Word: lasker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...paneled conference room one day in 1942, Advertising Man Albert Lasker and one of his biggest clients sat surrounded by their deputies and advisers. Lasker advanced an idea which nearly everyone else opposed. "Well, gentlemen." said Lasker as he began to back out of the room, "you're doubtless right, and I am wrong-so wrong that I've only made $40 million in this business...
...only did Albert Davis Lasker make more than $40 million out of advertising, he changed its technique and virtually fathered modern advertising. In so doing he turned such names as Lucky Strike, Palmolive, Pepsodent, Kleenex and Kotex into household words...
What Is the Secret? When Lasker, an 18-year-old stripling from Galveston, Texas, got a job in Chicago's Lord & Thomas agency in 1898, advertising was in its horse & buggy stage. Ad agencies were little more than space brokers. They bought space in newspapers and magazines at cut-rate, and resold it to advertisers at whatever markup they could get. They prepared little copy or art work. Lasker, who displayed a hypnotic, golden-tongued salesmanship from the start, soon changed all that. He laid out ad campaigns with newsy headlines and drawings, insisted on a 15% commission...
...Lasker was still groping for a new approach to advertising when, in 1904, a stranger helped him find it. A boy came in from the saloon near Lord & Thomas bearing a note from John Kennedy, an ex-Canadian mounted policeman who was writing breezy ads for patent medicines: "I can tell you what advertising is." Lasker sent for Kennedy; liked his definition: that good advertising simply offered a "reason why" the customer should buy. Lasker hired Kennedy and they translated the theory into copy with such slogans as Palmolive's "Keep that Schoolgirl...
Complexion" and Van Camp's (evaporated milk) "You Can Now Have a Cow in Your Pantry." At 30, Lasker was sole owner of Lord & Thomas and already a millionaire...