In a paneled conference room one day in 1942, Advertising Man Albert Lasker and one of his biggest clients sat surrounded by their deputies and advisers. Lasker advanced an idea which nearly everyone else opposed. "Well, gentlemen." said Lasker as he began to back out of the room, "you're doubtless right, and I am wrong—so wrong that I've only made $40 million in this business."
Not only did Albert Davis Lasker make more than $40 million out of advertising, he changed its technique and virtually fathered modern advertising. In so doing he turned such names as Lucky Strike, Palmolive, Pepsodent, Kleenex and Kotex into household words.
What Is the Secret? When Lasker, an 18-year-old stripling from Galveston, Texas, got a job in Chicago's Lord & Thomas agency in 1898, advertising was in its horse & buggy stage. Ad agencies were little more than space brokers. They bought space in newspapers and magazines at cut-rate, and resold it to advertisers at whatever markup they could get. They prepared little copy or art work. Lasker, who displayed a hypnotic, golden-tongued salesmanship from the start, soon changed all that. He laid out ad campaigns with newsy headlines and drawings, insisted on a 15% commission on the price of the ads. Thus he helped establish the fee system now standard for the industry. At 24, he was earning $1,000 a week, already owned 25% of the firm.
Lasker was still groping for a new approach to advertising when, in 1904, a stranger helped him find it. A boy came in from the saloon near Lord & Thomas bearing a note from John Kennedy, an ex-Canadian mounted policeman who was writing breezy ads for patent medicines: "I can tell you what advertising is." Lasker sent for Kennedy; liked his definition: that good advertising simply offered a "reason why" the customer should buy. Lasker hired Kennedy and they translated the theory into copy with such slogans as Palmolive's "Keep that Schoolgirl
Complexion" and Van Camp's (evaporated milk) "You Can Now Have a Cow in Your Pantry." At 30, Lasker was sole owner of Lord & Thomas and already a millionaire.
Salt in the Ocean. Lasker's biggest campaigns were for Lucky Strikes. President George Washington Hill was spending $1,000,000 a year on ads when Lasker stepped in; soon he was spending $25 million, and Luckies soared from third place to first in sales. Lasker and the legendary Hill spent endless hours dreaming up new slogans ("Nature in the Raw is Seldom Mild," "Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet"). Hill, worried because more women smoked Chesterfields, and impressed by the growing fad of "research," wanted a survey made. Lasker, who relied on his own intuition, thought that so-called "market research" only proved that "there is salt in the ocean." His common sense told him women preferred Chesterfields because of their clean white packages (Luckies were then green). Lasker took an experimental white Lucky package into the building lobby, tried it on a girl tobacco clerk. When she liked it, he telephoned Hill: "I've just completed a survey; the new package is a hit." It was (in spite of Luckies' clangorous campaign, "Lucky Strike green has gone to war," which was a flop).