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The most dramatic examples of this were the ‘Arrow Collars & Shirts' advertisements. The owners of the Arrow brand hired Calkins & Holden, who in turn commissioned illustrator Joseph Christian Leyendecker to create a suave ‘Arrow man'. They hit the jackpot: Leyendecker's illustrations resonated with consumers to an extent that they could hardly have dared imagine.

Leyendecker was a German-born émigré whose parents had moved to the United States in 1882. He'd had his first brush with the world of advertising in his teens, when he was apprenticed to a Chicago printing house, while at the same time taking evening classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1896 he moved to Paris (along with his brother Frank, a talented artist in his own right) to study for two years at the city's best schools. By the time C&H commissioned Leyendecker, in 1905, he'd carved out a solid reputation working for magazines such as
Collier's
and
The Saturday Evening Post
.

But Leyendecker's Arrow saga was an altogether different phenomenon. The men he painted actually generated fan mail. They were tall, rakish, impeccably dressed and yet forever nonchalant, their cheekbones gleaming above pristine shirt collars. To use a phrase that had not yet become hackneyed, men wanted to be them and women wanted to be with them. Perhaps Leyendecker's own enthusiasms shone through in his art: his first Arrow model was Charles Beach, his companion in life as well as work. He illustrated other campaigns – for Kellogg's and Ivory Soap, among others – but none of them had the same impact as his Arrow men, who firmly established the brand's values and sauntered elegantly across its advertising for the next 25 years.

As Calkins & Holden and their collaborators were bringing a new sensibility to the art department, copywriting skills were also evolving. No-nonsense, ‘reason why' advertising was competing with a more poetic, atmospheric style, as practised by Theodore MacManus at General Motors. MacManus favoured an approach that dispensed with the hard sell and instead gently wooed potential buyers, convincing them in melting prose that the Cadillac – for which MacManus wrote his best copy – was an irreproachable luxury purchase.

At the Chicago agency Lord & Thomas, a dynamic young executive named Albert Lasker had developed a ‘copywriting school' in association with an irascible yet talented Canadian-born writer called John E Kennedy. With a few years of experience under his belt, Kennedy had simply presented himself at the agency one day claiming that it
desperately needed his help. Flipping through Kennedy's work, Lasker was persuaded. Unfortunately, it transpired that the socially awkward Kennedy felt unable to teach the firm's nascent copywriters. ‘So he taught Lasker,' writes Stephen Fox in
The Mirror Makers
, ‘who passed the message along…'

The Kennedy method combined Powers-style plain speaking with striking typographical eccentricities, including a liberal sprinkling of capital letters and italics, ‘that caught the eye despite a jerky rhythm that reminded one reader of riding in a wagon with one lopsided wheel'.

Opinionated, unpredictable and unmanageable, after two years Kennedy left Lord & Thomas to go freelance, a situation in which he flourished. He was replaced at the agency by Claude C Hopkins – who went on to become an advertising legend.

The Hopkins approach

Claude Hopkins never denied – in fact he overtly stated – that the sole purpose of advertising was to sell. He spent his entire career honing the techniques that would best serve this end, describing his style as ‘dramatized salesmanship' in his autobiography,
My Life in Advertising
, first published in 1927. He believed in research, both before and after the event, and insisted that advertising was worthless unless it could demonstrate a tangible effect on sales.

In photographs Hopkins looks dour and aloof, with his clipped moustache, round spectacles and balding pate. And yet he was a populist, believing that a good adman should retain a common touch. His utter devotion to the advertising business, which he admitted to reading, writing and thinking about ‘night and day', could perhaps be explained by the diametrical rejection of his oppressively Christian upbringing.

Claude was born in Detroit in 1866. His journalist father died when he was just 10 years old, placing him entirely in the shadow of his deeply religious mother. Although she hoped he would become a preacher, he broke with the church at the age of 18 and made his bid for freedom. In Grand Rapids, he got a job with a company called Bissell, a maker of mechanical carpet sweepers. Here he tentatively began preaching an entirely different gospel.

Initially a bookkeeper, Hopkins took it upon himself to rewrite the company's brochure, which he felt showed limited knowledge of the
product. Ironically, it was written by that other copywriting pioneer, John E Powers, then at the height of his fame. But Hopkins was not daunted by Powers' reputation. ‘He knew nothing about carpet sweepers. He had given no study to our trade situation. He knew nothing of our problems. He never gave one moment to studying a woman's possible wish for a carpet sweeper.' Hopkins considered that only with a thorough understanding of the product, its benefits and its potential customers could a copywriter pen a convincing ad.

The success of Hopkins' early promotional efforts for Bissell led him to the Chicago offices of Swift & Company, a marketer of meat products and derivatives. In his book, Hopkins describes how he applied for the job of advertising manager, only to be told during an interview that he was 106th on a list of 106 applicants. Undaunted, he asked all the advertising agencies that had approached him with job offers to send references to Swift confirming his talents as a copywriter. Next, he convinced his local newspaper to let him write a column about advertising, free of charge, in return for a byline with his photograph above it. Each time the article appeared he clipped it out and sent it to Swift. Finally, the man who had interviewed him – a Mr I H Rich – called him back and offered him the post.

One of his greatest triumphs at Swift was the promotion of a beef suet brand called Cotosuet, used in baking as a substitute for butter. To demonstrate the product's effectiveness, Hopkins ordered that a giant cake be baked and displayed in the window of a department store. His newspaper ads pulled in customers while emphasizing the colossal cake's key ingredient. The stunt was a perfect example of dramatized selling.

It was while he was freelancing in Chicago that Hopkins honed another of the techniques that was to leave its mark on advertising history. Hired to promote the beer brand Schlitz, he discovered that its bottles were steam-cleaned – just as they were in every other brewery. But no other brewery had thought of including this nugget of information in its advertising. When an ad penned by Hopkins pointed out that Schlitz bottles were ‘washed with live steam', it gave the impression that the brand cared more about purity and hygiene than any of its competitors.

This was the essence of the Hopkins approach. For each product, he would find the unique factor that set it apart from its rivals. ‘You cannot go into a well-occupied field on the simple appeal “buy my brand”,' he wrote. ‘That is repugnant to all. One must offer exceptional service to induce people to change from favourite brands to yours.' Hopkins called
this the ‘pre-emptive claim'. Later, in the hands of Rosser Reeves, who worked for Ted Bates & Co in the 1950s, it became the Unique Selling Proposition. Reeves pushed the idea to an extreme, turning each USP into a simple slogan that he punched home with repetitive ads.

For the time being, though, it was Hopkins who attracted attention with his quasi-scientific methods of advertising. His work for Schlitz caught the eye of magazine publisher Cyrus Curtis – a teetotaller. Bumping into Albert Lasker of the Lord & Thomas agency on a train, Curtis advised him to hire the copywriter who could turn the thoughts of abstemious men towards beer.

Lasker took Curtis at his word and lured Hopkins to Lord & Thomas in 1907. This was not an easy task, as Hopkins was happy freelancing and had no intention of returning to ‘serfdom', as he called it. Lasker initially lured Hopkins with an unusual freelance contract: ‘Give me three ads… and your wife may… select any car on the street and charge it to me.' Finally, Hopkins agreed to work for Lasker at the remarkably high salary of one thousand dollars a week, later rising to US $185,000 a year.

This comfortable new position did nothing to slow the workaholic copywriter's output. He experimented with direct response advertising, becoming a sorcerer of cut-outs and coupons, realizing that it was an invaluable way of assessing readership of an ad. While researching dental hygiene for a product called Pepsodent, he ‘discovered' plaque, and wrote the first advertisement offering a means of combating it. Clearly convinced of the power of his imagery, he bought a stake in Pepsodent and made a fortune when it took off – thanks to his own copywriting skills.

But although Hopkins was an advertising genius, for the rest of his career he always deferred to his boss: Albert Davis Lasker.

Lasker's second choice

There were other contenders for the title, but few historians would disagree that Albert Lasker was the true father of modern advertising. Ironically, it was not his first choice of profession. He originally wanted to be a journalist – and continued hankering after that trade throughout his career, despite (or perhaps because of) his seemingly effortless ability to sell things to people. ‘So far as I know, no ordinary human being has
ever resisted Albert Lasker,' wrote Claude Hopkins. ‘He has commanded what he would in this world. Presidents have made him their pal. Nothing he desired has ever been forbidden to him.'

Lasker's father had emigrated from Germany and, after years of struggle, built up a prosperous grocery business in Galveston, Texas. Albert, then, was born into a wealthy family on 1 May 1880, the third of eight children. Showing a journalistic bent early on, he launched a weekly newspaper when he was only 12 years old, and worked for the local Galveston title while still in high school. His dream was to work on a big city paper, preferably in New York.

In a series of reminiscences published by
American Heritage
magazine in December 1954 (and more recently unearthed by a business website), Lasker describes his unlikely entry into the advertising business. ‘My father had a dread of my becoming a newspaperman, because in those days (and this is no exaggeration) almost every newspaperman was a heavy drinker… I was very devoted to my father, and he proposed instead that I go to a firm in what he considered a kindred field – Lord & Thomas in Chicago, an advertising agency… He wrote to Lord & Thomas, and they wrote back that they would give me a three months trial. Then they would see whether they could keep me on' (‘Wall Street History',
StocksandNews.com
, 4–18 February 2005).

Established by Daniel M Lord and Ambrose L Thomas in 1881, the agency had moved with the times, graduating from placing ads to creating them. Among its biggest clients was the brewer Anheuser Busch. But the young Lasker was given menial tasks that would make even the most mundane modern internship seem thrilling, such as sweeping floors and emptying ashtrays. Unable to take the job seriously, he turned his attention to big-city living. Perhaps in order to augment his meagre 10 dollars a week salary, he started gambling, and lost several hundred dollars in a crap game.

‘Then I had to think, and think fast, so I went to Mr Thomas, who was a very sympathetic man… and I told him what I'd done. I had never before sold anything to anybody, but I did a salesmanship job that day. I talked Mr Thomas into advancing me five hundred dollars – which was a fortune in those days. He went with me, and we settled with the gambler. I had to stay with Lord & Thomas to work out the five hundred dollars. I never got back to reporting.'

In fact, in order to speed the repayment of his debt, he convinced Lord & Thomas to give him the sales territory of Indiana, Ohio and Michigan,
which had just become free following the departure of a colleague. Encouraged by the fact that Lasker offered to continue working for 10 dollars a week unless he brought in business, Ambrose Thomas accepted the proposal. Now Lasker had to go out and literally prospect for clients.

In the interview with
American Heritage
, he recounts: ‘I had three assets: energy, dedication, and luck. I was a success from the first – from the time I was nineteen… The first town I covered, after Mr Thomas gave me a territory, was Battle Creek. There was a prospect there who was going to spend $3,000… a big account… I was lucky. I was full of energy and determination. I was a young boy – and that intrigued people. The first day I was out… I was awarded this order of US $3,000… which my predecessor could have landed any time before. He was a fine man, but he wasn't a “closer”.'

Albert certainly was, and he continued to bring in business, despite his later modest protestation that this was ‘largely as a result of the good work done by my predecessor'. Helped by a gift for spotting talents like John Kennedy and Claude Hopkins, Lasker rose smoothly to the top of the agency. Along the way, he began to change the advertising business. While most advertising firms still had only two copywriters, Lasker created a department of 10. He closely monitored the efficiency of the agency's campaigns, tracking his clients' sales curves against media placements to determine which mix of newspapers and magazines was the most successful. In 1904, Lord & Thomas made him a partner. Immaculately dressed, fast-talking and sparking with ideas, Lasker seemed to sweep aside all in his path like a snowplough. By 1912, he had bought out his former employers and become head of his own agency. With Lasker at the helm, advertising was well on its way to modernization.

In Europe, however, events were taking shape that would cast the advertising industry in a new and sinister role.