Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising Read online

  J. Walter Thompson’s president, Stanley Resor , felt that celebrity testimonials work because “people are eternally searching for authority”: “Democracy, even in name, is new. Royalty, aristocracy, feudalism dominated the world for scores of centuries, instilling in the masses a sense of inferiority and an instinctive veneration for ‘their betters’.” 98 Of course, Shaw too had great faith in the authority of individuals of will, what he called “world-betterers,” and he admired leaders like Stalin and Mussolini as “provisional supermen … who by their ruthless action could compel order and efficiency, mold an unruly and recalcitrant population into a disciplined social body, and therefore clear the ground for the true supermen who would evolve biologically in the distant future.” 99 Crawford criticizes its agency competitors for dissipating their “energy along too many channels” and “through trying to get everywhere – [they are] apt to get nowhere.” 100 If Shaw’s creation of “G.B.S. ” was a deliberate branding that capitalized upon the commodity culture he frequently chided, the profession also followed his lead in self-consciously and profitably merging personality with product.

  Biographers and scholars have mapped the skirmishes with presses Shaw had over the ways his published work was marketed; while not as radical as John Ruskin , who “opposed the ‘evil trade’ of advertising, even to the point of refusing to allow his own works to be advertised,” 101 the playwright was frequently exasperated. Less consideration has been given to his participation in professional marketing campaigns. Besides mimicking the pitchmaking rhetoric of advertising copy for “G.B.S. ,” Shaw crafted what one field professional would call “near testimonials ”—endorsements for various products that served celebrity endorser, agency, and client without compromise. Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising: Prophet Motives takes as its focus specific campaigns in which “G.B.S.” was prominently featured (for Formamint tablets, Harrods department store, Simmons mattresses, and Pan-American air travel) to explore the ways in which both Shaw and the agency/client used advertisement as an occasion for self-promotion. Throughout this study, along with material drawn from newspapers, medical journals, and mass cultural periodicals, trade publications belonging to the then burgeoning field of professional advertising will also be used as sources because they were primary contexts in which these trends and tactics were observed and discussed. As Roland Marchand has argued,given the unevenness of archival sources and the scarcity of good memoirs, the fullest sources on the advertising profession and advertising strategies of the 1920s and 1930s remain the trade journals – especially Advertising Age, Advertising and Selling, Judicious Advertising, Printers’ Ink , Printer’s Ink Monthly, and Tide . Many of the trade journals articles were written by advertising managers and agency leaders and were often self-serving and uncritical. But because they were written for other professionals rather than the general public, they often expose with striking frankness the internal debates within the trade. 102

  Recognizing similar caveats about their agendas, internal agency publications produced by the J. Walter Thompson agency for its own employees will also be a part of this book’s critical context.

  Anchoring its discussion with an interpretive analysis of Misalliance through the lens of the portable Turkish Bath , Chapter 2 charts Shaw’s relationship to the proprietary medicine industry and its marketing practices, suggesting that he was profoundly indebted for his professional success to the techniques through which these ersatz remedies were promoted (techniques he frequently criticized), making his relationship with the industry symbiotic rather than simply antagonistic. Juxtaposing the playwright’s seemingly involuntary appearance in a 1912 advertisement for Formamint formaldehyde lozenges with a reading of his 1916 play “O’Flaherty, V.C.” as a critique of recruitment techniques, Chapter 3 looks at the development of the testimonial endorsement and the specific relationship between theater and advertising that surely informed Shaw’s approach to his own brand marketing.

  As recent scholarship has mapped productively the branding machinations of High Modernist authorship, Chapter 4 seeks to texture further this “collaboration” by providing insight into how executives and writers in the advertising industry worked to render profitable mergings of literary personality with commodities. For their part, High Modernists were eager to efface rather than embrace any symbiotic affinity between the worlds of literature and commerce. On the advertising side, executives wrangled to harness the potency of personality but avoid certain stigmas of testimonial endorsement when employing literary authors, including questions of compensation and authority that potentially undermined market effectiveness. Illustrating what is at stake in the proximity between the two fields, the chapter lays out two campaigns from the late 1920s. A Harrods campaign that featured Shaw garnered considerable transatlantic fanfare for crafting “near-testimonials” from literary authors as a way to ward off the specter of impropriety and maintain the integrity of stakeholders, each pursuing their respective aims. The influence of the series featuring Shaw, H. G. Wells , and Arnold Bennett is unusually far-reaching within the evolution of modern advertising and the fashioning of literary modernism. Taken as a case study, it shows how the advertising industry and Shaw are using “collaboration” to further articulate professional identities and produce innovative formal strategies for the promotion of personality and product.

  Around the same time, facing increasing public skepticism towards and government scrutiny of the celebrity testimonial over questions about solicitation and compensation practices, the J. Walter Thompson company, the American agency most committed to personality marketing, devised a Simmons campaign that took the “near testimonial ” in a new direction and situated Shaw at the center of a controversy over the efficacy of a tried and true marketing technique. In the series, he and other famous personalities provided thoughts about the importance of sleep but did not explicitly mention the product or endorse the company in an attempt to restore the loss of consumer faith. Despite the taint, the continued turn towards “personality marketing” provoked innovation in form, the professionalizing of writers within the industry, and the delineation of modern advertising. For Shaw, the ad space presented another opportunity to act on the prophet motive, marketing the Shavian lifestyle.

  Chapter 5 focuses on Shaw’s participation in a 1948 campaign for Pan-American air service to Ireland. In order to continue to repair the public image of the celebrity testimonial against charges of insincerity and fraud, the campaign decided to foreground Shaw’s role in the copywriting process, nearly obscuring the actual product. Revising descriptions of Ireland and inducements to travel there, the playwright struggles against the imperialist undertones inherent in advertising discourse trying to appeal to American tourists. Nonetheless, his “near testimonial ” once more illustrates the synergistic relationship between Shaw and modern advertising. All of the marketing campaigns in which Shaw participated become key crucibles within which agency and personality could renegotiate their relationship to one another and to the consuming public, and this study underscores how Shaw’s brilliantly calculated “near-testimonials” presage the iconoclastic style of contemporary “public personality ” and techniques of celebrity marketing.

  Notes

  1.John Palmer. “George Bernard Shaw: Harlequin or Patriot?” The Century Magazine 89 (November 1914–April 1915): 768–82. 770.

  2.“Pride.” The New Yorker (18 November 1950): 42.

  3.Raymond Williams. “Advertising: The Magic System.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd edition. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1999. 320–36. 329.

  4.Roy Church. “Advertising Consumer Goods in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Reinterpretations.” The Economic History Review 53.4 (November 2000): 621–45. 641, 627.

  5.T. R. Nevett. Advertising in Britain: A History. London: The History of Advertising Trust, 1982. 79, 84.

  6.Gerry Beegan. The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London. New York: Palg
rave Macmillan, 2008. 10.

  7.Winston Fletcher. Powers of Persuasion: The Inside Story of British Advertising: 1951–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 18.

  8.John Strachan and Claire Nally. Advertising, Literature and Print Culture in Ireland, 1891–1922. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 36.

  9.Bernard Shaw. Shaw’s Music, vol. 1. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw. London: The Bodley Head, 1981. 67.

  10.Brad Kent. “Bernard Shaw, the British Censorship of Plays, and Modern Celebrity.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 57.2 (2014): 231–53. 231.

  11.Letter to Otto Kyllman (9 September 1903). In Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, vol. 2 (1898–1910). Ed. Dan H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1985. 367–8.

  12.Alice McEwan. “Commodities, Consumption, and Connoisseurship: Shaw’s Critique of Authenticity in Modernity.” SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies 35.1 (November 2015): 46–85. 76.

  13.Bernard Shaw. Misalliance. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 4. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 143–253. 204.

  14.Ibid., 208.

  15.E. S. Turner. Taking the Cure. London: Michael Joseph, 1967. 232.

  16.Matthew Yde. Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 9.

  17.Bernard Shaw. The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. New York: Wm. H. Wise & Company, 1931. 347.

  18.Bernard Shaw. Widowers’ Houses. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 1. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 33–121. 112.

  19.Bernard Shaw. Getting Married. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 3. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 547–662. 624.

  20.Bernard Shaw. You Never Can Tell. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 1. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 667–794. 669.

  21.Bernard Shaw. The Devil’s Disciple. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 2. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 51–141. 131.

  22.Bernard Shaw. Mrs. Warren’s Profession. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 1. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 272–356. 352.

  23.Bernard Shaw. Man and Superman. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 2. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 533–733. 697.

  24.Bernard Shaw. Dramatic Opinions and Essays with an Apology from Bernard Shaw, vol. 2. New York: Brentano’s, 1928. 189.

  25.Shaw, Misalliance, 156.

  26.Bernard Shaw. Candida. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 1. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 513–94. 517.

  27.Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters, 1911–1925. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1985. 496.

  28.Bernard Shaw. Major Barbara. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 3. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 67–185. 143.

  29.Shaw, Misalliance, 153.

  30.Bernard Shaw. The Millionairess . In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 6. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 882–969. 883. While it may seem a stretch to class Sagamore with Undershaft and Tarleton, the associations with the names Shaw chooses aren’t subtle. While “sagamore” denotes an Algonquin chief, a “pontifex” was a member of the council of priests in Ancient Rome, considerably enhancing the resonance of “Julius”. In a play that is about the necessity of productive labor and capital put to productive use, Sagamore claims he is striving to “succeed to as much of his business as I can persuade his clients to trust me with.” Fittingly, the play’s original title was “His Tragic Clients.”

  31.Bernard Shaw. “The Music-Cure.” In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 4. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 877–94. 888.

  32.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to Pygmalion. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 4. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 659–64. 661–2.

  33.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to Major Barbara. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 3. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 15–63. 43.

  34.Ibid., 42.

  35.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to Androcles and the Lion. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 4. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 455–579. 545.

  36.Ibid., 551–2.

  37.Bernard Shaw. Essays in Fabian Socialism: Major Critical Essays 30. New York: Wm. H. Wise & Company, 1932.

  38.Bernard Shaw. “The Revolutionist’s Handbook.” In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 2. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 739–80. 768–9.

  39.Bernard Shaw. Everybody’s Political What’s What. London: Constable and Company, 1944. 150.

  40.Williams, 331–2.

  41.Ibid., 334.

  42.Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s, 151.

  43.Bernard Shaw. “Postscript” to the “Preface” of How He Lied to Her Husband. John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara: Also How He Lied to Her Husband. London: Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd., 1907. 119–24. 122.

  44.Shaw, Intelligent Woman’s, 226–7.

  45.Shaw, “Postscript,” 124.

  46.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to Mrs. Warren’s Profession. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 1. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 231–66. 238, 266.

  47.Shaw, “Preface” to Androcles, 528.

  48.Bernard Shaw. The Doctor’s Dilemma. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 3. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 321–436. 344, 346.

  49.Bernard Shaw. Fanny’s First Play. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 4. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 347–441. 416.

  50.Bernard Shaw. Doctors’ Delusions. In The Collected Works of Bernard Shaw, vol. 22. New York: Wm. H. Wise & Company, 1932. 1–170. 56.

  51.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to Farfetched Fables. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 7. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 381–428. 417.

  52.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to The Doctor’s Dilemma. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 3. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 225–320. 289.

  53.Shaw, Everybody’s, 294–5.

  54.Shaw, “Preface” to Farfetched Fables, 402.

  55.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to On the Rocks. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 6. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 573–628. 586.

  56.Bernard Shaw. Pygmalion. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 4. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 669–819. 780–1.

  57.Bernard Shaw. “Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra.” In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 2. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 293–305. 302.

  58.Bernard Shaw. Back to Methuselah. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 5. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 340–684. 487.

  59.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to Three Plays for Puritans. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 2. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 11–48. 32.

  60.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to Major Barbara. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 3. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 15–63. 32.

  61.Shaw, “Preface” to Three Plays for Puritans, 32.