The original mad man: advertising genius Albert Lasker transformed America.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True! - Book review

The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (But Trud) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century, by Jeffey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz, Harvard Business Press, 415 pages, $27.95

AMERICANS ARE great at rattling off Nike slogans and reciting the lyrics to the Big Mac theme song. But ask them to name the man often described as the father of modern advertising, and you might as well ask them to name the U.S vice president in 1853. That so few people have ever heard of Vice President William Rufus DeVane King is understandable: He died after just 45 days in office as second-in-command to Franklin Pierce. That so few people have ever heard of the man who convinced America to brush its teeth every day and made it fashionable for women to smoke in public is downright unpatriotic.

His name was Albert Lasker, and he's the subject of a new biography, The Man Who Sold America, co-authored by the business consultant Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and the ad man Arthur W. Schultz. Lasker was born in 188o and grew up in Galveston, Texas, where his father, a German-Jewish immigrant, was a prosperous businessman and influential figure in local politics. At II, Albert started publishing a four-page weekly newspaper, The Galveston Free Press, that included local news, political editorials, and theater reviews. The young entrepreneur managed to attract enough advertisers to make about $60 a month for his efforts, or $1,400 in 2009 dollars.

That, it turned out, was one of the least prosperous stretches of his career. After graduating high school, Lasker wanted to follow his journalistic muse, but his father felt the newspaper business was a disreputable industry full of drunks. Hoping to steer his son away from a life of ink-stained dissolution, he set him up with an entry-level salesman's position at an advertising agency in Chicago.

Apparently the industry had yet to institutionalize three-martini lunches. But if ad men weren't yet as bibulous as their counterparts in the newspaper business, they weren't as industrious either. While advertising agencies had been around for about 60 years at that point--the first ones were founded in i842--they mostly functioned as brokers of newspaper and magazine space. Agencies distinguished themselves not through their creative work but through the segments of the market in which they specialized. If you wanted to buy space in women's magazines, you went to J. Walter Thompson. If you wanted to buy...