Shining light on the work of a groundbreaking ad man

Strange as it seems, one of the seminal movers behind the development of the consumer mass market in the U.S. a century ago became an obscure figure, known only to a few aficionados of the advertising industry.

Albert Lasker has disappeared from the popular canon of 20th century business titans in the U.S., yet he was a prominent figure in business, sports, politics and public policy over five decades and the subject of a biography, “Taken at the Flood,” written 50 years ago by noted author John Gunther.

Now Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz have written a new biography of “The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century,” published by Harvard Business Review Press. It resurrects Lasker’s accomplishments and places them in the context of his times.

Cruikshank is a business writer, while Arthur Schultz once headed Foote Cone & Belding, the successor to the small Chicago agency that Lasker propelled to the forefront of the nascent ad industry.

Born in 1880 to a German immigrant and his wife and raised in Galveston, Texas, Lasker was precocious in business affairs. He launched a community newspaper at the age of 12 and six years later headed north for a stint at ad agency Lord & Thomas in Chicago.

The advertising business was in its infancy. The sophisticated style and structure of the industry depicted in the television series “Mad Men” was still decades away — yet the seeds of it are apparent in Lasker’s innovations.

Ad agencies at the start of the 20th century converted clients’ messages or announcements into all-type ads, then placed the ads in print media. They added value by booking space in certain titles.

Lasker thrived in this milieu because of his big personality and his ability to convince older men who were potential clients of the agency that he was capable of handling their business.

He also worked on improving how the ad itself was executed. With the help of two colorful colleagues, John E. Kennedy and Claude Hopkins, he had the insight that copywriting could help sell the product. The secret was to move into the new realm of salesmanship in print.

Other successes followed: The agency helped unify loose co-operatives of California fruit growers by branding their oranges Sunkist and their raisins Sun-Maid. The growers had been suffering from low prices because of overproduction but the campaigns boosted sales across the country.

Lasker took over Lord & Thomas, and it became his springboard for a variety of causes. In 1914 and 1915, he led a media campaign from behind the scenes to overturn the conviction of Leo Frank, a Jewish plant manager in Atlanta who was sentenced to death for the murder of a local girl.

After a scandal involving a professional baseball team in the 1919 World Series, he brokered a deal with major and minor league baseball clubs to create a commission to oversee the sport.

In the early 1920s, Lasker joined the administration of President Warren G. Harding, assigned to clean up the federal government’s wasteful entry into the shipping business during World War I.

After two years, Lasker left Washington. He had become the subject of newspaper stories questioning his effectiveness — a nightmare for a public relations genius who preferred to operate in the background.

The authors also cover Lasker’s use of public relations to get Harding elected president, and to defeat populist causes in California.

In 1942, tired of the business in which he made his fortune, Lasker closed Lord & Thomas and turned over its constituent parts to three subordinates, Emerson Foote, Fairfax Cone and Don Belding, who set up a new agency, Foote, Cone & Belding.

Unlike legendary ad men from a later era — J. Walter Thompson and David Ogilvy, for instance — Lasker did not leave an institution that could outlive him.

He was a brilliant advisor to his top clients, but the agency revolved around the personal bonds he forged, and his subordinates could never grow to their boss’ stature within the same firm.

Book reviewer Greg Farrell is a New York-based reporter for the Financial Times of London, in which this review first appeared.