The cigarette company Lucky Strike was trying to figure out how to acquire more customers.
To round out the team, Hill also hired Edward Bernays, who had just released his most acclaimed work, Propaganda, espousing his ideas of how the techniques government had developed during the war could now be applied to the purposes of business. The two got down to work, though not always together. What might make Lucky Strike stand out? In 1917, the brand had gotten its start with an idea conceived by Hopkins.
“It’s toasted” was the slogan, the “secret” step supposedly yielding a better flavor. In the mid-1920s, Lasker built on the concept with a campaign borrowing from patent medicine’s playbook: the brand was presented as a health tonic—specifically, a cure for the problem of sore throats caused by most cigarettes.
To drive home the hygienic benefit, Lasker ran a “precious voice” campaign, with testimonials from opera stars and other singers. What could be more persuasive than the Metropolitan Opera’s lead soprano attesting that she smoked Luckies to protect her livelihood?5 The testimonials were, of course, paid for, but it is still startling that Lasker was able to coax the singers into the effort. Even by the late 1920s, there were inklings that cigarettes might be bad for you. So, to preempt the truth, Lasker deployed another old patent medicine trick: he tried to co-opt medical authority.
The American Tobacco Company sent doctors free cartons of Luckies in exchange for a vague nod that they might be less abrasive than other brands. Whether or not the doctors knew what they were agreeing to, Lord & Thomas went ahead with ads that portrayed them as, in effect, touting the health benefits of smoking Lucky Strikes. One advertisement features a doctor in a white coat holding up a packet, with the copy: “20,679 physicians say ‘LUCKIES are less irritating’…Your throat protection.”
In the late 1920’s, it was taboo for women to smoke in public and in some places, it was illegal.
Good soldiers both, Lasker and Bernays soon caught the spirit of women’s liberation, or at least noticed its utility. Lasker allowed that, after his wife had been asked to refrain from smoking in a restaurant, he was determined “to break down the prejudice against women smoking.”
But it was Bernays, the public relations man, who took more seriously the idea of a commercial cause in social-activist clothing. He was in fact a critic of advertising in the Hopkins mold, and believed that ideally one should seek to make it obsolete. “The old-fashioned propagandist,” wrote Bernays, “using almost exclusively the appeal of the printed word, tried to persuade the individual reader to buy a definite article, immediately.”
Bernays wanted to create a new way of advertising to the consumer, by changing customs and norms at a fundamental level.
He asked: What are the true reasons why the purchaser is planning to spend his money on a new car instead of on a new piano? Because he has decided that he wants the commodity called locomotion more than he wants the commodity called music? Not altogether. He buys a car, because it is at the moment the group custom to buy cars. The modern propagandist therefore sets to work to create circumstances which will modify that custom.
The skilled propagandist could be not merely an engineer of demand, then, but a maker of manners, bringing a multiplier effect to the commercial use of attention capture. Bernays sought to overthrow the taboo against women smoking outside the home by framing it as an abridgement of their freedom. Relying on some back-of-the-envelope Freudian analysis, including the idea of cigarettes as phallic objects and a source of oral satisfaction, he presented smokes as vital to a fuller life.
And he hired a group of attractive women to march in the 1929 New York City Easter Day Parade, brandishing their Lucky Strikes, or “torches of freedom.”10 He had paid Ruth Hale, a prominent feminist, to sign the letter inviting the women to the march. “Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” it thundered.
While a great story, we aren’t sure to what extent Bernays was responsible for this event. It lends the narrative more credibility that Noam Chomsky, a serious critic of propaganda, has echoed the idea that Bernays got women to smoke.