Fifties (82 page)

It was a salesman’s dream: The nation had not only been wired to sell, but it was wired to sell through pictures, going right into the home. It was, Rosser Reeves said, like “shooting fish in a barrel.” The advertising firms that adapted most readily to television tripled and quadrupled their annual billings; BBD&O, where Ben Duffy was an early booster of television, shifted 80 percent of its media buys to television, and by 1950 the television department had grown from twelve people to 150; Duffy was well ahead of the curve, and he was rewarded for his foresight: The firm went from billings of $40 million to $235 million in the fifteen-year period from 1945 to 1960.

Advertising men became the new heroes, or antiheroes, of American life. Novels and movies appeared about them. They were said to dress more stylishly than the mere businessmen they served: They lived somewhat unconventional, even racy lives and were supposedly torn between guarding the public good and using their great gifts to manipulate people for profit. In effect, it was seen to be a profession where talented young men traded their ideals for an even higher life-style, with luxurious suburban homes in Greenwich and Darien. In the film version of the Frederic Wakeman novel
The Hucksters,
one of the early novels that helped give Madison Avenue its dubious reputation, Deborah Kerr tells Clark Gable that he does not have to sell out, that he can be an honorable man in advertising. “Why don’t you be one of those who sells only what he believes in? Sell good things, things that people should have, and sell them with dignity—and taste. That’s a career for any man, a career to be proud of.”

If ad men were not more esteemed in this new era, no one doubted that they were more influential. The Yale historian David Potter noted in his book
People of Plenty
that in a culture of so many choices, as America was in the fifties, it was inevitable that advertising would come to play an increasingly important role. “Advertising,” he wrote, “now compares with such long-standing institutions as the school and the church in the magnitude of its social influence. It dominates the media, it has vast power in the shaping of popular standards and it is really one of the very limited groups of institutions which exercise social control.”

Rather than glamorous, it was in fact a job of long hours and high turnover that bred ulcers and heart attacks and children who barely knew their fathers. Studies comparing the health of men in advertising with that of executives in other professions showed them to be consistently in poorer health than their peers. It was an enormously stressful calling; if the rewards were great, so were the pitfalls. Advertising executives were at the beck and call of large, powerful companies whose chief executives rarely understood the market. The big companies could switch firms in a minute, and even within the advertising agencies themselves competition was extreme. “I sold my interest in Benton and Bowles when I was thirty-five,” said Bill Benton, “and I’d been taking $300,000 to $400,000 a year out of it. Any business where a kid can make that kind of money is no business for old men.”

As for television, it was all on-the-job training and, at first, almost everyone was getting it wrong. A handful of firms—like Ted Bates, and Young and Rubicam, Ogilvy and Mather, and Doyle Dane—were somewhat more nimble than the others in making the transition from radio to television and came to understand the obvious early on: The new medium was visual. But even at Young and Rubicam, the first instinct was to transfer people who had done radio to the television department, whereas what was needed was a miniature movie production team.

Previously advertising, like many professions, had depended on a sort of Ivy League old-boy network, in which heads of companies
could be counted on to patronize their school chums. The largest and perhaps most famous agency, J. Walter Thompson, reached its zenith in the thirties and forties, largely because its account executives did most of their business at the Harvard and Yale clubs. But in the new age of television advertising, talent was everything, and by the fifties J. Walter Thompson was regarded as so stodgy by the bright young men on Madison Avenue that it was called J. Walter Tombstone.

It was a heady time. Everything was a risk. It was quite possible to do a campaign that succeeded brilliantly by mistake: It was equally possible to do a brilliant campaign and have it turn out to be a disaster. A young ad man just starting out at Young and Rubicam named David McCall was assigned in the early fifties to do a campaign for Rinso soap, a Lever Brothers product. Rinso had been one of the great brand names in the old radio days, but it had come on hard times, for two reasons: Its producers had not mastered the art of television advertising, and it was being challenged by the new more powerful detergents. In retrospect, probably nothing could have saved Rinso, McCall decided, but if it was possible for a campaign to hasten the demise of an ailing product, his campaign had done it: fifty-two weeks of full-page ads in
Life
magazine, beautifully illustrated by the top photographers in the country, including Richard Avedon. One ad alone showed sixteen different kinds of stains in full color. Everything was executed perfectly, and not even a ripple in sales resulted to show that someone out there had paid attention.

Thanks to the power of television, selling and marketing became ever more important within companies—the sizzle was becoming as important as the steak. Some auto executives later decided that television advertising tilted the balance within their companies, making marketing and sales gradually more important than engineering and manufacturing. A kind of misguided ethic began to take root, one of great and dangerous hubris—that it did not really matter how well made the cars were; if the styling was halfway decent and the ad campaign was good enough, the marketing department could sell them.

In the case of cigarettes, Madison Avenue faced a particularly stiff challenge, though. The tobacco industry was in crisis by this time. There was growing evidence that smoking was in fact injurious to one’s health. (Rosser Reeves tried to calm doubts with a particularly ingenious slogan for Tarryton: “All the tars and nicotine trapped in the filter are guaranteed not to reach your throat.”) The beginnings of consumer resistance were already apparent; even
though Philip Morris sponsored
I Love Lucy,
it received less of a boost in sales than the company hoped. Indeed, along Madison Avenue the general belief was that a cigarette company was the wrong sponsor for the show, that it was ill-positioned to extract maximum benefit from Lucy’s success. At the height of Lucy’s success, in 1952, Philip Morris’s sales slipped slightly, in fact.

The dilemma grew worse in the mid-fifties as the government began to close in on the tobacco companies. The Federal Trade Commission ordered Philip Morris to stop using the claim that its cigarettes were “recognized as being less irritating to the nose and throat by eminent nose and throat doctors.” Soon after, in July 1954, the
Reader’s Digest,
one of the great barometers of life in the American heartland (and, because of its lack of advertising, a magazine immune to commercial pressures), published an article on the possible connection between smoking and cancer. The industry, feeling cornered, was beginning to introduce filter-tip cigarettes. Philip Morris made its commitment with a brand called Marlboro. It was developed initially as a cigarette for women, but in the mid-fifties, the company decided to push Marlboro for men as well. The problem was that filter cigarettes were regarded at the time as effeminate. Real men didn’t smoke filter cigarettes and didn’t worry about lung cancer. The Philip Morris people took their problem to the Leo Burnett agency in Chicago. Burnett was a crusty old advertising hand who prided himself on keeping his agency in Chicago and away from New York. New York was too smooth and its people tended to be too highbrow. He wanted none of that. He wanted his copy simple, almost corny. In fact he kept a file in his desk, called “Corny Language,” into which he placed simply folksy Americanisms. “Our sod-busting delivery, our loose-limbed stand, and our wide-eyed perspective make it easier for us to create ads that talk turkey to the majority of Americans. I like to think that we Chicago ad-makers are all working stiffs. I like to imagine that Chicago copywriters spit on their hands before picking up the big black pencils,” he once said. Certainly, Burnett himself was a working stiff. He worked seven days a week and kept two full-time secretaries busy. He took only Christmas Day off. He often arrived home after his family had gone to bed. His children barely saw him: “It must be disconcerting for three highly intelligent children to see their father only if they happen to get up for a glass of water during the night,” one colleague, William Tyler, said of him.

Burnett trusted his instincts and was wary of the new research departments just then springing up at various ad agencies. These
featured polling, in an attempt to understand why people wanted certain goods. He was scornful of what he regarded as the pseudo-scientific approach to selling. Advertising was not a science, he thought. It was a skill that took talent and experience. He was particularly accomplished at creating folklorish figures for his campaigns—the Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Doughboy, for example.

Now when Philip Morris asked for a campaign to make Marlboro more masculine, he pondered the problem with his top people. They asked themselves which was the most masculine symbol in American life. The answer was the tattoo. A series of ads was drawn up with rugged men, from different walks of life, sporting prominent tattoos on their hands, readily visible when they lit up. Of the original ads, the one with the cowboy was by far the most effective, and gradually the theme became the cowboy instead of the tattoo. At a time when many Americans feared losing their individualism to the norms of suburbia, the myth of the cowboy, celebrated by Hollywood in a thousand films, was powerful stuff.

The first ad ran in January 1955. The Burnett people also suggested changing the packaging to a stronger red color. But the key to the campaign became the craggy-faced cowboy. It was an immense success, and it changed the market for filter cigarettes. The ads began to talk about “man-sized flavor,” and suggested that Marlboro was, “[a] man’s cigarette that women like too.” Pierre Martineau, one of the pioneer market-research people and pop psychologists in advertising, praised the Marlboro ads and the macho quality of the campaign, which placed the cigarette “right in the heart of core meanings of smoking: masculinity, adulthood, vigor, and potency. Quite obviously these meanings cannot be expressed openly. The consumer would reject them quite violently. The difference between a topflight creative man and the hack is this ability to express powerful meanings indirectly ...”

The cowboy was so successful for Marlboro that it was not long before other cigarettes tried to get in on the act. Soon there was a Chesterfield commercial that showed cowboys on a roundup smoking Chesterfields. There was a new Western song to go with it: “Chessss——ter——fiieeelddd,” it began: “Drivin’ cattle/ desert sun a-blaze/ Poundin’ leather/ roundin’ up the strays/ Herdin’ steers/ Across the range/ You’ll find a man/ Who stops and takes big pleasure/ When and where he can.” It was a nice try and the cowboys all looked like they ought to be riding with Gary Cooper, but it was in vain: Cowboys and the West belonged to Marlboro.

There was in all this new and seemingly instant affluence the making of a crisis of the American spirit. For this was not simple old prewar capitalism, this was something new—capitalism that was driven by a ferocious consumerism, where the impulse was not so much about what people
needed
in their lives but what they needed to consume in order to keep up with their neighbors and, of course, to drive the GNP endlessly upward. “Capitalism is dead—consumerism is king,” said the president of the National Sales Executives, defining the difference between prewar America and the new America orchestrated by Madison Avenue. The people surging into the middle class were the target market, and they were supposed to buy any way they could—if necessary, indeed preferably, on credit. This was an important new development, for the country was prosperous, but it was not
that
prosperous; the new consumerism depended not merely on mercantile seduction but on credit as well, and ordinary buyers were extended levels of credit never enjoyed by such people before. The auto companies lengthened the credit period on buying new cars from twenty-four to thirty-six months. As that happened, the old puritanism was dramatically weakened: Expectations and attitudes were being rapidly changed. (Not everyone was so enthusiastic about easier access to credit; Winthrop Aldrich, then the head of the Chase bank, expressed his doubts at one meeting with younger employees who wanted to ease requirements: “I’m just not sure that we should offer the ability to borrow and to have easy credit to the kind of people who are clearly going to have serious problems paying us back,” he said.)

Few others shared his wariness. For most Americans, the idea of buying luxury items was a relatively new concept, as was the idea of buying on time. Their parents and their grandparents had lived in a world in which they bought only what was essential, because they could afford little more. They did not like to buy on time, because they tended to be pessimistic rather than optimistic about economic trends, and they knew too many stories of banks foreclosing on houses and stores repossessing items that were only half paid for. It was not so much that they did not like being in debt; they
feared
being in debt. But in the new, affluent America even blue-collar jobs brought middle-class salaries. Young Americans, though, if they had one foot in the future and responded eagerly to the cornucopia of goods around them, still knew of a Calvinist past. The dilemma for them, and thus for Madison Avenue, was the question of how to balance the cautiousness of the past with the comparative opulence of the present.

Ernest Dichter, one of the first and most influential of the motivational
research experts, was a pioneer in trying to explain to companies the complicated subterranean psychological reasons on which people based their choices. He picked up on this theme very quickly, deciding that one of the main tasks advertisers had to deal with in the mid-fifties was resolving what he called “the conflict between pleasure and guilt,” among those now more affluent than their parents. The job for the advertiser, he said, was therefore not so much to just sell the product “as to give moral permission to have fun without guilt.” This was, he believed, a major psychological crisis in American life: the conflict between American puritanism and appetites whetted by the new consumerism. Every time a company sold some item that offered a new level of gratification, he argued, it had to assuage the buyer’s guilt and, in his words, “offer absolution.”