Advertising in New York City, Before the Mad Men
[This writing was originally prepared as a presentation for the New-York Historical Society’s History After Dark series, scheduled for March 26, 2020. However, due to its timing at the onset of a global pandemic, it was never previously made public. Drawing heavily from NYHS’s Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Ephemera as well as other collections and significant moments in New York History, this research explores key moments in the history of commercial advertising in New York City, prior to the era made famous by the show Mad Men.]
History and advertising sit alongside each other quite naturally in museums, but not as well in the real world. History lives in the past, advertising (sometimes blindly) chases what’s next.
Ad world legend Sir John Hegarty (yes, they really did knight him for advertising) said quite bluntly:
The word ‘history’ in our industry is almost a dirty word. We’re obsessed with tomorrow and the next big thing….But sometimes this can work against it.”
I’ve seen it with my own two eyes, having spent my working life flipping between both history and advertising. As a co-founder of the pop history lecture series The Society for the Advancement of Social Studies, I’ve spent over a decade helping people connect the dots between history and the world around them. Concurrently with that, I also spent many years working at nearly every acronym in the advertising alphabet, including BBDO and DDB, which are amongst the major inspirations for Mad Men.
SJH (since we’re doing abbreviations now) goes on:
“I was lucky enough to be taught history by an inspirational teacher whose mantra was ‘history isn’t about the past, it’s about the future.”
And so I hope you’ll enjoy this look at the past, and maybe even consider what it might mean for what lies ahead.
Mad Men
If you’ve seen Mad Men and were asked to describe the personalities of some of the main characters like Don Draper, Pete Campbell, and Roger Sterling, you might call them charming, creative, or charismatic. On the other hand, if you’ve made it past one season, you might call them anything from “lying sad bois” to “racist misogynistic weasels.” Surely it’s all fine since they’re fictional characters created from the minds of brilliant writers, right?
Ah, well, not entirely. Those who know their history won’t be surprised to hear that there’s truth in this portrayal. Because no matter how elegantly refined these vintage ads may look as they hang on the walls of bars and restaurants or in museums, advertising has never reflected that polished, idyllic reality on the inside of agency walls.
The great ad industry secret is this: it’s always been this way. Behind the veil of slick ads and clever lines is a creative but frequently chaotic world, one that gives a home to the hustlers, cynics, dreamers, and delusionals.
I guess this is a classic trope of self-loathing folks in advertising that I’m playing out — advertising folks belittle themselves as misplaced creative minds who just ended up in the wrong place. There’s an old and somewhat tired advertising gag: “Don’t tell my mother I work in advertising, she thinks I’m the piano player in a brothel.”
And it was in New York City that these sad bois, bad bois, and eventually even women found a home in the field of advertising.
So, Why New York City?
A big part of the answer to this question about why New York City became a hub for advertising has to do with the other industries that surrounded it on the island. The finance and banking industries, in particular, turned the city into a global economic player, as we’ll soon see, and these industries needed people to be convinced to buy things. Enter: advertising.
Now, if I were to sum up a great amount of history in a very short time, I would come up with one word for you to answer the question of why New York City. The word is: geography.
NYC’s location made it a central hub for inbound European merchants in the late 1700s and early 1800s. And it had a superior river that made it all the more attractive as a port than Boston and Philadelphia. The Hudson River was deeper, and thus much more navigable and less prone to freezing over than both the Delaware River and the Charles River.
Again, over simplifying a lot, there were many other selling points (bah-duh-dum) for New York City like the grid system, the Erie Canal, the stock exchange, and the first-ever regularly scheduled transatlantic passenger service. So, with all this backing, New York City grew into a trade center, and as trade grew, so did business.
But being an important and well-located port city had a major indirect benefit. New York City was the first port of entry for many, many immigrants. Importantly, these new immigrants also brought with them a more adventurous risk-taking spirit that contrasted with Massachusetts Puritans and Philadelphia’s Quaker heritage, though they would get their last laugh by becoming one of the most enduring brand icons via their oatmeal.
(Now the massive success of New York as a city and a hub for advertising due to the significant contributions of immigrants over the years is likely something that has you smart folks scratching your head. For a city built by immigrants from many different backgrounds, advertising has long been criticized for promoting the opposite: sameness, cultural assimilation, and encouraging people to exchange their family traditions for some made-up depiction of the “American dream.” But, as we said from the start, who would these ad people be if they weren’t full of contradictions?)
As a result of being a well-placed city with business-friendly features, New York City earned a new reputation as a city of innovation, speculation, and ambition…and a perfect capitalistic breeding ground for our future ad folk.
Now that we have a general understanding of how New York City was built as a city of ideas, and perhaps a hint to how it eventually produced the Mad Men, let’s rewind back to the beginning. We’ll take a trip down memory lane, stopping at some key moments in New York City’s advertising industry, and meet some of the real-life characters who turned earning attention into an art.
1800s: Newspapers + Advertising
We’ll begin at the dawn of it all. We’re in the early 1800s, and while we don’t yet have ad agencies, Super Bowl ads with puppies or social media rock stars, we do have newspapers.
Unlike the persuasive, rhetorical, and hyperbolic advertisements to come, early ads were purely — and perhaps refreshingly — informational. Most were what we’d now call classifieds: lost items, things for sale, job openings, and private notices of various kinds. They were just facts.
The no-nonsense style made sense for the time period. It was the post-Industrial Revolution, pre-Civil War America, with lots of new things to buy, sell, and say.
But there’s a bit of a hitch in it all. Like the New Yorkers of today, many of the 1800s-era New Yorkers in the 1800s did not read newspapers at all. As one historian (quoted in The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu) noted, “they went their way, if not entirely unaware of their presence, at least untouched by their influence… There was little or nothing about these papers to attract the average reader.”
That is, until New York’s The Sun rose to fame in 1833 by deciding to spice up the new paper format of yore.
Benjamin Day reinvented the newspaper as a media channel that would appeal to the masses and New Yorkers alike. It only cost one penny (equivalent to 33¢ in 2025), was easy to carry, and had lots of fun illustrations to look at.
But the content was equally groundbreaking. Day hired a journalist to hang out at the court and cover the highs and lows of human life. It’s notable that while the courtroom journalist had no problem covering the dirty laundry of the locals, he also took a principled stand on important issues like abolition, and uniquely gave detailed coverage to New York’s slave trade, exposing the heartbreaking realities happening to people in the business-obsessed city.
The most notable thing for the purpose of this article was Day’s radical new approach to selling. To offset the low cost of the newspaper, he turned to a different business model that we know all too well now: ads! This thought process has created a structure for most of the media that we consume today. Unless you’re directly paying creators via platforms like Patreon, Substack, or OnlyFans, most of the creative costs in today’s media is offset by ad sales.
The birth of NYC advertising is something even the most clever copywriter couldn’t write: it was founded on a farce of Dishonest Day. For the paper’s inaugural issue, Day took the unorthodox move of filling it with advertisements from businesses he had never solicited. In a way, it’s not so different from how today’s Instagram influencers might pretend like they were “sponsored” by cool brands that have never contacted them in order to gain credibility. Day essentially ran advertisements, in effect, to try and find advertisers.
And it all worked!! By the end of the first year, it became the city’s leading paper. And the phenomenon of the advertising business in NYC was here to stay.
1800s: The Early Ad Agencies
The first ad agencies were simply selling real estate, except instead of brokering property, they sold space in newspapers to businesses. At that point, they weren’t even making the content of the ads, just selling the squares they’d appear in.
It was a simple, honest job (for advertisers) of skimming some off the top. They took a commission from their customers and also took kickbacks from the newspapers, and did this under the pretense that they were providing their “insider knowledge.”
Then, in the mid-19th century, someone from the city of Brotherly Love began to publish a comprehensive media rate guide. What that meant was that people could see for themselves what they should be paying, and when they were being overcharged.
With that new pay transparency, advertising agencies could no longer say that they were charging for “insider knowledge”. They had to do more, do something to earn their commission now that they couldn’t just take a little off the top. And with just that, the modern advertising agency was born.
In this modern ad agency world, agencies offer insider knowledge in the form of creative services: advice on how to prepare and write the ads, in addition to placing the ads. And people bought it up: by the year 1861, there were twenty advertising agencies in New York City.
1900s: The Rise of the Giants
By 1900, advertising was out of the fringes and was firmly established as a bona fide profession (just don’t tell the brothel players' mom), reflecting a city on the rise as a global economic player.
Case in point: The New York City Association of Advertising Agencies was founded in 1911, predating the establishment of the American Association of Advertising Agencies by several years. The city was setting trends the world would follow, from the Harlem Renaissance uptown to the ad world in midtown.
During this exciting time, some of the iconic agencies that we know today were just starting out. For example, BBDO was founded in 1891, McCann Erickson began in 1902, and J. Walter Thompson was founded in 1896.
1900s: Women!
These agencies were full of Mad Men, and in fact, Mad Women, long before Peggy Olsen entered the scene.
At the turn of the 20th century, advertising was actually one of the few career choices for women in business. Unlike many at the time, it paid for their creativity and point of view.
But the reason for this was none too noble. It was economics, not equality, that welcomed women in the door. Women were responsible for most of the purchasing done in their households, and businesses realized they could profit from women’s insights.
Thus, women were particularly well represented in research departments, as well as in copywriting positions and the stereotypical secretarial roles. They were excluded, however, from art direction and managerial positions.
One pioneering woman from J. Walter Thompson was Helen Lansdowne, who started out as a New York City copywriter.
What great revolution do you think her women’s touch brought to the world in 1911? The answer, which history books will back me up on, is the use of sex appeal and sexual contact in advertising.
Famously, she wrote the ad slogan for the Woodbury Soap Company: “Skin You Love To Touch”. The slogan became so popular that Woodbury used it for 30 years. It remains a landmark moment in advertising and is consistently ranked as one of the top 100 campaigns of the 20th century.
On the strength of Woodbury’s work, Landsowne was asked to run a new Women’s Editorial Department at J. Walter Thompson in New York City. With this position, she made room for others. Helen Lansdowne identified as a suffragette and hired many leaders of the women’s suffrage movement for her staff. No matter their background, she aimed to make all employees remember “the old suffrage slogan — that ‘Women Are People.’
Torches of Freedom
Now, at this time, being a suffragette was all the rage in NYC and across the country.
Do you know what else was all the rage during this time? Smoking. Well, it was…if you were a man. WWI had brought back a generation of men addicted to cigarettes- but ho ho ho — they’d not yet hooked women. But modern advertising was going to work on changing that.
In fact, especially in the 1920s, it’s smoking that we can thank (or blame) for many modern, innovative attention-getting techniques.
Specifically, too, we can look at the campaigns of Edward Bernays, considered the founder of modern, “Madison Avenue” style.
In 1929, Mr Edward Bernays was commissioned by the American Tobacco Company. His task: to get more women smoking. He was up against some serious friction. Thanks to the cultural norms of the time, it was still taboo for women to smoke in public; in some cities, including, for a brief while, New York, it was even against the law.
Bernays’ solution was to reframe smoking not as a taboo, but as a sign of women’s liberation. Here, he’s credited with inventing the PR stunt with this shady move disguised as social activism. He hired women to smoke in public as they walked in the Easter Sunday Parade in New York City, and called their cigarettes “torches of freedom”.
The stunt was staged from start to finish. He hired his own photographers to make sure that good pictures were taken and then published around the world. And kicking off the now regular practice of paid enforcements, he 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 declared.
1920s: The Advent of Radio Advertising
The fast-moving flapper-fueled 1920s had a lot of momentum in advertising history, and so I’d be remiss not to mention New York City advertising and radio. As another ribbon for the Empire City, the first-ever radio commercial was aired on New York’s WEAF in 1922, advertising apartments for the Queensboro Corporation.
But radio advertising was not common at this time. At the time, radio was new and somewhat idealistic, meant to uplift Americans coming out of the First World War.
But as we saw with Day’s media format, the financial support for free content needs to come from somewhere. So the way to adapt to the optimistic approach of radio was through sponsored content.
NYC’s channel NBC kicked off a new era (and in fact also invented a new style: sitcoms) with Amos and Andy, sponsored by Pepsodent Tooth Paste.
At its peak, Amos ’n’ Andy is believed to have attracted some 40 million listeners, then, a third of the US population. It’s the equivalent of having today’s Super Bowl audiences each and every evening — and with just one advertiser. Budweiser would give up every Clydesdale it had for that opportunity on just one day.
Amos ’n’ Andy started in Chicago, but when Pepsodent tried to take the show national, it faced its fair share of skeptics. For one, Amos ’n’ Andy is essentially a radio minstrel show, criticized during its time for white actors' offensive performances of Black characters and use of stereotypes.
Other advertisers laughed at the toothpaste company’s obvious ignorance of radio. The conventional wisdom was that people wouldn’t listen to talk on the radio. NBC, the broadcasters laughed, too. President H. C. Cox said, “I think you should go back to Chicago,” said Cox. “It’s very plain to see that you know nothing about radio.”
What changed NBC’s mind was money. Pepsodent essentially bet their entire company, with a $1 million show order, thus setting into motion the fame of Amos ’n’ the first sponsored serial program. Perhaps this hefty paycheck was why it was so easy for NBC to ignore the complaints registered by the NAACP at the time.
You might be wondering what an offensive sitcom and a toothpaste had in common, and here, it’s not what you might think.
The popularity of the show is attributed to the universally appealing characters, who were earnest and honest. People felt that, like the main characters, Pepsodent was an equally authentic brand, one of the big buzzwords in the business today.
Pepsodent’s ads were a turning point in history. Ads are no longer about securing a space in a newspaper, but it’s about capturing people’s attention and becoming part of culture.
What a new, exciting time for advertisers!
1930s: The Great Depression
And then the depression hit.
As a person who is now going through their second recession, let me tell you, depression is a terrible time to work in the business.
With the economy as a whole in utter collapse, advertising agencies shrank over the 1930s to almost one-third of what they had been by the end of the 1920s. Several firms folded, and consumption’s former high priests and priestesses were among those left jobless.
Trying to salvage some business, those who were left in the industry went backwards, falling on hard-selling snake oil techniques that only confirmed the worst claims of critics.
1930s-1940s: Advertising Research (A Reach)
Trying to rehabilitate the concept of consumerism, advertisers in the 1930s and 1940s invented scientific public opinion polls and focus groups, making them the centerpiece of their own market research for ad campaigns.
A leader in this was Ernest Dichter, a Viennese psychologist with a Freudian résumé, who set up shop in a Manhattan suburb to promote his newly created quote-unquote science of motivational research. I read conflicting accounts about how effective advertising theories were, but they were too ridiculous not to share.
Basically, Dichter pioneered the application of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and techniques to business — he offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption, and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism.
For example, one of his first accounts was Ivory Soap, a Procter & Gamble product. Dichter demonstrated that bathing had an erotic element — “one of the few occasions when the Puritanical American was allowed to caress himself or herself.” This insight gave rise to a new campaign slogan: “Be Smart and Get a Fresh Start with Ivory Soap.”
Dichter’s theory of “food genders” became especially sought after by advertisers. Dichter believed it was important to classify various food products along gender lines to gain insight into why buyers prefer one product over another.
Most foods in Dichter’s mind, however, were female, as was their preparation (except for grilling). But there were also some products for which he could not quite make up his mind. “Some foods are bisexual,” he thought, “among them roast chicken and oranges.”
Fortunately for him, and for us all, business eventually bounced back. And with it came the new frontier of television.
1940s: TV Turns On
The United States, as we know, came out of the Depression and fell hopelessly in love with television. This became the era of peak communication and conformity, ushering in the era of the Mad Men on Madison Avenue.
In 1941, the first legal television ad aired on New York Local Television, in the middle of a Brooklyn Dodgers vs Philadelphia Phillies game. These early moments helped cement New York City’s position as a commercial giant.
Keep in mind, Europeans were still dealing with the aftermath of the ruinous Second World War, so during this time, New Yorkers assumed world leadership with a cool sophistication that they’d previously granted to Paris, Rome, or London.
Between 1949 and 1959, total advertising spending more than doubled, from $5.21 billion to $11.27 billion. Between 1950 and 1960, more new office space was added to New York than existed in the rest of the world at the time. In one decade, that one city more than doubled the world’s available office space.
This ushers in the era of the Mad Men, who drew upon the tricks of the trade and built the world of advertising we know today. Or did it?
From my research, apart from just one mention in a 1964 novel, there is no evidence that the expression “Mad Men” was used to describe the world of 1960s New York City advertising.
So even that was a lie.
