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02/18/2005

Albert Lasker, Part III

We finish up our series on the “father of modern advertising,”
Albert Lasker (1880-1952), with the tale of his marketing
campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes. Frankly, it’s a terrific
story on how Lasker got women to smoke in public. Yes, I
know, I know, but remember as you’re reading this that we are
talking the 1920s and 30s. Americans were largely na ve to the
dangers of smoking back then and the surgeon general’s report
on the hazards wasn’t released until January 11, 1964; at which
time SG Luther Terry found that the use of cigarettes
“contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific
diseases and to the overall death rate.”

The big tobacco companies began to use the present day type of
cigarettes between 1912 and 1923, employing domestic Virginia
and Turkish tobacco. The initial leaders were Camel and
Chesterfield and the American Tobacco Company, with whom
Lasker’s Lord & Thomas agency had done minimal work in the
past, put out a cigarette under the Lucky Strike label.

Percival Hill was the president of American Tobacco and he
sought out Albert Lasker for a sit down to discuss the Lucky
Strike account. At the time the company was spending $600,000
to $800,000 marketing the brand.

Percival was getting up in years and it was apparent his son
George would take over upon his death. Lasker wasn’t keen on
working with George but agreed to take over the Lucky Strike
account. Lasker notes in his 1949-50 series of interviews for
Professor Nevins and Dean Albertson that it was also represented
to him that sales of “Luckies” were 35 billion cigarettes a year,
though Lasker later learned it was more like half that when Lord
& Thomas got involved.

During the testing of some initial ad spots, Percival died and
George became president. Lasker told George that if in two or
three years the size of the account grew from the $800,000 level
to $5,000,000 that George would no longer complain about the
commission Lord & Thomas was receiving 15%. Years later,
as it turned out, the two were in court against each other,
ostensibly over commissions but this was after the level of
spending on the Luckies brand peaked at $20,000,000. Lasker
doesn’t say in the interviews how the suit ended up but it’s not
germane to the main story; the marketing of Luckies.

When Lasker’s Lord & Thomas took over the account, he told
George Hill, “You can’t live unless you have this one brand,
because eighty or ninety percent of the cigarette business in this
country today is on this one type of cigarette .Instead of
spending a little money and a moderate amount of money on
each of these fifty products, milk them all. Take what you spend
on them and the milking of their profits and put it in a big push
behind Luckies.”

Camel and Chesterfields were pumping huge amounts of their
profits back into advertising and George Hill agreed with Lasker
that this was the way for American Tobacco to go.

Then one day Lasker was lunching with some co-workers at the
Tip Top Inn on the top of the Pullman Building in Chicago. The
group was bouncing around ideas on branding Luckies. Lasker:

“Women did not smoke in public in this country, but with this
new type of cigarette, women had begun smoking more and
more. This was in the midst of Prohibition (1919-1933), when
they were more or less uninhibited, but no public place in the
United States would permit women to smoke. As a result, the
ladies’ rooms were always jammed with women who would go
in there for a smoke. Women did smoke at home, and although
there were comparatively few who did, it was a growing thing .
Goodness knows, a hundred years before women had smoked
pipes! But there’d grown a prejudice – such a prejudice that
when Theodore Roosevelt was Governor of New York and the
reporters saw his daughter Alice smoking a cigarette, it was first-
page news for days in all the papers of the United States.

“If you saw a woman smoke in public, it was something which
people pointed out as if they were looking at some strange
animal in a zoo. It was against the mores of the times, but
already women had begun to smoke secretly at home .

“My wife had been to a doctor a short time before. She had been
ill, and she was gaining weight. This doctor proposed to my
wife (who almost thought he proposed something criminal to her,
so strong was her prejudice) that before each meal, or between
meals when she got hungry, she light a cigarette and then throw
it away. He said that the smoke in the saliva would kill the
appetite for a little while. I had to urge my wife to do it.”

One time Lasker was at the Tip Top with his wife when she lit
up. The proprietor was a friend of Albert’s but he told the
couple, “Look, I can’t let your wife smoke here in the restaurant.
The sight of a woman smoking offends too many of my
customers, but I have my own private dining room. You go
in there with her, and she can smoke all she wants.”

Well, that ticked off Lasker and he was more determined than
ever to break the taboo against women smoking. Lasker:

“I talked it over with my men. I think this campaign was one of
the few we put out under my direction in Lord & Thomas, and
that was largely my own idea. I thought of the idea of getting
foreign women to testify that they smoked Luckies. There was
no prejudice in Europe against women smoking. They smoked
then as now – the same as men – in public, out of public, and
whenever they wanted.

“As I worked it out, I said in my mind, ‘I must get foreign
women who are resident in America for a time, and whom the
public would know and who would not mind publicity.’ It was
very natural that my mind went to the opera stars, because at that
time there were only one or two American stars, and the rest
were foreign.

“Then we developed what we called our ‘precious voice’
campaign. As they were singers, they said, ‘My living is
dependent on my being able to sing, and I protect my precious
voice by smoking Lucky Strike.’


“We showed beautiful pictures of the stars in their costumes, and
practically all the men and women of the Metropolitan Opera
Company used Luckies for a while and gave us testimony.”

The opera stars weren’t paid anything, but the publicity was good
for them. Later on, baseball and football players were used as
props extensively by the tobacco companies. Continuing

Lasker was then able to get the stage and screen stars and sales of
Luckies “went up like the land in a boom field where oil has just
been found. All other cigarettes went up, too. The women broke
the prejudice down overnight and began smoking in public. I do
not think two months passed before the prejudice was withering
in the whole nation.”

Well, it just so happens that one particular group became most
jealous of the success the tobacco companies were having; the
candy manufacturers. They decided to put up $150,000 for a
national campaign to combat cigarettes. Lasker:

“Already at the end of these few months the candy people were
feeling it, since people have a limited amount of money. They
wanted to stop the growth of cigarettes so that money could be
used for candy, and they wanted a good argument for people to
buy candy.”

The candy companies’ main argument was going to be that
cigarette smoking was not good for the nervous system and for
one’s overall health. So they proposed that if you ate a piece of
candy, the sweetness would cause you to lose your taste to
smoke. Lasker:

“Then I remembered what had given me the original impulse for
the ‘precious voice’ campaign. It was that the doctor had told
my wife to smoke to cut down on her appetite for sweets. So I
said, ‘Well, if that idea is good for them with their little
$150,000’ – and they did run a few advertisements in the
Saturday Evening Post – ‘that justifies us in reverse using the
several millions we have now in making the claim for Lucky
Strike.”

But when Albert Lasker approached George Hill with his idea
for countering the candy companies, Hill responded he had an
idea of his own, which he pulled out of his desk drawer. On a
piece of paper he had written:

“Reach for a Lucky instead of a bonbon.”

Lasker was horrified. “What made you think of that?” he asked
Hill. Well, George was a man of old-fashioned ideas. “He
didn’t call candy, candy,” Lasker recalled. “It was bonbon.”
Lasker said one word had to be changed. So the new slogan
became:

“Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”

When Hill inquired why this one change was so important,
Lasker said, “Because ninety percent of the people who will read
this won’t know what bonbon means. You happen to have lived
in France a lot. Second, there’s a swing to ‘sweet’ – one word –
that there isn’t to ‘bonbon.’ But third, why do we want to limit it
to candy, which is just one item of sweets? We want people not
to take pies and cakes.”

“Then we added to our copy with each of the testifiers that they
protected their ‘precious voices’ by smoking Luckies, and that
they protected their figures by ‘reaching for a Lucky instead of a
sweet.’”

Earnings soared from about $12,000,000 a year in 1926 to
$40,000,000 in 1930 and Luckies became the #1 cigarette of its
era. As for George Hill, Lasker relates the man became totally
obsessed with the brand, to the point where he became mentally
unstable.

---

I hope you’ve enjoyed our little look back at advertising’s early
years. Maybe you even picked up an idea or two for your own
organization.

*The source for this series was an article for the December 1954
issue of American Heritage magazine titled “The Personal
Reminiscences of Albert Lasker,” as told to Professor Nevins
and Mr. Dean Albertson, 1949-50.

Wall Street History will return February 25.

Brian Trumbore



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-02/18/2005-      
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Wall Street History

02/18/2005

Albert Lasker, Part III

We finish up our series on the “father of modern advertising,”
Albert Lasker (1880-1952), with the tale of his marketing
campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes. Frankly, it’s a terrific
story on how Lasker got women to smoke in public. Yes, I
know, I know, but remember as you’re reading this that we are
talking the 1920s and 30s. Americans were largely na ve to the
dangers of smoking back then and the surgeon general’s report
on the hazards wasn’t released until January 11, 1964; at which
time SG Luther Terry found that the use of cigarettes
“contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific
diseases and to the overall death rate.”

The big tobacco companies began to use the present day type of
cigarettes between 1912 and 1923, employing domestic Virginia
and Turkish tobacco. The initial leaders were Camel and
Chesterfield and the American Tobacco Company, with whom
Lasker’s Lord & Thomas agency had done minimal work in the
past, put out a cigarette under the Lucky Strike label.

Percival Hill was the president of American Tobacco and he
sought out Albert Lasker for a sit down to discuss the Lucky
Strike account. At the time the company was spending $600,000
to $800,000 marketing the brand.

Percival was getting up in years and it was apparent his son
George would take over upon his death. Lasker wasn’t keen on
working with George but agreed to take over the Lucky Strike
account. Lasker notes in his 1949-50 series of interviews for
Professor Nevins and Dean Albertson that it was also represented
to him that sales of “Luckies” were 35 billion cigarettes a year,
though Lasker later learned it was more like half that when Lord
& Thomas got involved.

During the testing of some initial ad spots, Percival died and
George became president. Lasker told George that if in two or
three years the size of the account grew from the $800,000 level
to $5,000,000 that George would no longer complain about the
commission Lord & Thomas was receiving 15%. Years later,
as it turned out, the two were in court against each other,
ostensibly over commissions but this was after the level of
spending on the Luckies brand peaked at $20,000,000. Lasker
doesn’t say in the interviews how the suit ended up but it’s not
germane to the main story; the marketing of Luckies.

When Lasker’s Lord & Thomas took over the account, he told
George Hill, “You can’t live unless you have this one brand,
because eighty or ninety percent of the cigarette business in this
country today is on this one type of cigarette .Instead of
spending a little money and a moderate amount of money on
each of these fifty products, milk them all. Take what you spend
on them and the milking of their profits and put it in a big push
behind Luckies.”

Camel and Chesterfields were pumping huge amounts of their
profits back into advertising and George Hill agreed with Lasker
that this was the way for American Tobacco to go.

Then one day Lasker was lunching with some co-workers at the
Tip Top Inn on the top of the Pullman Building in Chicago. The
group was bouncing around ideas on branding Luckies. Lasker:

“Women did not smoke in public in this country, but with this
new type of cigarette, women had begun smoking more and
more. This was in the midst of Prohibition (1919-1933), when
they were more or less uninhibited, but no public place in the
United States would permit women to smoke. As a result, the
ladies’ rooms were always jammed with women who would go
in there for a smoke. Women did smoke at home, and although
there were comparatively few who did, it was a growing thing .
Goodness knows, a hundred years before women had smoked
pipes! But there’d grown a prejudice – such a prejudice that
when Theodore Roosevelt was Governor of New York and the
reporters saw his daughter Alice smoking a cigarette, it was first-
page news for days in all the papers of the United States.

“If you saw a woman smoke in public, it was something which
people pointed out as if they were looking at some strange
animal in a zoo. It was against the mores of the times, but
already women had begun to smoke secretly at home .

“My wife had been to a doctor a short time before. She had been
ill, and she was gaining weight. This doctor proposed to my
wife (who almost thought he proposed something criminal to her,
so strong was her prejudice) that before each meal, or between
meals when she got hungry, she light a cigarette and then throw
it away. He said that the smoke in the saliva would kill the
appetite for a little while. I had to urge my wife to do it.”

One time Lasker was at the Tip Top with his wife when she lit
up. The proprietor was a friend of Albert’s but he told the
couple, “Look, I can’t let your wife smoke here in the restaurant.
The sight of a woman smoking offends too many of my
customers, but I have my own private dining room. You go
in there with her, and she can smoke all she wants.”

Well, that ticked off Lasker and he was more determined than
ever to break the taboo against women smoking. Lasker:

“I talked it over with my men. I think this campaign was one of
the few we put out under my direction in Lord & Thomas, and
that was largely my own idea. I thought of the idea of getting
foreign women to testify that they smoked Luckies. There was
no prejudice in Europe against women smoking. They smoked
then as now – the same as men – in public, out of public, and
whenever they wanted.

“As I worked it out, I said in my mind, ‘I must get foreign
women who are resident in America for a time, and whom the
public would know and who would not mind publicity.’ It was
very natural that my mind went to the opera stars, because at that
time there were only one or two American stars, and the rest
were foreign.

“Then we developed what we called our ‘precious voice’
campaign. As they were singers, they said, ‘My living is
dependent on my being able to sing, and I protect my precious
voice by smoking Lucky Strike.’


“We showed beautiful pictures of the stars in their costumes, and
practically all the men and women of the Metropolitan Opera
Company used Luckies for a while and gave us testimony.”

The opera stars weren’t paid anything, but the publicity was good
for them. Later on, baseball and football players were used as
props extensively by the tobacco companies. Continuing

Lasker was then able to get the stage and screen stars and sales of
Luckies “went up like the land in a boom field where oil has just
been found. All other cigarettes went up, too. The women broke
the prejudice down overnight and began smoking in public. I do
not think two months passed before the prejudice was withering
in the whole nation.”

Well, it just so happens that one particular group became most
jealous of the success the tobacco companies were having; the
candy manufacturers. They decided to put up $150,000 for a
national campaign to combat cigarettes. Lasker:

“Already at the end of these few months the candy people were
feeling it, since people have a limited amount of money. They
wanted to stop the growth of cigarettes so that money could be
used for candy, and they wanted a good argument for people to
buy candy.”

The candy companies’ main argument was going to be that
cigarette smoking was not good for the nervous system and for
one’s overall health. So they proposed that if you ate a piece of
candy, the sweetness would cause you to lose your taste to
smoke. Lasker:

“Then I remembered what had given me the original impulse for
the ‘precious voice’ campaign. It was that the doctor had told
my wife to smoke to cut down on her appetite for sweets. So I
said, ‘Well, if that idea is good for them with their little
$150,000’ – and they did run a few advertisements in the
Saturday Evening Post – ‘that justifies us in reverse using the
several millions we have now in making the claim for Lucky
Strike.”

But when Albert Lasker approached George Hill with his idea
for countering the candy companies, Hill responded he had an
idea of his own, which he pulled out of his desk drawer. On a
piece of paper he had written:

“Reach for a Lucky instead of a bonbon.”

Lasker was horrified. “What made you think of that?” he asked
Hill. Well, George was a man of old-fashioned ideas. “He
didn’t call candy, candy,” Lasker recalled. “It was bonbon.”
Lasker said one word had to be changed. So the new slogan
became:

“Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”

When Hill inquired why this one change was so important,
Lasker said, “Because ninety percent of the people who will read
this won’t know what bonbon means. You happen to have lived
in France a lot. Second, there’s a swing to ‘sweet’ – one word –
that there isn’t to ‘bonbon.’ But third, why do we want to limit it
to candy, which is just one item of sweets? We want people not
to take pies and cakes.”

“Then we added to our copy with each of the testifiers that they
protected their ‘precious voices’ by smoking Luckies, and that
they protected their figures by ‘reaching for a Lucky instead of a
sweet.’”

Earnings soared from about $12,000,000 a year in 1926 to
$40,000,000 in 1930 and Luckies became the #1 cigarette of its
era. As for George Hill, Lasker relates the man became totally
obsessed with the brand, to the point where he became mentally
unstable.

---

I hope you’ve enjoyed our little look back at advertising’s early
years. Maybe you even picked up an idea or two for your own
organization.

*The source for this series was an article for the December 1954
issue of American Heritage magazine titled “The Personal
Reminiscences of Albert Lasker,” as told to Professor Nevins
and Mr. Dean Albertson, 1949-50.

Wall Street History will return February 25.

Brian Trumbore