Word: ayer
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week two advertising agencies lost (and others got) two of the biggest accounts in the U. S. From Philadelphia's N. W. Ayer & Son, Henry Ford took some $4,000,000 worth of business (all his Ayer advertising except radio), split it between two other agencies. Manhattan's McCann-Erickson, which already had the motor-maker's branch and dealer advertising, got the Ford car advertising. To Detroit's Maxon, Inc., which took over the Lincoln-Zephyr account from Ayer last summer went the Mercury account. For Maxon and McCann, this was good news...
...Ayer's bad news was not the biggest in the agency world last week. Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Co., No. 2 U. S. soapmaker (No. 1: Procter & Gamble), which spent well over $6,000,000 last year to sell Palmolive soap and 432 other items, abruptly announced that after Jan. 1 Benton & Bowles would handle C-P-P advertising no more. This bombshell was followed by another: B. & B.'s $1,000,000-a-year Continental Baking Co. account also went into other hands. These losses will cut the agency's annual billings about in half...
...your hand may make you feel very good, but a diamond bracelet lasts forever." Thus wrote Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes} in the speakeasy 1920s. Since then the U. S. diamond market has faded away like hocked bracelets. Aiming to get it out of hock again, N. W. Ayer's advertising agency (which holds the account of Kimberley's De Beers diamond syndicate, biggest in the world) last year decided that the somewhat flawed diamond trade needed association with the higher things of life...
Pioneers in the use of high-brow art in advertising (they had already got the Dole pineapple people to hire top-flight U. S. artists to paint pineapples in Hawaii -TIME, Feb. 12), N. W. Ayer suggested that the De Beers syndicate buy paintings by famous modernists, reproduce them in color alongside their diamond ads. The De Beers syndicate obediently bought about $20,000 worth of modern art by such headliners as Picasso, Matisse, Dali, Derain, Dufy, Marie Laurencin, got ready to reproduce them, by expensive color processes, as diamond...
Pleased at snatching the unique account from his competitors was Ayer Partner Gerold McKee Lauck, 48, in charge of the New York office. Cherubic, white-haired, pipe-nursing Partner Lauck has a propensity for getting unique accounts the hard way. Year ago he set out for Johannesburg to persuade the crusty British South African (DeBeers) diamond syndicate to step up its ailing sales with a U. S. advertising campaign. At Lumbo, Mozambique, his Imperial Airways flying boat smacked head-on into a jetty in landing, killing two passengers and flinging Adman Lauck against a bulkhead with such force that...