Albert Lasker, Part III
Brian Trumbore
President/Editor, StocksandNews.com

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.

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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.

Brian Trumbore

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