The Great Depression was not a great time to start a new business. Following the American stock market crash in October 1929, national economies the world over began to retract. Billions of dollars in paper value were lost on stock markets and consumer spending plummeted as individuals lost their savings or their jobs, or both. Farmers, who might have been spared the ravages of the industrial economy, fared no better. Those who leveraged home and farm improvements against the harvest were devastated when drought hit the prairies and demand for Canada’s produce declined in step with global consumer spending. At its worst point, in 1933, more than one in four Canadians was out of work and the average farm income dropped to less than half its peak from the 1920s.
In this climate, the advertising industry soldiered on. Well into 1930, Marketing barely whispered the word “depression.” Just three weeks after the crash readers were warned not to repeat the term lest it become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Still, if there were products to be sold, someone had to sell them. Many agents turned to fear campaigns to sell their goods, admonishing consumers not to let themselves get yellow teeth, bad breath, unsightly clothing, or a host of other socially disagreeable ailments that might lead to lost opportunities. For instance, in 1934, Gillette ran a series of ads for its Blue Blade line suggesting that men who were careless about their appearance were more likely to lose their jobs.
There were, however, some optimists. Among them was Harry “Red” Foster, a popular sportsman with a flair for publicity. After capping his football career with a Grey Cup ring in 1930, Foster promoted both amateur and professional sports on a freelance basis. Four years on, he capitalized on his name and growing experience to found Foster Advertising-a force in the industry until the 1980s. His agency organized the first nationwide radio broadcast of a Grey Cup game in 1934 and the first televised broadcast in 1953.
John A. MacLaren took a different path to agency work. He started in newspapers and was drawn to advertising during the 1920s when American agency Campbell-Ewald opened an office in Toronto. Campbell-Ewald withdrew its brand from Canada in 1935, but MacLaren gambled that he could keep the agency going under his own name. (see “He Shoots, He Scores,” p. 50)
In the world of public relations, another pioneer would get his start in the midst of the Depression. Louis J. Cahill, a sportswriter for the St. Catharines Standard, turned his hand to promotional literature to boost Ontario’s Niagara region tourism and businesses. He founded the Niagara Editorial Bureau in 1936, and in three short years found himself handling the Royal Tour as King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited Niagara and opened the Queen Elizabeth Way highway. Under his direction, the company grew to become OEB International and a founding member of WorldCom Public Relations in 1988. Still based in St. Catharines, OEB is now the country’s oldest PR firm.
Foster, MacLaren and Cahill were greatly aided by their early engagement with “new media,” otherwise known as radio. Newspapers had been closing or consolidating since the 1910s due to fierce competition for advertising dollars. Where most Canadian centres had once supported two or more papers, many were moving towards a single paper. The Depression simply accelerated this trend. Among magazines, a combination of poor economic conditions and unfavourable federal policies led to the closure of several notable titles. Most prominent was the venerable Canadian Magazine, a literary and political journal founded in 1892 that tried to reinvent itself as a popular consumer magazine to compete with Maclean’s. It failed.
By contrast, radio experienced phenomenal growth despite the hard economic times. Until 1953, every radio set in Canada was supposed to be licensed through the federal government. From 1928 to 1933-the year before the crash to the depth of the Depression-the number of licensed sets in Canada almost tripled to 763,000. The government itself believed this represented only 70% to 80% of the actual number in use, in which case the actual number of sets might have been closer to one million, or roughly one for every eleven Canadians. Radio offered one winning advantage during the depression: once a set was purchased, the programs were free. If you could build a crystal radio, the sets themselves were free.
Some companies shrugged off the new medium, thinking that it was a fad unlikely to have any lasting influence as an advertising vehicle. Among them was the American office of General Motors, which temporarily pulled out of radio sponsorships in 1932. Nonetheless, the trick of radio advertising lay not in the medium itself but in the careful pairing of product with program. While Foster pursued football and wrestling sponsored by Eveready batteries, MacLaren promoted hockey through an exclusive deal with Conn Smythe and the Toronto Maple Leafs. It was originally sponsored by General Motors of Canada, MacLaren’s largest client, but passed to Imperial Oil in 1936.
Hockey players and radio announcers were not the only Canadian celebrities who sold goods in the 1930s. A poor farm family near Callander, Ontario, made international headlines when Elzire Dionne gave birth to five girls. Against all odds, the Dionnes, their village neighbours and Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe successfully brought the girls through the first few weeks. When the girls’ father realized their commercial potential, the Ontario government stepped in to claim the prize for itself. It declared itself their ward and placed them in a specially-built clinic across the road from their parents’ farm. Called Quintland, the clinic was essentially a zoo where tourists paid to see the children play. For the next nine years, the government managed their affairs through Dafoe and the children became a marketer’s dream. Certainly they were a medical miracle, but they were also undeniably photogenic and had an unmatchable aura of authenticity about them. While Depression-era movie and radio stars continued to live the high life in Hollywood or New York City, the Dionne Quintuplets story served as a model for all parents struggling to raise their own families. Countless companies sought the Dionne name on their promotions, including Libby’s tinned foods, Fisher car parts, Palmolive, Lysol, Colgate, Quaker Oats, Carnation Milk and the federal governments’s Victory Bond campaign during the Second World War. Quintland itself drew more tourists in the mid-1930s than Niagara Falls.
If Canadian advertising suffered through the Depression, then Harry Foster, Jack MacLaren and Lou Cahill found ways to steer through it. The novelty of radio supplied some slight relief early on, but eventually its promise was realized by quality programs and special events that held audiences entranced-be they royalty, sports or baby girls. One can almost picture Foster’s delight as he extolled the virtues of Crown Brand corn syrup, endorsed by the Dionnes, to football fans.
RUSSELL JOHNSTON is the author of Selling Themselves: The Emergence of Canadian Advertising, published by University of Toronto Press. He is associate professor and chair of the Department of Communications, Popular Culture & Film at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont.
