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preached optimism. Things would get better soon, they said. But, as Stephen Fox reports, Albert Lasker was forced to cut salaries at Lord & Thomas by 25 per cent, ‘and then later had to fire over 50 employees… BBDO tried to carry its people through the hard times and so consequently was overstaffed’. The hard sell got harder; more sex appeared in advertising. The bitter public glanced disdainfully at ads for products they could no longer afford. With the glory days of the 1920s at an end, advertising would never regain its coquettish charm.
    And yet, a couple of famous agencies rose from this mire. One of them was Leo Burnett, which opened in 1935 with a bowl of apples on its reception desk (see Chapter 5 , The Chicago way). Another was Young & Rubicam. Although the agency had been around since 1923, it was one of the few to wrench a profit from the Depression, when it also developed the techniques that would have a lasting impact on the industry.
    Raymond Rubicam was another frustrated writer in a sector littered with them. Born in Brooklyn in 1892, the youngest of eight children, he was just five years old when his father died of tuberculosis. With his mother unable to look after him, he was shuffled around surrogate parents in Ohio, Denver and Texas. A bright yet undisciplined child, he left school at 15 to work in a diverse variety of positions – from salesman to hotel porter – hitching illegal rides on the railroad as he made his way slowly east. Finally he pitched up in Philadelphia, where his family had its original roots. Here, aided by relatives, he made ends meet with short stories and journalism.
    Then he fell in love, and realized that his finances would need a boost if he was to become a family man. After a short, unsatisfactory periodas an automobile salesman, he turned his attention to the nascent advertising industry. He wrote some sample tobacco ads and took them along to the offices of F Wallis Armstrong, the first agency in the phone book and, unbeknown to Rubicam, a notoriously cantankerous adman. Initially agreeing to see the budding copywriter, Armstrong then let him ‘warm a bench’ in the lobby for nine days in a row. On the final day, Rubicam went home and wrote an angry letter explaining exactly what he thought of such treatment. It was, he recalled, ‘designed to produce an immediate interview or a couple of black eyes for the writer’ (‘Leaders in Marketing’, Journal of Marketing , April 1962). Rubicam’s talent must have blazed off the page: Armstrong called him back into the office and hired him.
    Even so, Rubicam was unlikely to shine at the antediluvian Armstrong operation, and stayed just long enough to learn the rudiments of copywriting before moving on – this time to NW Ayer. Here, for the Steinway piano account, Rubicam hit the right note, with an ad describing the piano as ‘The Instrument of the Immortals’. Later, he wrote another winning line for the pharmaceutical company ER Squibb: ‘The priceless ingredient of every product is the honour and integrity of its maker.’
    Rubicam’s closest friend at Ayer was James Orr Young, an amiable account man seven years his senior who had also moved over from the Armstrong agency. At a certain point they began to feel that there wasn’t enough room for manoeuvre at Ayer, which had grown stuffy and complacent. While taking a stroll across Independence Square one afternoon, they decided to launch their own agency.
    At its peak, Y&R was the closest adland had so far seen to the kind of freewheeling agency that would later spark ‘the creative revolution’ of the 1950s. Reflecting his own lack of a formal education, Rubicam recruited talented oddballs and rebels rather than intellectuals. Hardly anyone turned up before 10 in the morning, but the agency specialized in late-night creative sessions, fuelled by coffee and cigarettes, known as