Chapter 38: The Advent of Modern Advertising
Advancements made in papermaking, printing, and lithography during the First Industrial Revolution led to many other developments. Among them: They set the foundation for modern advertising. This week we discuss some of the many characters from France, Great Britain, and the United States who gave rise to this new industry.
Sources for this episode include:
Crouse, Megan C. “Business Revolution: The Ad Agency.” The Pennsylvania Center for the Book, Pennsylvania State University. 2010.
“Émile de Girardin: French Journalist.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Last updated Jul 20, 1998. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emile-de-Girardin
Gardner, Victoria E. M. The Business of News in England, 1760–1820. Palgrave Macmillan. 2016.
Holland, Donald R. “Volney B. Palmer: The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 98, no. 3, 1974, pp. 353–381.
Johnson, Steve. How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. Penguin Random House. 2014.
Petit, Zachary. “The Father of Modern Advertising Rides Again.” Print Magazine. Jun 27, 2014. https://www.printmag.com/imprint/thomas-j-barratt/
Seaton, A. V. “Cope’s and the Promotion of Tobacco in Victorian England.” European Journal of Marketing (1986) 20#9 pp. 5–26.
Tungate, Mark. Adland: A Global History of Advertising. Kogan Page Limited. 2007.
Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830-1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe. Edited by Minsoo Kang and Amy Woodson-Boulton. Ashgate Publishing. 2008.
Full Transcript
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You know how you get when you go a couple of days without showering? You start to smell; your skin and hair starts to feel oily. I bet you hate it.
If you do, then I’ve got news for you: You’re not cut out for pre-industrial life. Before the Industrial Revolution, that un-showered state was pretty normal. In the Middle Ages, it was considered unhealthy to submerge yourself in water every day. According to one French doctor in 1655, “Bathing fills the head with vapors. It is the enemy of nerves and ligaments, which it loosens, in such a way that many a man never suffers from gout except after bathing.” Instead, doctors recommended clogging one’s pores with dirt and oil to prevent disease.
The few people who could afford bathtubs and to make hot water for them looked down on the practice. England’s Queen Elizabeth I insisted on bathing once a month, making her an absolute clean freak by 16th Century standards. France’s King Louis XIII wasn’t bathed once until he was 7 years old.
Sitting in a tub of water and your own filth was never all that appealing. But as water pumps began to improve in the late 18th Century, attitudes would slowly start to change. Charles Dickens used them to install a shower system in his house and became an early advocate for the daily shower. Several progressive voices of the Victorian era followed, arguing that cleanliness was next to godliness.
But the reason we became obsessed with personal hygiene is because people were trying to sell us personal hygiene.
In 1886, the celebrated English painter, Sir John Everett Millais, exhibited a new painting. Inspired by a 17th Century Dutch painting, it featured a five-year-old boy staring at a bubble he blew out of a pipe. Millais called it “A Child's World” but it soon became known better by another name: “Bubbles”.
The painting was then seen by Sir William Ingram, the Managing Director of The Illustrated London News, who got permission to reproduce it for his newspaper. And when a soap manufacturer saw “Bubbles” in The Illustrated London News, he decided to acquire the rights.
To explain why, I need to tell you about this soap manufacturer.
Thomas James Barratt was born in London in 1841. It seems he had something of a middle-class upbringing, and after completing his education he got a job as a traveling salesman for Pears’ Soap. Working for the company, he met the founder’s great-granddaughter, Mary Pears and married her in 1865. That same year he went into partnership with her father, becoming the company’s bookkeeper, and forever tying himself to the firm of A&F Pears’.
Among other things, Barratt was interested in chemistry and experimented with soap production, making various dyes and trying to create “pure” soap.
But his truest calling was in selling the product – not in the door-to-door way like how he started, but in a mass-advertising way. He took it upon himself to write copy for the ads, and it was totally revolutionary. He didn’t so much refer to it as “soap” but rather, as “Pears’”. His tagline, “Good morning! Have you used Pears’ soap?” was used so widely, that it not only grew brand recognition, it changed the way people saw personal hygiene. Many people began, for the first time, washing themselves every morning.
And the copy was only the half of it. What really captured the customer’s attention was the pictures – beautiful, eye-catching illustrations of people using the product. And those imaginary users were almost always from the rising middle class, demonstrating a certain virtue of cleanliness. And the customer base – those aspiring to rise in social position during the Second Industrial Revolution – identified with the images and started bathing daily as a means to advancement.
And by changing consumer habits, A&F Pears’ grew considerably. Barratt took over the company and turned Pears’ Soap into one of the world’s leading brands. Because it was a private company, it’s difficult to say how much financial growth there was exactly, but it must have been astronomical.
And among the images Barratt used to promote Pears’ was the “Bubbles” painting. He bought the rights to use it from Millais for £2,200 – roughly $360,000 in modern terms – and slapped the Pears’ logo on top. Millais was accused by fellow artists of selling out – the first of many artists who would face such accusations. Barratt, meanwhile, went down in history as the “Father of Modern Advertising”.
The marketing genius of Thomas J. Barratt may have been unprecedented, but the truth is, advertising had been around for a very long time. And before Barratt had his opportunity to sell soap with it, the Industrial Revolution created a whole new advertising industry. Here’s what happened…
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 38: The Advent of Modern Advertising
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So, this is the final regular chapter of 2019. But don’t worry! I will be posting a special holiday bonus episode on Christmas Eve. It will basically be an entire episode devoted to a particular Christmas story you probably know quite well – a Christmas story written during (and practically about) the Industrial Revolution. I am of course talking about A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
After that, we will circle back in the New Year.
Now, advertising – in one form or another – seems to go back as far as commerce does. Town criers and sign-boards can be traced back centuries. There are ads to be seen in the ruins of Pompeii, for example. And, throughout time, advertising has advanced alongside advancements in media. Every time a new form of media develops, advertising seems to follow. Whether it’s social media, television, radio, or newspapers, advertisements have featured prominently.
So, it should come as little surprise that, after Johannes Guttenberg made his printing press in the 1400s, advertising got its first big boost. As new, printed novels and treatises started circulating in the 1500s, so too did ads in the form of handbills and flyers. Then, in the early 1600s, a French doctor and journalist became an unlikely pioneer of print advertising.
Théophraste Renaudot was born into a wealthy Protestant family in 1586 and studied medicine at Paris and Montpellier. He became a doctor by age 20 and would eventually become the physician to Louis XIII. But in his early years of practice he had trouble attracting patients due to his young age. So, he expanded his horizons.
Among Renaudot’s interests was how to most effectively care for the poor, and so he established a Paris-based job recruitment office where, among other things, he had a notice board and disseminated job postings in a new newspaper. Naming it after an Italian currency called gazetta, which he had encountered during his travels, he called the paper La Gazette. It was France’s first newspaper, and Renaudot was running the first personal ads.
As technology underwent massive improvements during the first Industrial Revolution, so too did the scale and scope of advertising. In 1799, Louis-Nicolas Robert invented a new papermaking machine that could produce continual rolls of paper. In the first decade of the 19th Century, this was adapted by the brothers Sealy and Henry Fourdrinier, who used a mesh conveyor belt to churn out huge quantities of paper sheets big enough to fit a wall.
Printing on these huge rolls of paper got better and better too. As you’ll remember from Chapter 33, German inventor Friedrich Koenig built a printing press in 1814 for The Times in London, which printed as many as 400 pages per hour. And, by the 1840s, Richard March Hoe was making his ten-cylinder Hoe Type Revolving Machine, which could print up to 20,000 pagers per hour. As newspapers became easier to produce, they became more widespread and more affordable.
Among the individuals who profited from this opportunity was one William Tayler.
Born in London in 1739 or 1740, not much is known about Tayler. By 1779, we know he was collecting news to supply to provincial newspapers across the country – sort of a pre-telegraph version of the AP or Reuters. But he was competing with other news aggregators and struggling.
So, by 1784, he started to change his focus. He established a new agency at No. 5, Warwick Court, Newgate Street. Instead of collecting news, he would collect advertisements to get placed in papers. So, if you were a merchant in London trying to sell your goods in, say, Southampton, you’d get Tayler to place an ad in the local Southampton newspaper. He’d take a percentage of whatever rate the paper charged.
In 1803, Tayler brought on a new business partner, Thomas Newton. Together, they became indispensable to the newspaper industry. As one news man told a friend trying to establish his provisional paper, “Tayler & Newton must be written to, soliciting their recommendation to advertisers.”
Tayler & Newton became perhaps the first ever advertising agency. Now, all they really did was get ads placed. They didn’t write copy or handle any creative, those advertising industry services would come later. By 1812, at least three other similar agencies had formed, all in London.
As the Edinburgh Review described the growing industry in 1829:
“At these offices, advertisements are received for all the country papers without increased charge to the advertiser, the commission of the agent being paid by the newspaper proprietor, and these agents also send to the country the stamps necessary for the papers, and undertake the collection of accounts owing in London.”
But print advertising didn’t just come in the form of newspapers.
In 1796, a struggling Bavarian actor and playwright named Alois Senefelder was experimenting with a new process for etching. He used greasy, acid resistant ink as a resist on a smooth, fine-grained slab of Solnhofen limestone. What he discovered was it could be extended to allow printing from the flat surface of the stone alone, making it the first planographic printing process.
The French would call this process “lithography”.
With lithographic printing, you could mass-print more than just alpha-numeric characters – you could mass-print images too. By the turn of the 19th Century, merchants and retailers began using the process when printing their trade cards – sort of an early version of a business card – in order to stand out more. Eventually it became a given that your trade cards would include pictures of your products, in addition to the prices, special features, and directions to your store.
By 1837, a multi-color lithography process – chromolithography – was invented by a Franco-German lithographer named Godefroy Engelmann.
And although these new techniques in papermaking, printing, and lithography were important for a great many reasons, perhaps the most substantial one was the ability for merchants to more effectively sell their products in the age of mass production. More and more, mass production meant mass consumption.
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Newspapers started to pop up within a couple hundred years of the printing press. And from the get-go, they relied on a combination of paid subscriptions and advertising to stay afloat. And as it became possible to print them on a larger scale, it became possible to reach a much wider audience.
By the 1830s, it was becoming clear that the wider audience would be easier to tap into if subscription fees were lower. And as a result, mass advertising was about to become a lot more important.
Émile de Girardin was born in Paris in 1802 to Count Alexandre de Girardin, and his mistress, Madame Dupuy, the wife of a Paris attorney. By his mid-20s, Girardin was known as an enthusiastic writer in the city and, by 1828, he had started his first periodical, Le Voleur, a monthly review of arts and science. In the 1830s, his success grew as a publisher, as he released an atlas, an almanac, and several more journals. He was then elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1834.
Then in June 1836, Girardin established his life’s most important publication: La Presse.
Basically an early version of a conservative tabloid, La Presse is remembered as the first “penny press” newspaper in France. While other newspapers of the time charged subscriptions of roughly 80 francs per year, La Presse charged just 40. And it wasn’t mailed to a small pool of readers like other newspapers were – it was distributed by street vendors to anyone willing to pay for it.
La Presse was, as a result, more reliant on advertising for financial success than other papers. Because the price was lower, it had more readers. And with more readers, it was a better investment for advertisers than other papers were. In the early years, these ads were typically a few lines with various font sizes, usually including a quick description of the product or service, along with the prices. But by the 1840s, they often times included small illustrations too. And during elections the paper would be filled with what we today call “advertorials” – opinion columns that were paid for but looked like other editorial content.
La Presse was wildly successful, gaining tens of thousands of subscribers, and serving as a foundation of a larger publishing empire Girardin was building. And its low-price, heavy-advertising publishing model was quickly adapted by other industrial-scale newspapers, starting with Armand Dutacq’s Le Siècle just a month after La Presse.
In this age of industrial-scale newspapers, modern advertising first started to take shape.
In the 1850s, the British tobacco firm Cope Brothers & Company began advertising their products with unusual foresight. For example, they created marketing segments by class. Working class tobacco users were promised a rugged, heavy taste in the ads they saw, while the more aristocratic consumers would see copy with phrases like “delicately fragrant”. Most hilarious were the advertisements directed toward middle-class customers, who were told Cope Brothers brand tobacco “not only checks disease but preserves the lungs.”
And the business model built by Tayler & Newton started to spread.
Volney B. Palmer was born in the area of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1799. His father, Nathan Palmer, was an attorney and local politician who had come there from Connecticut, before moving the family to Mount Holly, Burlington County, in 1818. At that point, the rural community had no newspaper, so the Palmer family decided to start one: The Burlington Mirror. Nathan provided the capital and editorial direction. His sons provided the labor. Even Nathan’s wife and daughters pitched in, learning the journalism trade which they would carry on after Nathan’s death.
Volney too learned the trade, including the market for advertising. The Burlington Mirror would run ads for stage coach schedules, rewards for lost horses, and medicines that promised to cure all kinds of illnesses and injuries.
Around 1830, Palmer and his brother left the family business for the new and growing town of Pottsville, where they tried to get in on the coal boom. His brother would go on to take over the local newspaper while Palmer made a successful career in real estate. Then in 1841, Palmer moved his family to Philadelphia to grow the real estate business. But the banks were still reeling from the Panic of 1837 and credit was practically frozen. (Not good if you were in real estate.)
So Palmer decided to expand the scope of his business, changing the listing from a “real estate office” to a “real estate and coal office” (whatever a “coal office” is), and then adding advertising to the repertoire in 1842. That year he ran an ad for his services in the business directory…
“ADVERTISEMENTS and Subscriptions received for some of the best and most widely circulated Newspapers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and in many of the principal cities and towns throughout the United States, for which he has the Agency, affording an excellent opportunity for Merchants, Mechanics, Professional Men, Hotel and Boarding house Keepers, Railroad, Insurance and Transportation Companies, and the enterprising portion of the community generally, to publish extensively abroad their respective pursuits—to learn the terms of subscription and advertising, and accomplish their object here without the trouble of perplexing and fruitless inquiries, the expense and labour of letter writing, the risk of making enclosures of money, etc., etc.”
V.B. Palmer’s Real Estate and Coal Office and Newspaper Agency (yes, that’s what his business was soon called) grew very slowly. And as it did, the advertising service became a bigger and bigger share of the work. Newspaper publishers started growing dependent on the business Palmer was sending them.
By 1849, Palmer renamed it the American Newspaper Subscription and Advertising Agency – the first time we know of words “Advertising Agency” being used like that. He claimed to be the sole representative of 1,300 of the nation’s 2,000 (or so) newspapers.
And he went a step further than the British agencies went. He would meet with advertisers and craft specialized strategies to fit their needs, organizing presentations to them outlining how their dollars would be spent and where. For this work he would charge a 25% commission on top of the total expenditure to the papers.
Now, Palmer wasn’t doing any of the creative work – ad agencies wouldn’t start providing that service until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But he did successfully make the case for his business model, arguing that his customers were saving time, energy, and ultimately money by engaging his expert services rather than trying to place all the ads on their own. He was an economic specialist, tapping into that “Division of Labour” Adam Smith was talking about. (Shout out Chapter 10!)
Not only did Palmer’s business grow, but he was joined by competition. And after he died in 1864, his company was bought and went through a series of mergers. In 1877 it was finally incorporated as part of N. W. Ayer & Son, which revolutionized and set the standards of American advertising going into the 20th Century.
So, advertising was taking off. And as it did, the hucksters and fraudsters followed.
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In 1903, an ad man named Daniel Lord told a story about a meeting he had with a client from his early days in the business. The client had scolded him, “Young man, you may know a lot about advertising, but you know very little about the furniture business.”
From the earliest days, despite the success they had in generating sales for their clients, advertising agents were seen in a negative light – their work as being superficial, their fee-for-placement system as suspect if not entirely corrupt.
And they were willing to advertise just about anything.
In 1844, the French caricaturist J. J. Grandville published a new book of his prints, Un Autre Monde. It begins with a character explaining “My name is Puff. That says enough.” In this story, Puff is a former journalist who resorts to schemes when he is out of work. The story underlines the 19th Century associations between journalists, publicists, and charlatans.
In those days, the word “Puff” would have been familiar to readers. “Puffery” referred to the way one would exaggerate the benefits of his product or service. Puffing would involve unsubstantiated claims and, even, the manipulation of scientific data. A great example of this can be seen in the 2003 film Elf, where Buddy (played by Will Farrell) sees a neon sign in a restaurant window and goes inside.
“You did it! Congratulations! World’s best cup of coffee. Great job, everybody!”
Everyone in the restaurant, including the staff, looks at him with jaded expressions. Everyone in there knows it is not the world’s best cup of coffee. It’s a whole lot of puff.
And puff was a constant problem with ads in 19th Century publications.
Among other things he promises in Un Autre Monde, Dr. Puff (yes, he’s also a quack doctor) is a “steam-powered concert” where perfect machines have taken the place of musicians. He then reviews his own steam-powered concert, which he finds to be a masterpiece, and modestly concludes “[Dr. Puff] has lavished on all his assistants the care of his art with a disinterest above all praise.”
Dr. Puff later takes a wife – a woman named “Advertising”.
The satire was hitting at an obvious point: Newspapers were printing ridiculous commercial claims alongside what was supposed to be objective journalism. Medicine show language could be found alongside serious reporting. And because money was changing hands, nobody was questioning the validity of claims.
No other industry was worse about this than the 19th Century pharmaceutical industry. From pitching snake oil to opioids, just about every newspaper came with promises about the latest cures and remedies for all sorts of afflictions. I’ll share some interesting ones this week on Twitter. (So, follow along @IndRevPod – that’s @ I-N-D – R-E-V – P-O-D.)
Advertising was full of such dubious messaging throughout the 19th Century. It wouldn’t be until the Progressive Era that governments started cracking down on false advertising.
And, in fairness to the publishers, it was hard to test the claims about every new good and service coming on the market. Because there was a lot. Inventors were coming up with no shortage of products that were potentially world changing. And we’re going to talk about this age of invention, in the first episode, in 2020, of the Industrial Revolutions.
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Don’t forget to come back next week for the Holiday Bonus Episode about A Christmas Carol.
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