Albert Davis Lasker started out as a newspaper reporter when still a teenager but soon got interested in advertising. He started first as an office clerk and later became a salesman. He then asked to be given responsibility for a money-losing account so that he could try his hand at copywriting. By the age of 20, he had bought Lord & Thomas advertising agency and remained its chief executive for more than four decades. This book is as close as readers can come to an autobiography. This book tells the story of how he shaped the agency which ranked number one in its day. Originally published in 26 installments of Advertising Age, this book takes into the boardroom of Lord & Thomas and reveals the business philosophy and hard-won knowledge of the man who was its leader for 40 years. Get your copy today and learn how the earliest and most successful marketer in the first half of this century created that success.

This book is not written as a personal history, but as a business story. I have tried to avoid trivialities and to confine myself to matters of instructive interest. The chief object behind every episode is to offer helpful suggestions to those who will follow me. And to save them some of the midnight groping which I did. My only claim for credit is that I have probably worked twice as long as anybody else in this field. I have lived for many years in a vortex of advertising. Naturally I learned more from experience than those who had a lesser chance. Now I want that experience, so far as possible, to help others avoid the same difficult climb. Every pioneer should blaze his trail. That is all I have tried to do. I set down these findings solely for the purpose of aiding others to start far up the heights I scaled. Then, with the efforts I here describe, I hope you can now attain some peaks in advertising beyond any of us to date. - Claude C. Hopkins

In this unique work of scholarship, Edd Applegate surveys the key figures and events that transformed the American business landscape from its colonial beginnings to that Mad Men moment when advertising “went professional.” In The Rise of Advertising in the United States: A History of Innovation to 1960, Applegate traces how the explosion of newspapers in the American colonies laid the groundwork for the first advertising agents, leading to America’s first class of professional marketers. This entrepreneurial class of new white-collar professionals thrived on innovation in the quest for more publicity, larger clients, and greater sales. Some of the thought-leaders in what remained a novel, ever-changing form of communication include: • P. T. Barnum, master of the advertising “gimmick” • Lydia Pinkham, queen of the patent medicine cure • John Wanamaker, progenitor of modern retail advertising • Albert Lasker, the formulator of “reason why” advertising • Stanley Resor, the consummate market researcher • Elliott White Springs, the groundbreaking purveyor of the sexual innuendo Applegate records the achievements of these individuals and others up until 1960, when advertising underwent a remarkable change, becoming a post-war subject of study and scholarship in America’s colleges and universities. Written for those interested in learning about a select group of movers and shakers in this key area of American business, The Rise of Advertising in the United States should appeal to anyone interested in American business history.

This book collects together pieces by significant figures in American advertising, including George L. Dyer, who at the time of his death left almost no other written record of his point of view. There is a substantial introduction by the editor, which interweaves the history of advertising with the history of the era of American industrial coming-of-age, touching not only on the impact of mass-production, but also the beginnings of corporate social responsibility.

"This full-color book offers a sweeping history of advertising. It places developments in the advertising and marketing industries within a framework of major cultural events to help readers understand the conditions under which advertising developed. Timelines of historical and advertising industry events begin each chronological section"--

Stephen Fox explores the consistently cyclical nature of advertising from its beginning. A substantial new introduction updates this lively, anecdotal history of advertising into the mid-1990s. --Publisher.

Spanning a century, Pushing Cool reveals how the twin deceptions of health and Black affinity for menthol were crafted—and how the industry’s disturbingly powerful narrative has endured to this day. Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. The disproportionate Black deaths and cries of “I can’t breathe” that ring out in our era—because of police violence, COVID-19, or menthol smoking—are intimately connected to a post-1960s history of race and exploitation. In Pushing Cool, Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers.