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thought of himself as a writer, Barton agreed – figuring he could still be a man of letters in his spare time.
    In its early years BDO won a succession of cornerstone accounts, such as General Electric, General Motors and Dunlop. It moved to spacious new offices at 383 Madison Avenue, where it was not the only advertising agency: the other was the George Batten Company.
    Like many advertising pioneers, George Batten had started a one-man agency towards the end of the 19th century. However, his was the first operation to offer in-house printing, as he believed in the use of plain, simple type to attract the attention of readers. Batten died in 1918, having built an agency to reckon with. By the time it shared a headquarters with BDO, in 1923, the Batten Company had 246 employees. It mergedwith BDO in 1928 to form one of the industry’s largest players, with billings of US $32 million.
    The unprecedented success of agencies like JWT and BBDO demonstrates the extent to which the 1920s were boom years for advertising. In London, the decade had kicked off with an International Advertising Exhibition at White City. The poster for the event showed a London Underground platform crammed with cross-track advertising, while the waiting passengers included many familiar advertising characters: Monsieur Bibendum (better known in Britain as The Michelin Man), the Bisto Kids, Nipper the HMV dog and the red-coated striding man found on bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label (he was first drawn in 1909 by the cartoonist Tom Browne). Brands had definitively entered the public consciousness.
    Back in the States, the introduction of hire purchase made costly goods available to a raft of new consumers. Sales of radio sets rose from US $60 million in 1922 to US $850 million by the end of the decade, while the number of cars on the road rose from 6 million to 23 million in 10 years. In 1928 Ford replaced its Model T with the Model A, with the NW Ayer agency handling advertising for the launch. Just as JWT’s overseas expansion had been accelerated by General Motors, so Ayer’s was driven by Ford, with the agency opening offices in London, São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Slowly, the big agencies were going global.
    This period also saw the strengthening of an industry that was to remain a reliable source of income for advertising agencies for years to come: tobacco. In the United States, rival firms RJ Reynolds (Camel), Liggett & Myers (Chesterfield) and American Tobacco (Lucky Strike) had been fiercely competing for the traditionally male market of cigarette smokers. But now they noticed that a new generation of young, liberated women was starting to smoke – even though this was still considered socially unacceptable. The tobacco companies made contorted efforts to target women: a poster showing a woman gazing at a Camel poster was a typical example; or a woman saying to her Chesterfield-puffing guy, ‘Blow some my way.’ Despite this oblique approach, the number of women smokers in the United States rose from 5 per cent of the total in 1923 to 18 per cent 10 years later.
    But the profits that the advertising agencies reaped from this new market were not enough to protect them from the approaching financial maelstrom.
    Rubicam versus the Depression
    An image provided by the ad agency D’Arcy, of Santa Claus dressed in the red and white livery of Coca-Cola (his traditional attire from then on), was one of the only cheerful sights on the wintry streets of America in 1931. Unemployment had risen to 8 million, having doubled in a year. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 had ripped the floor out of the US economy and sent a shudder through the entire Western world (with the shockwave hitting debt-ridden Germany particularly hard). By 1932 the Dow Jones Index had lost 89 per cent of its value – and would not fully recover until 1954.
    As one might have expected, the advertising agencies adopted fixed grins and