On a fall day in 1914, in a Toronto Police courtroom, the sellers of a patent medicine known as Nature’s Creation were found guilty of overpromising and underdelivering. Nature’s Creation had been advertised as a cure for “consumption,” the common term back then for tuberculosis. Unfortunately for customers, the only thing Nature’s Creation relieved them of was their money, and in court that day the company was fined $200.
For Toronto’s emerging advertising establishment, primarily the members of the Toronto Ad Club, the conviction must have been hugely satisfying. Only months before, the federal government had passed the False Advertising Act, making it a criminal offence to make untruthful claims in an ad. The maximum fine was $200, six months in jail-or both.
But the real legwork in this case hadn’t been done by the police. It came courtesy of the ad club’s recently formed “vigilance committee,” whose sole mandate was to root out false ad claims and cajole the advertiser, and whatever newspaper ran the ad, to withdraw it-or else.
In the years after Marketing was founded in 1908, advertising was just beginning to get its first taste of legitimacy. Brands like Old Dutch and Goodyear had emerged through the power of advertising, outdoor advertising had turned Neilson’s Ice Cream into a national brand and William MacDonald MacKay, who’d performed miracles as ad manager for Lever Brothers in Great Britain, was now doing the same in Canada, turning Lux and Sunlight into household names.
The way Marketing’s editors saw it, the only thing that could ruin advertising’s good name was advertising that lied. “The success of both honest and dishonest advertising depends alike on one element-the confidence of the buying public, and dishonest or objectionable advertising can only tend to destroy the public confidence which the honest advertising has created,” they wrote in the January 1913 issue. Vigilance committees were there to make sure their confidence wasn’t shaken.
Not that admen of the day ever really thought advertising might be bad for anyone. Like Canada itself, which in 1908 had a population of 6.5 million, and was anticipated to grow to a startling 80 million by century’s end, advertising’s potential was unlimited. At the offices of the Toronto Ad Club, at 179 Yonge St.-where, above Williams Cafe, the city’s agency executives often congregated to smoke cigars and be entertained by the well-known piano player and composer Jules Brazil-advertising was seen as the great communicator, a way to enlighten the public about products that would make their lives better-stoves, cars, soap, even cigarettes.
“The advertising millennium is not so far distant as many imagine,” Marketing accurately predicted in March 1912, while the Sunday American proclaimed that “What language is to the human race, advertising is to business, industry, commerce, manufacturing and [the] economy.” In June 1917, in an article entitled “How Advertising Saved Britain,” a Marketing writer even went so far as to claim that in 1914, had it not been for the ads that recruited four million soldiers and the ads that taught Britons how to make sacrifices at home, the Germans would likely have won a quick victory in the First World War.
And yes, even the war was sometimes seen as a good thing for advertising. At its outbreak, the World Newspaper Co. in Toronto pointed out that the public’s appetite for war news had caused the combined circulation of its daily World and Sunday World circulation to jump to 230,000 from 145,000 in just a few days. A more conservative tack was taken by the rival Evening Telegram, which stated matter-of-factly that its 10 p.m. war edition would contain no advertising and would not be added into its overall circulation numbers.
Of course, during the 1908-20 period in marketing, advertising was all about print. Magazines, of which the most popular included Maclean’s, Canadian Courier and Everywoman’s World, were considered avenues to build the prestige of a brand, whereas newspapers “stirred things up and actually promoted sales.” This according to a January 1912 Marketing article written by Frank Rowe of the Russell Motor Car Co. Breaking it down further, Rowe opined that morning newspapers were the ideal avenue to reach a male audience, while evening newspapers were better read by women.
Rowe was clearly trying to understand how people consumed media and therefore advertising. Having convinced businesses that advertising was a bona fide tool to increase sales, ad agencies were now searching for a way to perfect their craft. As Marketing’s editors pointed out in 1912, “Modern advertising uses every available process and science… At a meeting of advertising men one hears ‘psychology’ and ‘subconsciousness’ bandied about as freely as talk of type and white space.” Advertising had finally come of age.
But as the decade drew to a close, the written word’s monopoly of the ad message was coming to an end. On Dec. 1, 1919, the world’s first radio broadcast was made by station XWA in Montreal. Since few had a radio (and many were still without electricity), the program was heard by almost no one. But the floodgates had been opened, and within a few years radio stations were popping up across Canada. Not for the last time in the 20th century, advertisers and ad agencies would have to come to grips with a new medium and figure out the best way to reach consumers through it.
