Exit the Old Master

In a paneled conference room one day in 1942, Advertising Man Albert Lasker and one of his biggest clients sat surrounded by their deputies and advisers. Lasker advanced an idea which nearly everyone else opposed. "Well, gentlemen." said Lasker as he began to back out of the room, "you're doubtless right, and I am wrong--so wrong that I've only made $40 million in this business."

Not only did Albert Davis Lasker make more than $40 million out of advertising, he changed its technique and virtually fathered modern advertising. In so doing he turned such names as Lucky Strike, Palmolive, Pepsodent, Kleenex and Kotex into household words.

What Is the Secret? When Lasker, an 18-year-old stripling from Galveston, Texas, got a job in Chicago's Lord & Thomas agency in 1898, advertising was in its horse & buggy stage. Ad agencies were little more than space brokers. They bought space in newspapers and magazines at cut-rate, and resold it to advertisers at whatever markup they could get. They prepared little copy or art work. Lasker, who displayed a hypnotic, golden-tongued salesmanship from the start, soon changed all that. He laid out ad campaigns with newsy headlines and drawings, insisted on a 15% commission on the price of the ads. Thus he helped establish the fee system now standard for the industry. At 24, he was earning $1,000 a week, already owned 25% of the firm.

Lasker was still groping for a new approach to advertising when, in 1904, a stranger helped him find it. A boy came in from the saloon near Lord & Thomas bearing a note from John Kennedy, an ex-Canadian mounted policeman who was writing breezy ads for patent medicines: "I can tell you what advertising is." Lasker sent for Kennedy; liked his definition: that good advertising simply offered a "reason why" the customer should buy. Lasker hired Kennedy and they translated the theory into copy with such slogans as Palmolive's "Keep that Schoolgirl

Complexion" and Van Camp's (evaporated milk) "You Can Now Have a Cow in Your Pantry." At 30, Lasker was sole owner of Lord & Thomas and already a millionaire.

Salt in the Ocean. Lasker's biggest campaigns were for Lucky Strikes. President George Washington Hill was spending $1,000,000 a year on ads when Lasker stepped in; soon he was spending $25 million, and Luckies soared from third place to first in sales. Lasker and the legendary Hill spent endless hours dreaming up new slogans ("Nature in the Raw is Seldom Mild," "Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet"). Hill, worried because more women smoked Chesterfields, and impressed by the growing fad of "research," wanted a survey made. Lasker, who relied on his own intuition, thought that so-called "market research" only proved that "there is salt in the ocean." His common sense told him women preferred Chesterfields because of their clean white packages (Luckies were then green). Lasker took an experimental white Lucky package into the building lobby, tried it on a girl tobacco clerk. When she liked it, he telephoned Hill: "I've just completed a survey; the new package is a hit." It was (in spite of Luckies' clangorous campaign, "Lucky Strike green has gone to war," which was a flop).

Lasker was more than an adman; he liked to buy into small companies and make them big. He bought a one-third interest in Pepsodent and with Charles Luckman boosted it to a top place in U.S. dentifrices with his advertising razzle-dazzle. When the company was sold to Lever Bros., Lasker got $2,500,000. He invested $1,000,000 in International Cellucotton to persuade its president that the press taboo against Kotex ads could be overcome. Lasker overcame it by talking women's magazines into carrying ads saying Kotex was a boon to women and before long newspapers began carrying the ads also. His interest in Cellucotton added to his millions. He early saw the potentials of radio advertising, and for Pepsodent created two of radio's most famous shows (Amos n' Andy, Bob Hope).

Sunday Squash. Lasker's boundless energy spilled over into boxing, golf, baseball, politics. It was Lasker who started Jack Johnson on the way to the world's heavyweight championship. Later, as part owner of the Chicago Cubs, after the great "Black Sox" scandal, he proposed the reforms that made Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis baseball's czar. He helped elect Harding, who got him to take on the vast job of liquidating World War I's war-shipping fleets. He worked both himself and his employees hard. Ex-Lord & Thomas Employee William Benton recalls that he joined a squash club for exercise, but managed to get in only five games--"all on my way to work on Sunday morning." Like Benton, many of Lasker's proteges set up their own agencies and made their fortunes.*

Lasker's zest for the advertising business diminished after his first wife's death in 1936. In 1942, after remarrying, he astounded the advertising world by suddenly bringing Lord & Thomas, the most famous name in the business, to an end. He turned over his accounts to three young deputies--Emerson Foote, Fairfax Cone and Don Belding./- Having given away his agency, Lasker set about giving away his fortune as well. With his wife, Mary, who had long been interested in medical research (TIME, Aug. 30, 1948), he set up the Lasker Foundation to fight heart disease, rheumatic fever, cancer. Last week, at 72, Albert Lasker died of cancer.

* Erwin & Wasey's Charles Erwin and Louis Wasey, Young & Rubicam's John Orr Young, Hilton & Riggio's Peter Hilton, Sherman & Marquette's Stuart Sherman and Arthur Marquette, M. H. Hackett, J. M. Hickerson, Duane Jones, etc.

/- The successor agency still survives as Foote, Cone & Belding, although Foote has left the firm, is now a vice president of McCann-Erick-

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