BOOK REVIEW: The Man who Sold America, the Amazing (but True) Story of Albert Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century, by Jeffrey Cruickshank and Arthur Shultz; Harvard Business Press; €26.99

MAD MEN, the stylish, critically acclaimed hit drama series, depicts the glamorous, exciting and politically incorrect world of US advertising in the 1960s.

The business model that lay behind this golden era was created several decades earlier and one character stands out as a trailblazer – Albert D Lasker.

Although Lasker had a somewhat colourful life – and is credited with many innovations in the industry – this biography falls down, ironically, in the copywriting process.

At some 380 pages, it drags on the detail and could have done with a sharper edit. Mad Menit is not. Nonetheless, with perseverance, readers will gain some valuable insights into the way many modern advertising approaches were created.

Perhaps Lasker’s most important contribution was his application of the notion of “reason why” advertising.

If advertising was salesmanship in print, it had to give people a compelling reason for buying a product or service. This was revolutionary thinking in the 1920s when advertising was dominated by sloganeering and copy was often written by the client.

Up to that point, agencies were largely just brokers of space between advertisers and publishers. Lasker, through his agency Lord Thomas, persuaded clients to become more creative in their copy and, when the results proved profitable, he became a legend in the industry.

Among many pioneering campaigns, Lasker can lay claim to mainstreaming the advertising of sanitary towels, creating a new style of ad for Kotex, inspiring confidence through nurses’ recommendations.

When Edward Bok, publisher of the leading women’s magazines in America and a self-appointed arbiter of morals and taste, refused to take the ads, Lasker visited his offices and suggested Bok call in his secretary and ask if she was offended by them.

His heart sank when a sober 60-something woman entered the room. He needn’t have worried as the secretary told her boss that the ads were marvellous as women needed to know about these products. Kotex became an outstanding success as a result of the campaigns.

Lasker can also claim the dubious distinction of popularising smoking among women, earning fortunes for American Tobacco. Lasker employed actresses to endorse the Lucky Strike brand in a famous “precious voice” campaign to counter fears that smoking damaged the voice and throat and then played on the notion of the role of cigarettes in weight control with the slogan “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”.

The candy industry revolted, newspaper editorials condemned American Tobacco for exploiting women, but sales of cigarettes to women surged. The Federal Trade Commission intervened, demanding that sweets could not be mentioned in the ads.

In a foretaste of the censorship of tobacco advertising that was to come later, subsequent campaigns simply stated “Reach for a Lucky instead”. The message was clearly not lost and sales kept soaring.

Many of the products that Lasker helped to introduce have disappeared, although there are enduring exceptions such as Sunkist, Sun-Maid, Kotex, Kleenex and Palmolive.

So what is his legacy?

Cruickshank and Shultz argue it is enormous. His agency, they say, taught mass audiences to drink orange juice, use sanitary napkins and brush their teeth. His creation of radio soap operas conditioned consumers to accept free entertainment in return for commercials, a tacit contract that endures to this day in media such as television and the internet.

His other legacy lies in his painstaking use of research to track and tweak the effectiveness of campaigns and he was one of the pioneers of direct mail advertising.

His reputation earned him political influence in the White House where he became a trusted adviser of President Warren Harding. He took on the difficult task of chairing the influential shipping board.

A highly energetic and notoriously difficult person to work with, Lasker suffered from a form of depression for most of his life that required respite with long vacations in the country. When his first wife Flora died, he quickly got remarried to an actress, Doris Kenyon, but the marriage fell apart during the honeymoon.

Lasker, it appears, could not cope with the attention afforded to his glamorous wife, rather than himself, and suffered impotence.

Later in life, Lasker and his third wife Mary embraced charitable and social causes, taking on politically sensitive campaigns in areas such as national health insurance and birth control.

They also promoted the concept of leverage in philanthropy, providing the initial seed finance for projects and then encouraging other wealthy donors to follow suit.

Lasker was at his best, the authors conclude, when he operated as an outsider and could see things objectively and dispassionately. When he became an insider, his genius declined, he lost his ability to get to the kernel of the nut and he became merely another stakeholder.

His legacy to the industry he served so energetically remains strong and, even if the title of this biography is somewhat over the top, it is an exaggeration of which the egotistical Lasker himself would no doubt have been proud.