Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising Read online

  Although Shaw critiqued the commercialization of the stage, famously referring to conspicuous product placement in shows as “a tailor’s advertisement making sentimental remarks to a milliner’s advertisement in the middle of an upholsterer’s and decorator’s advertisement,” 28 he surely noticed the explosion of product endorsements by performers in periodicals and newspapers by the early 1890s as well as “the press’s ability to rapidly circulate the appearance, personal details, and opinions of personalities on a huge scale.” 29

  However, almost as soon as the technique of incorporating the names of well-known figures into advertisements was deemed effective, starting in the early nineteenth century and flourishing well into the twentieth, its success was marred by both overusage and improper attribution without consent, engendering an atmosphere of public mistrust. Indeed, stage actresses’indiscriminate endorsement of anything and everything ultimately undermined the value of the testimonial by raising questions in consumers’ minds about the truthfulness of their claims. … By the late 1890s, a series of scandals involving the use of fake or “tainted” testimonials by patent medicine companies further tarnished the testimonial’s reputation [so that] by 1900 testimonial advertising was largely discredited, and actresses all but disappeared from the advertising pages for almost a decade. 30

  A historical retrospective that appeared in Printers’ Ink in 1938 described the stumble of the testimonial at the turn of the century:Ultimately, the whole thing became a competition of names and ran the cycle of abuse which has since become familiar in testimonial advertising.

  So great waxed the demand for big-name testimonials that the securing of them became an organized business. … [In the end,] the testimonial craze caused public ridicule. Theatrical travesties in advertising were received with uproarious applause by audiences everywhere. 31

  In addition to the proliferation of endorsements in advertising of all kinds, there was a zealous backlash emerged, intent on exposing “the worthlessness of patent medicines and their exaggerated claims,” which counted among its collateral damage the “credibility and viability” of the testimonial technique. 32 In an effort to put the taint of patent medicine behind it, the field tried to re-brand itself:The testimonial scandal cast a pall over the advertising industry, [and,] in an effort to restore dignity to the profession and refute lingering charges of charlatanism, advertising agents abandoned their Barnumesque techniques and began to reinvent themselves as professional business men. 33

  Nonetheless, in the early twentieth century, attempts by advertising agencies to attract consumers through various media included a return to the celebrity testimonial technique but with a difference. Rather than simply indiscriminately associating a famous name with products, campaigns in the 1910s sought to capitalize the particular authority of the spokesperson to deepen the persuasiveness of the appeal.

  Stage actresses were sought to endorse products directly related to their profession, especially in the areas of fashion and beauty, and the testimonial staged a comeback. They indirectly follow Shaw’s model of professional branding via ventures into advertising that were, as Marlis Schweitzer has shown, “an extension of the actress’s other promotional activities, including writing articles and delivering lectures on beauty and fashion”:Acting independently or through an agent, these women who made arrangements with advertisers allowed them to profit from their own success, enhance their public profile, and promote themselves as fashion experts. For performers whose careers were often circumscribed by male producers, managers, and directors, testimonial advertising also presented an opportunity to take responsibility for at least one aspect of their professional lives. 34

  Yet, as Schweitzer goes on to argue, there was also a particular danger with the testimonial to the actress’s professional autonomy:Whereas fashion articles and onstage fashion endorsements allowed performers to monitor and shape their self-commodification, testimonial advertisements limited their ability to control the meanings associated with their names and images. 35

  Unfortunately, promotional agents would run unauthorized and uncompensated endorsements, a trend actresses were powerless to stop, and agencies often tried contractually to forbid spokeswomen from participating in advertising for other products, forcing them to turn over exclusive control of their name for a certain period of time. 36 Legally, “viewed as public property – and therefore public commodities – celebrity performers found it increasingly difficult to control and shape their public personae.” 37 An added effect on the industry, especially when actresses refused to comply with directives to limit their commercial exposure, was that endorsement was again beginning to saturate advertising, re-challenging in the 1920s the effectiveness of the technique by re-igniting public skepticism. Advertising posed for actresses the same risks that Shaw envisioned, making the control of one’s brand a most urgent imperative. Indeed, the playwright’s early ventures into testimonial advertising illustrate how predatory the market could be in poaching successful brands.

  Despite his negative outlook on patent medicine as an industry and revulsion at the industry’s deceitful marketing practices, Shaw nonetheless purchased and used many proprietary products. A glance at the various postcards and letters from Shaw kept by his Welwyn pharmacists reveals that, even into the late 1940s, Shaw was well-versed in proprietary brand names and the health commodity market. Starting his professional relationship with Shaw in 1908, chemist E. P. Downing admitted that these requests for products give the impression that “Shaw was a bit of a hypochondriac” but that his requests for “medicines or other goods we sold [occurred] much less than most customers” and are just the result of an “ever-inquiring mind [that] led him to an interest in vitamins.” 38 However, appearing in such proximity to his market critiques in Doctor’s Dilemma and Misalliance , it still is startling at first to encounter Shaw’s 1912 endorsement of Formamint .

  Developed in Germany, Formamint was a lozenge made of lactose and formaldehyde and promoted as a throat antiseptic agent. Analyzed and approved by the British Medical Journal as an alternative to gargles in February of 1908 and put to wide use by the Red Cross, hospitals, and the British army, Formamint tablets were marketed as both therapeutic and preventative. Even surgeons took them as part of the process of preparing for a procedure. In its March 1908 issue, the Dublin Journal of Medical Science provided an overview of international research on Formamint conducted between 1905 and 1907, indicating it had no irritative effects and was “proved to have very well-indicated uses in all cases of asepsis of the oro-pharyngeal regions” even extending into “all infective throat conditions” like scarlet fever and diphtheria (240). 39 The ad copy adopted a “scientific approach” and detailed a purifying process to clear out toxic bacteria (not unlike that of the Turkish bath ), this time via a “candy-like tablet” that dissolves in the mouth and “frees the germicide.” The product was widely advertised in medical journals as well as popular newspapers and periodicals, always deploying a testimonial-based approach, often citing the journal articles as well as citing names of prominent users, both medical practitioners and famous figures such as Enrico Caruso and Jack London.

  The product did face some challenges right from the start. Seven months after its affirmation of the tablet, on September 12, 1908, the British Medical Journal reported on a documented case the previous June of poisoning by Formamint as well as additional evidence contained in the testimony of a civil lawsuit, concluding that the “tablets cannot be regarded as completely harmless.” 40 The piece was reprinted subsequently in The British Dental Journal. That its developer Wulfing & Co. kept up with medical journals is clear from the swift rebuttal that appeared a month later in the “Letters, Notes, etc.” section, claiming it “only fair to state” that in Medizinsche Klinik (July 12) a company representative says that the unpleasant side-effects were “due to idiosyncrasy” and identifies supporting witnesses to certify it “impossible” (including in cases of accidental overdoses in ch
ildren), “even after the most searching examination, to discover any ill effect.” 41

  A much more dramatic and sustained pushback occurred when Formamint was introduced in the USA in 1911, typical of the struggles new commercial remedies faced for legitimacy, especially among medical practitioners. The April 10, 1913 issue of Printers’ Ink used Formamint as a case study to illustrate how the “protection of dealer’s profit on [the] first of [a] family of products makes it far easier to secure distribution for the second.” 42 According to the article, less than a year after its introduction in America in 1911, “10,000 dealers” of Formamint were secured by leveraging the company’s success in preventing its other product Sanatogen from price cutting. In unusual detail, the piece provides a window into the steps of the marketing process taken for Formamint, from an initial phase of “circularized” physicians and dentists, moving to advertisement in trade papers for both industries, and culminating in letters to druggists across the country. What Printers’ Ink valorized as an effective roll out was greeted with suspicion and scorn by the American Medical Association (AMA) . Interestingly, their objection seemed to be not so much with the product (one of countless arriving every year) but with the marketing, done “by that cheapest of all methods of advertising ‘patent medicines ,’ through the medical profession”:Doubtless it will be only a matter of time when the required number of testimonials from American physicians are forthcoming when we may expect to find the newspapers of this country heralding through their advertising pages the fact that Formamint is “recommended by thousands of American physicians.” 43

  The piece goes on to identify by name the journals carrying the first wave of Formamint advertisements and concludes,How much longer will the medical profession permit itself to be used as an unwitting agency for the exploitation of “patent medicines ”? … That it should still be considered workable is complimentary neither to the standard of advertising ethics of medical journals that accept the Formamint advertisements nor to the intelligence of the members of the medical profession who will “fall for it.”

  For the AMA , “the game has been worked so often that it has become transparently thin [but] evidently not worn out, however, or shrewd nostrum promoters would not waste their time or money on it.”

  The 1913 Printers’ Ink piece also revealed that the introduction of the product to the American public via salesmen and newspaper notices didn’t gain much traction, due (according to the company) to a poor choice of seasonal timing for the launch. What is striking is that, among the incredible detail it presents about publicity and strategies—from counter signs and window displays to the use of testimonials and “microscopic slides” in the copy—no mention is made of Shaw who had (inadvertently, it seems) by that time become the celebrity anchor of new Formamint advertisements. The playwright mentions the product by name in two published personal letters to Charlotte . In one, dated May 2, 1912, he relays that he has bought Formamint for an ailing friend, and that it was “rather successful” against her cold. 44 In the other, dated August 22, 1912, he complains, almost sounding like the tablet’s ad copy, “I left my bottle of formamint behind and cant get any here: a serious matter, as I am constantly picking up germs that develop into diphtheria in ten minutes if not promptly poisoned.” 45 He seems to have continued to use the product in subsequent decades. In August of 1945, Shaw sent a postcard to E. P. Downing , his chemist in Welwyn, that had taped to it a print advertisement for Redoxon (the first synthetic vitamin to be mass-marketed). In addition to asking for two bottles, he inquires whether Formamint is available and, if so, whether he might have “a couple of units” sent. 46 But it was his mention of Formamint in a July 1912 piece for Christian Commonwealth that would trigger a change of direction for the tablet’s advertisements, starting in August 1912.

  In a letter to the editor, Shaw took issue with a sermon delivered by Reginald John Campbell , the minister of the City Temple, that figured the Life Force as “blind, senseless, and void of intelligence.” 47 The playwright critiqued the “capital danger in popular Christianity” of “detaching God from Man” and the “capital difficulty of the apparent incompatibility of the existence of malignant creatures with benevolence in their creator”: “It is no use putting all the failures into one parcel, labeled ‘Life Force: care of Bernard Shaw,’ and all the successes into another, labeled ‘The Father: care of R.J. Campbell , City Temple.’ They both come through the same post office.” One must, he went on, admit that “the failures and mistakes of Man are the failures and mistakes of the Life Force”:The cry of God to men, as I hear it, is “Pity me; help me; stop flattering me; above all, stop talking damned nonsense in your superstitious terror of me; for I am also beset with error and burdened with unimaginable labours; and I have created you to be my helpers and servers, not my sycophants and apologists.”

  Far from an endorsement, Shaw mentions the tablet brand in a throwaway example to illustrate his point: “When a man breaks a cobra’s neck or puts a Formamint lozenge into his mouth to kill a few thousand bacilli he is trying to wipe out the consequences of old mistakes of creation.”

  The following month, Formamint’s print advertisements were trumpeting the reference, seemingly without the explicit consent of the playwright. The decision marked a moving away from the “scientific” and practitioner testimonial techniques that had so drawn the ire of the AMA . Alice McEwan mentions Shaw’s appearance for Formamint as an example of Shaw’s use of his celebrity “to authenticate and promote health-related products”; yet, while she quotes his statement about the tablets’ ability to eradicate germs, she doesn’t comment on the unusual form of the endorsement (see Fig. 3.1). 48 Just underneath a line sketch of the playwright’s head directly engaging the reader, the copy was structured as a single column, mimicking the style of an article, and entitled in bold “Mr. Bernard Shaw on Formamint.” It begins: “Many famous persons have voluntarily given us testimonials to Formamint. But Mr. Bernard Shaw has paid us the still higher compliment of publicly treating Formamint as a ‘household word.’” 49 The indirect endorsement is expressed as a quotation from his letter to the editor:

  Fig. 3.1Formamint advertisement, from Collier’s Magazine (5 December 1914), p. 26

  Writing in the Christian Commonwealth (July 3rd, 1912), he casually refers to Formamint as a thing universally known and used – which indeed it is – for killing bacteria in the mouth, and so preventing the diseases they cause. Mr. Shaw says – and we quote this “Shavian” utterance with all due apologies: “When a man … puts a Formamint lozenge in his mouth to kill a few thousand bacilli he is trying to wipe out the consequences of old mistakes of creation.”

  Clearly, the intent behind this emphasis upon Shaw’s “casual” and unsolicited mention of the product in the marketplace of ideas is to side-step the ethical and credibility drawbacks personality advertising (especially in patent medicine) presented at the time. The rest of the copy recycles the earlier description of the tablets and the claims about their healing properties. The new advertisement ran widely for the next three years in a variety of periodicals, including The Sketch, Collier’s, the Illustrated London News, The Graphic, The Bystander, the New York Times , the London Times, and Punch’s Almanack. A revision of the original “scientific” advertisement but newly containing Shaw’s quote (with attribution) arrives in late 1914 and 1915 in, among other places, McClure’s, The New Outlook, and Scientific American. The eagerness and excitement with which Shaw’s image and words were circulated on behalf of Formamint confirm that, as Alice McEwan points out, “the construction and cultivation of the ‘GBS’ figure as a marketable commodity in the modern global marketplace was well advanced by the close of the Edwardian era” (Fig. 3.2). 50

  Fig. 3.2 Formamint advertisement, digital collections at the New York Public Library

  The identification of Shaw with Formamint was prominent enough to produce a few cheeky allusions elsewhere. A comic piece written in June 1913 for The New Age enti
tled “Health for Intellectuals” mocked the association of playwright with product:Some time ago I suffered from a virulent Shaw rash. Everything I wrote was diluted Shaw. A man who is easy to imitate is not exactly a good model, though I was not to know that until some time after. However, not being a fool even in the period of eruptive adulation, I soon wearied of the parrot life. Knowing the close relation between food and output, I determined on a drastic remedy. I cut my meals down to one a day.

  In a very short time this left me with little or no desire to write, but I profited by my abstinence in having more time and a clear head for study. The Shaw rash is now quite gone, and with it all interest in the Formamint specialist. 51

  A decade later, in a 1922 playlet by Pierre Loving , published in The Drama, an aging matinee idol exclaims, “I’m no longer fit to play the young lover or … Marchbanks,” rhapsodizing thateven Shaw wrote to me once in London, adding, contrary to custom, only a single short postscript in which he said I interpreted the part very much as if I had written youthful lyrics for Formamint in my time, instead of trying to ape Henry Irving’s conception of a poet, which seemed to be the vogue. 52

  In any case, as the new ads continued to roll out, the delegitimizing of Formamint by the AMA went on. In August of 1915, in The Propaganda for Reform in Proprietary Medicines, a report dedicated to analyzing the promotional claims of products and the research used to support them, the organization concludes that the claims made for Formamint are “grossly unwarranted,” “very extravagant and misleading,” that “the use of these tablets may be, in some cases, fraught with danger and are a menace, not only to the health of the individual, but also to the safety of the community,” and that “dependence on Formamint for the prevention of infection and for curing disease is not only unwise but dangerous.” 53 In 1919, another Journal article again cited this report, horrified that formaldehyde tablets such as Formamint were advertised “during the recent epidemic of influenza” and are “still being advertised.” 54 The piece reminded physicians that “an inefficient antiseptic is more than merely useless; it is a menace to public safety in that it tends to lead to the neglect of rational and effective protective measures.”