CHAPTER 6 NOT WITH A BANG BUT WITH A WHIMPER

In 1926, Stuart Chase and Frederick Schlink met in a Greenwich Village speakeasy and over the conversation found that they agreed about many things. Chase was an accountant and former investigator at the Federal Trade Commission; Schlink, a standards engineer, had worked in the National Laboratories. Although following markedly different professions, both men were near zealots for the scientific method and its power to expose truths that might be contrary to popular opinion. They also shared, above all, an implacable contempt for the advertising industry, and what they regarded as the massive fraud it was perpetrating on the American public.1

The two would later use the following parable to capture their view of the inherent tension between truth and advertising:

Two men are discussing the merits of a famous brand of oil. Says one, “I know it must be good; it sells a million dollars worth a year. You see their advertisements everywhere.” But the other says, “I do not care how much it sells. I left a drop of it on a piece of copper for 24 hours, and the drop turned green. It is corrosive and I do not dare to use it.”

…The first speaker followed the crowd, but his friend disregarded the fact of bigness and went after the facts of chemistry. As a result, he arrived at a precisely opposite course of action from the common one. Sometimes the crowd is right; often it is wrong. It remains for science to read the balance.2

That evening, Chase and Schlink decided to collaborate on what would become a manifesto: Your Money’s Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer’s Dollar. As they wrote:

Consumers make their blunder-ing way, so many Alices in the Wonderland of salesman-ship; they buy not what they freely want, but what they are made to want. In the office of the advertising agency, human psychology is an open book. There is no strand or chord of it upon which the advertiser has not learned to play….But there is just a chance that the gentlemen who run this unparalleled side show may be putting on the acts a little too fast; just a chance that the superlatives have almost reached the limits of registering on the brain; that the sheer multiplicity of brand names dizzies the spectator instead of seducing him….In that hope this book has been written, but its authors have not deluded themselves with the belief that the triumph of science is inevitable.3

Both encapsulating and amplifying an emergent disenchantment with the high-handedness of advertising, Your Money’s Worth would become a bestseller, known in its time as the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the consumer movement, and, along with the Depression, it sparked another major revolt—another period of consumer resistance. The authors knew their success owed in part to a perspective that was, in their words, “in no sense revolutionary.” Chase and Schlink were no critics of the free market, private property, or any other defining feature of American capitalism. Indeed, it was in the defense of the market’s integrity that they attacked advertising, which, with its misleading and deceptive claims, and manufactured demand for relatively needless products, was distorting the economy to the nation’s detriment. In the wake of the book’s success, in 1929 the authors founded Consumers’ Research Incorporated, which aimed to be the world’s first scientific consumer product testing service. The new organization produced a confidential newsletter—the Consumers’ Research General Bulletin—which supplied its subscribers with secret reviews of products and product claims, based on rigorous testing.4

Chase and Schlink’s ventures were, in fact, only the leading edge of a broad-based assault that would ultimately figure in advertising’s near collapse. Over the 1930s the movement collected a range of fellow travelers, among them academics like Rexford Tugwell, the Columbia University economist and member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, who opined that nine tenths of advertising was simple economic waste; as well as members of various women’s groups, like the League of Women Shoppers. It was fitting perhaps, after so much targeting of them by advertisers, that women were widely viewed as the heart of the movement. The average woman was outraged, Business Week reported, to find that “the soap which made her so popular at the dance was made with a little creosol…recommended by the Government for disinfecting cars, barns and chicken yards.”5

Some of the most intense new critics of advertising were internal. In 1928, Theodore MacManus, who had so famously branded Cadillac, Dodge, and Chrysler, decided he’d had it. Writing in The Atlantic, he denounced both his own industry and the whole of modern civilization: “Advertising has gone amuck,” he wrote, “in that it has mistaken the surface silliness for the sane solid substance of an averagely decent human nature.” A serious Catholic, he blamed the American brand of Protestantism for creating a “Nadir of Nothingness” in which people worshipped consumer goods as “brightly packaged gifts of the gods.”6

Helen Woodward, a copywriter of prominence, wrote a popular book lamenting the emptiness of what she’d done with her life. She offered a professional confession: “In the advertising business we thought ourselves important. We thought we knew what we were doing; we had our plans for next week or next year. The realization came to me with a slow shock that I was nothing, we were nothing. We were feathers all of us, blown about by winds which we neither understood nor controlled.”

The darkest was the work of James Rorty, another former copywriter, who wrote Our Master’s Voice: Advertising (1934), in which he described the job’s effect on the soul. The adman, he wrote, “inevitably empties himself of human qualities. His daily traffic in half-truths and outright deceptions is subtly and cumulatively degrading. No man can give his days to barbarous frivolity and live. And ad-men don’t live. They become dull, resigned, hopeless. Or they become daemonic fantasts and sadists.” In one poetical passage reminiscent of “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Eliot’s 1925 cry of despair for Western civilization following the Great War, Rorty memorializes his former colleagues thus: “they are dead men. Their bones are bakelite. Their blood is water, their flesh is pallid—yes, prick them and they do not bleed. Their eyes are veiled and sad or staring and a little mad. From them comes an acrid odor—they do not notice it, it may be only the ozone discharge of the machine itself.”7

Advertising had not come so far so fast to take these attacks lying down. The International Advertising Association pronounced Your Money’s Worth a work of “communist propaganda.” The purpose of the consumer movement, another critic charged, was “to overthrow capitalists, but to have the overthrowing done by an army of embattled consumers and housewives rather than by the traditional revolutionary agent—Marx’s proletariat.”

They also bit the hand that fed them, attacking the new consumer clubs as efforts to foment socialism among gullible females. “Women’s clubs have put aside Oriental travel and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay as topics for discussion,” wrote one condescending critic, “and are now clamoring for speakers on ‘Consumer Education.’ Editors of women’s magazines find that their readers want fewer recipes for summer salads and more information on consumer goods specification or social consciousness.”8

But despite the brave and defiant front, advertising was in serious trouble. Like all American industry, it was damaged by the Depression. In addition to consumer resentment, it was also meeting a rising new skepticism among clients, the producers of goods and services who, facing their own declining fortunes, began to wonder whether advertising was really as effective as they had once thought; whether it wasn’t, perhaps, just a waste of money. With the economy as a whole in utter collapse, advertising outlays shrank over the 1930s to almost one third of what they had been by the end of the 1920s; several firms folded, and consumption’s former high priests and priestesses were among those left jobless. Trying to salvage some business, the remnants of the industry fell back to hard-selling patent medicine techniques that only confirmed the worst claims of critics.9

The consumer movement, meanwhile, kept up a relentless onslaught over the early 1930s, with the publication of still more books, including 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (on food and drug advertising) and Skin Deep (an attack on the cosmetic industry), as well as Eat, Drink and Be Wary, Guinea Pigs No More, and The Popular Practice of Fraud, all of them encouraging a growing sense that neither advertisements nor manufacturers were to be trusted. The combined effect raised an interesting question—just what use, if any, was advertising to the economy? Let’s consider it for a moment.10

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In classical economics, sellers supply products to consumers who want them, and the price is set by the intersection of supply and demand. But of course this model, which still dominates market analysis, leaves out plenty of details. For instance: How do consumers actually find out—or “discover” in today’s marketing parlance—what products exist in the first place? Even in an information-rich world, one sometimes doesn’t hear about things for one reason or another, and you cannot demand, much less buy, something you don’t even know about. How often have you discovered a film or a novel that you love years after its release?

Nor can the competition envisioned by classical economics and driven by differences in price and quality work unless people actually find out about the prices and quality differences that various producers offer. If I don’t know that fifteen minutes can save me 15 percent or more on my car insurance, how does competition contribute to efficiency? Put another way, if a price falls in the market and no one hears it, it doesn’t make a sound.

Information cannot be acted upon without attention and thus attention capture and information are essential to a functioning market economy, or indeed any competitive process, like an election (unknown candidates do not win). So as a technology for gaining access to the human mind, advertising can therefore serve a vital function, making markets, elections, and everything that depends on informed choice operate better, by telling us what we need to know about our choices, ideally in an objective fashion.

That, at least, is the ideal. The trouble, of course, is that most companies don’t care so much about market efficiency as maximizing profit; and so advertising rarely stops at the presentation of objective information meant to aid the competitive process.11 After all, what makes people “want” a product in the first place? There are some things, like a mother’s milk, and basic comforts that one might be born wanting; but for such items advertising is hardly necessary. Most other products in the contemporary economy are what one might call acquired tastes. No one is born wanting 4K television, a purse branded by Hermès or Louis Vuitton, or the odor eliminator product Febreze. For the advertisers, by far the most valuable function of advertising, then, is the shaping or creation of demands that would not otherwise exist.^* We have seen ample examples in the creation of demand for orange juice, toothpaste, mouthwash, the Cadillac automobile, or cigarettes (among women), and in the 1920s advertising executives described this as their function. “The achievements of American mass production would fall of their own weight,” Stanley Resor observed, “without the mass marketing machinery which advertising supplies.”

At its worst, as Chase and Schlink argued, advertising actually tries to attack and distort the mechanisms of choice, by presenting information that is either completely false (as in some patent medicine advertising), or deceptive, by, for example, failing to disclose important truths (like the fact that cigarettes cause cancer). And when advertising confuses, misleads, or fools customers, it does not aid the market process, or indeed any process premised on informed choice, but instead defeats it.

Branding, which grew to such heights in the 1920s, was subject to a slightly different criticism. As economist Edward Chamberlin, in his 1933 work The Theory of Monopolistic Competition, alleged, the creation of strong brand loyalties, having little to do with intrinsic value, was a calculated effort to foster irrational attachments by which a brand might survive competition from other brands that were as good or better. The most effective brand advertising, after all, does not try to convince you to make a choice, but rather to convince you that there is no choice—that Coca-Cola is the cola, that Camel is your cigarette, or that Harley-Davidson is the only motorcycle one would consider. It can succeed if it manages to make the brand part of your identity: One might feel the same loyalty to Miller the beer as a resident of Wisconsin feels to the state. True brand advertising is therefore an effort not so much to persuade as to convert. At its most successful, it creates a product cult, whose loyalists cannot be influenced by mere information: companies like Apple, Hermès, and Porsche are among those that have achieved this kind of immunity to competition, at least among their true believers. What is offered to adherents is not merely a good product (though often it is), but something deeper and more deeply fulfilling—a sense of meaning that comes with the surrender of choice.

The harms of advertising are aptly attested by the Lucky Strike campaign of the late 1920s and ’30s. The massive amounts spent on cigarette advertising had spurred demand for a dangerous product and deterred switching between brands, while also preventing cheaper newcomers from making much headway. The result was an oligopoly of branded cigarettes—Camels, Lucky Strike, and so on—that has lasted for decades, and, of course, no few cancerous lungs.12

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As advertising suffered through its comeuppance, much the same fate awaited Lucky Strike, when its “Reach for a Lucky” slogan attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. (The confectionery industry, displeased with tobacco’s displacement of their product, might have had something to do with this scrutiny.) The FTC had taken particular note of the claims that cigarettes soothed the throat, along with the dubious doctor’s endorsements and paid testimonials; it also cast a jaundiced eye on the suggestion that cigarettes were a weight-loss aid. Finding both the testimonials themselves and the failure to disclose the payment for them deceptive, the commission insisted that Hill stop claiming that Luckies would help anyone lose weight.13

Unfortunately, the commission’s actual power over deceptive advertising, legally ambiguous at best, was definitively quashed by a skeptical Supreme Court in 1931, just as Lucky’s campaign was firing on all cylinders. Consequently, Hill and Lasker were back to their old tricks, if somewhat more cautious, now peddling their claim more by implication than outright assertion. A new version of the ad from later in the 1930s shows a slender and beautiful woman on the edge of a diving board, surrounded by a plumper silhouette. “IS THIS YOU FIVE YEARS FROM NOW?” it asks. “When tempted to over-indulge, Reach for a Lucky instead.”14

But the humbling of the FTC and general sense of outrage yielded a legal reform movement whose goal was to control the excesses of advertisers and their clients. At the Agriculture Department (the FDA’s ancestor), Rexford Tugwell, the economist, was appointed an assistant secretary with a mandate to improve consumer protection. Like others in FDR’s government, he felt the 1906 Food and Drugs Act had not been strong enough to prevent unscrupulous practices. So the administration introduced a bill that pushed for legislators to impose tough rules over advertising.15

As originally conceived, the so-called Tugwell Bill was very tough indeed. It combined the concepts of false labeling and false advertising, designating as the latter anything that was clearly untrue, or that, by “ambiguity or inference,” created a false impression. The law also barred advertisements from purporting that a product could cure any of a long list of diseases. Products falsely labeled or advertised would be subject to seizure by the Department of Agriculture; their promoters subject to criminal prosecution.16

Such strong medicine would have effectively outlawed many of the techniques that the advertising industry had adopted over the 1910s and 1920s. Though the softer brand advertising would have been unaffected, much of reason-why advertising’s arsenal, the entire patent medicine approach included, would have been finished. If Hill and Lasker had persisted with the Lucky Strike campaign as it stood, they might both have landed in prison. And many of today’s most familiar infomercials claiming the miraculous benefits of this or that would be illegal.

Unlike patent medicines, however, the advertising industry, though bloodied, was more than equipped to defend itself; and its side was joined by the fledgling pharmaceutical industry, already practiced in government relations, and determined to protect what it called the “sacred right of self-medication.” Rexford Tugwell became the target of claims that he was a communist agent trying to import socialism: “The world knows that he has visited Russia and has found its institutions acceptable,” charged one industry flack, and now “he believes that packaging and advertising constitutes economic waste that should be prevented.” Advertising also cleverly enlisted newspapers to its cause, even issuing threats to pull most of its business were the bill to pass; as the historian Inger L. Stole points out, the American media almost entirely declined to cover the controversy. Sensing their very viability was at stake, the newspapers, food producers, and drug manufacturers formed a tight phalanx with the advertising industry, doing everything they could, even funding front groups, until they were sure the Tugwell Bill would go down in flames.17

In 1938, a far weaker law was passed; the Federal Trade Commission regained its powers to oversee advertising through a ban on “unfair or deceptive acts or practices,” which referred only to factually untrue statements, not the potential inferences targeted by Tugwell. The new law reflected “a five-year effort to render such protections painless for business interests”; and many at the time argued, like Milton Handler, a law professor at Columbia, that it did not go far enough: “While the [new law] represents a sincere attempt to stem the avalanche of false and misleading advertising, it is no more than a first, and unfortunately, inadequate step in that direction. Unless buttressed by clarifying amendments broadening its prohibitions and implementing it with effective sanctions, it will not effect an abiding solution of the vexing problem of false and misleading advertising.”18

The industry, albeit humbled, had survived, and mostly unregenerate. In the end it was left with the grim awareness that it had worse problems than government. In Depression-era America, advertising’s pitches were falling on deaf ears, or at least, on the ears of people now lacking the means to buy all those items great and sundry on which they had frittered away so much money just a few years before.19

Something had to change, and it would. But few in late 1930s advertising could have predicted it would be an explosion in the supply of usable attention. This happened thanks to two new inventions, the first one whose potential most doubted and the second whose potential they could scarcely imagine. A whole new attention economy would soon be born, and advertising would cling to it for dear life.