A commonly held narrative is that Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernayes, transformed American advertising. But it’s not that simple. While Freud’s ideas did circulate, it is hard to prove that advertisers made use of them. But the data does suggest that Freud’s competition, the behavioral school of psychology, inspired many advertising projects.
For Watson, unlike Freud, mental states and moods were irrelevant. “The time seems to have come,” he said, “when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness.” Instead, he pursued a unitary theory of animal response, for the behaviorist “recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.”17
Watson thought that humans could be conditioned to respond in predictable ways, just like animals.
In the one on “Little Albert,” a human version of Pavlov’s experiments on dogs, Watson induced a phobia of rats in an eleven-month-old. He did so by striking a metal bar with a hammer behind the baby’s head every time a white rat was shown to him. After seven weeks of conditioning, the child, initially friendly to the rodent, began to fear it, bursting into tears at the sight of it. The child, in fact, began to fear anything white and furry—Watson bragged that “now he fears even Santa Claus.”18 * At J.
Watson was, in some sense, given a chance to perform his experiments on a larger population. As he maintained, “To make your consumer react, it is only necessary to confront him with either fundamental or conditioned emotional stimuli.”
Watson became a hot name in the advertising industry. Several firms sought out his services.
Soon Resor made Watson an “ambassador-at-large” and an account executive. When not advising on campaigns, he traveled America and the globe to sell executives on scientific advertising, and on his firm, which possessed all the tools necessary to control the minds of the public. As he said it plainly in one speech: “Since the time the serpent in the Garden of Eden influenced Eve and Eve in turn persuaded Adam, the world has tried to find out ways and means of controlling human behavior.
In advertising, we call the process selling. During this period it also struck businessmen, as if all at once, that if America was becoming a consumer society, most of this new purchasing of household goods was being done by the lady of the house. “In the purchase of things for personal use,” declared one authority in 1921, “men do very little on their own initiative.” Companies, run mostly by men, therefore, came to see cracking the code of the female consumer as the key to commerce. As an advertisement in Printer’s Ink put it, “The proper study of mankind is man… but the proper study of markets is women.”
To men of industry, however, the promised land was mostly a terra incognita. Hence, advertising’s third major development was a great new effort to appeal to women—through what would later be called “targeted” advertisements. A famous early advertisement for Woodbury soap, crafted by a woman named Helen Lansdowne, typified the new approach.
Initially ads directed at women relied on worn out stereotypes. But then an entirely new approach was made. It wasn’t “sex.” But rather, it created the promise of a better life. In other words, they didn’t appeal to the female sexual unconscious, and they didn’t try to advertise the usefulness of the product; instead, they used images to represent the promise of a better life.
Lansdowne went in an entirely different direction. In her advertisement, a dashing clean-shaven man in white tie is pictured with his arm wrapped around a beautiful woman, whose hand he holds. His cheek rests against her temple; he appears enthralled, while she stares pointedly at the viewer, her skin aglow. “A Skin you love to touch,” reads the copy. “You, too, can have the charm of a radiant, velvety skin.”