's lovely, she's engaged, she uses Pond's"). They spoke in euphemisms, wrapped like cotton around the harsh facts of life, and invented dread new diseases (B.O., Office Hips, Halitosis). They found that endorsements by real people, from tobacco auctioneers to movie stars, were astoundingly successful sales plugs. ("Fifty million women a week see movies," explained one adman. "They see these dames always get their man, so they want to use Lux soap, too.")
They documented more or less factual claims to superior quality ("Tests by independent research laboratories prove . . ."). They sponsored contests, told jokes, wrote essays, and often told a straight story about the things they had to sell. They appealed — and thus redeemed their sins of excess — to all men's desire for better things by dazzling them with glowing pictures of the new & better things American industry was making. But always present was advertising's simplest and most potent symbol, the female figure.