1920s Advertising History: The Birth of Modern Marketing

The modern advertising industry was born in the 1920s. Total advertising spending in the United States grew from about $1.3 billion in 1915 to roughly $3 billion by 1926 — an increase of more than 130 percent. The agencies that produced those ads — J. Walter Thompson, BBDO, McCann Erickson, Lord & Thomas — grew into corporate giants. The techniques they pioneered — testimonial advertising, the celebrity endorsement, the jingle, the radio commercial, the appeal to desire rather than need — became the standard tools of the trade, and they remain so today.

The Pre-1920s Advertising World

The 1920s advertising industry was built on the wreckage of an earlier one. Before 1900, much of the most visible advertising in America was for patent medicines — the “miracle” remedies sold under names like Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, Peruna, and Hadacol. The products were often alcoholic, addictive, or poisonous, and the advertising was often fraudulent. In 1905, Samuel Hopkins Adams published a series of exposés in Collier’s Weekly called “The Great American Fraud,” documenting the harm caused by the patent medicine industry. The articles led to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the creation of the Bureau of Chemistry (later the FDA) to enforce it.

The advertising industry responded to the new regulation by becoming more professional. The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 gave the federal government new authority to prosecute false advertising. The early advertising agencies had been essentially space brokers — companies that bought space in newspapers and magazines and resold it to advertisers. The shift to full-service creative agencies began in the late nineteenth century but accelerated dramatically in the 1920s.

The New Agencies

The 1920s saw the rise of the modern advertising agency. J. Walter Thompson, founded in 1868, was the largest agency in the world by 1920, with offices in New York, Chicago, and London. BBDO — Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn — was founded in 1928 by George Batten and the former employees of the JWT-rival Barton Durstine. McCann Erickson, founded in 1902 by Harrison King McCann and Alfred Erickson, grew rapidly in the 1920s to become one of the largest agencies in the world. Lord & Thomas, the Chicago-based agency of Albert Lasker and Claude Hopkins, was the most influential agency of the 1920s. Lasker, who would later be called “the father of modern advertising,” revolutionized the industry by paying copywriters rather than space brokers.

The agencies’ leaders became cultural celebrities. Bruce Barton, the chairman of BBDO, published a bestselling book in 1925 called “The Man Nobody Knows,” in which he argued that Jesus of Nazareth had been the world’s first great advertising man. The book sold more than 200,000 copies in its first year and made Barton a national figure. To see how these techniques were used to sell the products of the era,

The New Techniques

The 1920s agencies pioneered techniques that would define modern advertising. The most important was the appeal to desire rather than need. The earlier advertising model had assumed that consumers bought products because they were useful. The 1920s agencies taught Americans to buy products because of the emotions, identities, and aspirations associated with them. The car was not just transportation; it was freedom. The cigarette was not just tobacco; it was sophistication. The lipstick was not just makeup; it was modern femininity.

The shift was driven by the new science of psychology. The behaviorist John B. Watson left academia in 1920 to join the J. Walter Thompson agency. Watson applied the principles of behaviorism to advertising, arguing that ads should be designed to elicit specific emotional responses — fear, desire, status anxiety — rather than to convey information. The “motivation research” pioneered by Ernest Dichter in the 1930s was a direct descendant of Watson’s work.

The new agencies also pioneered the celebrity endorsement. The 1920s saw the first endorsements by movie stars, sports figures, and society personalities. The 1927 Pears’ Soap campaign featuring the film star Sarah Bernhardt was an early example; the Lucky Strike “torches of freedom” campaign of 1929, in which Edward Bernays — a nephew of Sigmund Freud — hired women to smoke in public as a statement of female independence, was a master class. The Woodbury Soap campaign, written by Helen Lansdowne at JWT, used the slogan “the skin you love to touch” to sell a previously unremarkable bar of soap. For the parallel transformation in product financing,

The Radio Commercial

The most important new medium of the 1920s was commercial radio. The first paid radio ad aired on WEAF in New York on August 28, 1922: the Queensboro Corporation paid $50 for a 10-minute advertisement for Hawthorne Court apartments in Jackson Heights. The broadcast was controversial — many early broadcasters believed radio should be supported by donations, the way public radio is today — but the commercial model won.

By 1929 there were more than 600 commercial radio stations in the United States, and the two national networks — NBC (formed 1926 by RCA) and CBS (formed 1927) — had been established. National advertisers like Coca-Cola, Lucky Strike, Palmolive, and General Motors bought blocks of time on the networks. The 1928 presidential election was the first in which radio advertising played a major role. The jingle — a short, memorable song used to advertise a product — became a defining feature of commercial radio. The commercial interruption — the moment when a program paused to make way for an advertisement — became a permanent part of American life. ## Outdoor Advertising and the Rise of Neon

The 1920s also saw the rise of new forms of outdoor advertising. The billboard had existed since the late nineteenth century, but the 1920s saw it spread to every major American highway, with painted ads for cigarettes, soft drinks, and gasoline visible from every passing car. The neon sign, invented in France in 1910, was first sold in the United States to a Packard car dealership in Los Angeles in 1923. By the end of the decade, neon signs lit up every major American downtown, from Times Square to the Las Vegas Strip to the Great White Way of downtown Chicago.

The Magazine Revolution

The 1920s were also the golden age of the American magazine. The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Liberty, Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Time, and the Literary Digest together reached tens of millions of readers. The magazines’ covers — illustrated by artists like J.C. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell, and Maxfield Parrish — were as famous as the articles inside. The full-page, four-color advertisements that filled the magazines turned their pages into a parallel world of consumer dreams. The Sears, Roebuck catalog — which had peaked at more than 100 million copies circulated in the early 1920s — was the most widely read publication in America. To see how these advertising-driven consumer desires reshaped personal style,