Advertising in the 1920s: What Modern Marketers Keep Relearning

Advertising in the 1920s was the first era in which mass persuasion became a commercial science. Brands moved from simple product announcements to emotionally charged campaigns built on psychology, aspiration, and audience segmentation, laying the structural foundations that still shape how marketing works today.

The decade produced the first celebrity endorsements at scale, the birth of radio as an advertising medium, and the earliest attempts to measure whether any of it was actually working. A century later, the questions being asked are remarkably similar. The tools are different. The underlying problems are not.

If you are building a modern go-to-market strategy, understanding where the discipline came from is not an academic exercise. The growth frameworks being sold as innovations today were largely field-tested between 1920 and 1929, under real commercial pressure, with real consequences for getting it wrong. More on that over at the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, where I cover the structural side of how businesses actually build and sustain commercial momentum.

What Made the 1920s a Turning Point for Advertising?

The 1920s arrived after a decade of war and economic disruption. American and European consumers had money, a growing appetite for new products, and for the first time, the infrastructure to reach them at scale. Mass-circulation newspapers and magazines already existed, but the decade added radio, expanded department store culture, and a professional advertising industry that had started to take itself seriously.

Before this period, most advertising was closer to classified listings than persuasion. You announced your product. You stated a price. You described a feature. What changed in the 1920s was the deliberate introduction of psychology. Advertisers began asking not just “what does this product do?” but “what does the customer fear, want, or aspire to?” That shift, from product-out to customer-in, is the single most important conceptual development in the history of advertising. And it happened in one decade.

I have spent a lot of time judging the Effie Awards, which recognises marketing effectiveness, and the campaigns that consistently win share one characteristic with the best 1920s work: they are built around a human truth, not a product feature. The decade of the 1920s established that principle commercially, not theoretically.

How Did Brands Use Psychology to Drive Demand?

The most instructive example from the era is Listerine. Before 1920, Listerine was a general antiseptic with modest sales. Its advertising agency, Lambert and Feasley, reframed the product around a condition they effectively invented as a social crisis: halitosis. The word itself was medical-sounding and therefore authoritative. The campaigns depicted social rejection, romantic failure, and professional embarrassment, all caused by bad breath, all solvable with a bottle of Listerine.

Sales increased dramatically over the following years. The product had not changed. The emotional frame had. This is the prototype for problem-solution advertising, and it remains one of the most effective structures in marketing today, which is also why it attracts the most ethical scrutiny.

Palmolive ran a similar playbook with soap and beauty anxiety. Pepsodent, backed by Claude Hopkins, one of the most rigorous advertising minds of the era, built the toothpaste habit loop by creating a “tingling sensation” cue that made consumers feel the product was working. Hopkins was not manipulating people arbitrarily. He was applying a genuine understanding of habit formation to commercial ends. His book “Scientific Advertising,” published in 1923, remains one of the clearest frameworks for direct response thinking ever written.

What this era understood, and what performance marketers sometimes forget, is that demand creation requires reaching people who are not yet looking for your product. You cannot capture intent that does not exist. Earlier in my career I placed too much weight on lower-funnel performance channels, assuming the numbers proved they were working. Over time I came to understand that much of what those channels were credited for was going to happen anyway. The person already searching for your product was already close to buying. The harder and more valuable work is reaching people before they know they need you. Listerine did not capture halitosis-solution demand. It created it.

This is directly relevant to how modern marketers think about channel mix. Market penetration strategy only gets you so far when you are competing for existing demand. The 1920s brands that grew fastest were the ones creating new demand categories, not fighting over existing ones.

What Role Did Radio Play in 1920s Advertising?

Radio in the 1920s is the closest historical parallel to digital advertising in the 2000s. A new medium appeared. It reached audiences at scale. Brands rushed in, often without a clear strategy. Measurement was limited. And within a few years, the medium had fundamentally restructured how advertising worked.

The first commercial radio broadcast in the United States is generally dated to 1920, and by 1922 companies were paying for radio time. AT&T sold the first paid radio advertisement on WEAF in New York in August 1922. By the mid-1920s, national radio networks were forming, and brands had access to something genuinely new: a simultaneous, national audience in their homes.

The creative challenge was significant. Radio advertising had no visuals, no product demonstration, no price list. It required storytelling, music, and personality. Brands responded by sponsoring entertainment programmes, embedding their names in content rather than interrupting it. The Palmolive Hour, The Eveready Hour, and similar sponsored broadcasts were early examples of what we now call branded content or content marketing. The format predates the internet by 80 years.

The measurement problem was immediate. Advertisers had no reliable way to know how many people were listening, or whether listening translated to purchase. This is not a digital-era problem. It is a media-era problem, and it has existed since the first brand paid for radio time in 1922. Go-to-market execution feels harder today partly because measurement expectations have risen faster than measurement capability. That gap is not new. It just has more dashboards around it now.

For anyone building a modern channel strategy, the radio parallel is useful when evaluating emerging platforms. The brands that moved early on radio built audience relationships before the medium became crowded and expensive. The brands that waited for proof-of-ROI before committing paid a premium to reach audiences that had already formed habits around other brands. That dynamic repeats itself with every new medium.

How Did 1920s Advertisers Approach Audience Segmentation?

Segmentation in the 1920s was crude by modern standards but conceptually sound. Advertisers understood that different publications reached different audiences, and they planned accordingly. Women’s magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping carried advertising for household products, beauty, and food. Business publications carried advertising for industrial goods and financial services. General interest newspapers carried everything.

What the era introduced was the idea of psychographic segmentation alongside demographic. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, applied his uncle’s ideas about the unconscious to advertising and public relations. His 1928 book “Propaganda” was not a manual for deception. It was a systematic argument that mass behaviour could be shaped by appealing to unconscious desires rather than rational self-interest. His campaign for the American Tobacco Company, encouraging women to smoke as an act of liberation and equality, is the most famous and most uncomfortable example of this thinking applied commercially.

The ethical dimension matters. The 1920s established the power of emotional and psychological advertising, and it also demonstrated the potential for that power to be misused. Marketers working in regulated sectors today, including financial services, healthcare, and professional services, are handling rules that exist largely because of what happened when those guardrails did not exist. If you work in B2B financial services marketing, the compliance frameworks around your campaigns are a direct descendant of the lessons learned when advertising operated without them.

Bernays also understood something that modern performance marketers sometimes undervalue: context shapes perception. Where an ad appears, and what surrounds it, affects how the message lands. This is the core argument behind endemic advertising, placing ads in environments where the audience is already in a relevant mindset. It is a 1920s idea with a modern name.

What Were the Major Advertising Agencies of the 1920s?

The 1920s was the decade in which the modern advertising agency model took shape. J. Walter Thompson, Lord and Thomas, BBDO, and Young and Rubicam were all operating and growing during this period. These were not just creative shops. They were strategic advisors, media buyers, and research operations combined.

Albert Lasker at Lord and Thomas is often credited with defining what advertising agencies actually do. His argument was that advertising is “salesmanship in print,” and that the agency’s job was to apply the same rigour to written persuasion that a skilled salesperson applied face-to-face. This framing shifted agencies from being space brokers, who simply bought media on behalf of clients, to being strategic partners who shaped the message and the medium together.

I think about this when I see modern debates about whether agencies are strategic partners or execution vendors. That debate was already happening in the 1920s. Lasker was arguing for the strategic model. Many clients were pushing for the cheaper transactional one. A century later, the same tension exists in every agency pitch I have ever sat through, and I have sat through more than I can count.

The agency model of the 1920s also established the account team structure that persists today: a client-facing account manager, a creative team, and a media planning function. It was not perfect. But it was built to solve a real problem, which is how you coordinate complex, multi-channel persuasion at scale. When I was building teams from 20 to 100 people at iProspect, the structural challenges were not fundamentally different from what those early agency leaders were solving. The vocabulary had changed. The problem had not.

Understanding how those early agencies structured their client relationships is relevant to how modern businesses structure their own marketing operations. A proper corporate and business unit marketing framework for B2B tech companies faces the same coordination problem the 1920s agencies were solving: how do you maintain brand coherence while allowing different business units to execute against their specific commercial objectives?

How Did 1920s Advertisers Think About Measurement and Effectiveness?

Claude Hopkins was the most rigorous measurer of his era. His approach to advertising was closer to direct marketing than brand advertising. He used coupons, coded offers, and split-run tests to determine which copy, which headline, and which offer generated the most response. His methodology was systematic and his results were documented. He was doing controlled creative testing decades before A/B testing had a name.

Hopkins’ framework influenced an entire generation of direct response advertisers, and his principles are still taught in copywriting courses today. But his approach had a limitation that he acknowledged: it worked best for products where the sale was immediate and traceable. For brand advertising, where the effect was cumulative and indirect, his methods were harder to apply.

This is the same tension that exists between performance marketing and brand marketing today. Intelligent growth models require both, and the mistake that many marketing teams make is treating them as alternatives rather than complements. Hopkins knew this. His campaigns for Pepsodent combined a measurable direct response mechanism, a free trial, with brand-building storytelling about the tingling sensation and the beautiful smile. The two worked together.

The attribution problem of the 1920s was real. John Wanamaker’s famous line, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” predates the 1920s but captured the era’s central frustration. Marketers were spending significant sums across multiple channels, with no reliable way to attribute sales to specific campaigns. Sound familiar?

What the best 1920s advertisers did, in the absence of perfect measurement, was apply honest approximation. They tracked what they could, made reasonable inferences about what they could not, and kept testing. That is still the right approach. The mistake is demanding false precision from tools that cannot deliver it, or dismissing channels entirely because their contribution cannot be isolated in a dashboard. Before making any channel decisions, it is worth doing proper digital marketing due diligence to understand what your current measurement actually captures and what it misses.

What Can Modern Marketers Learn From 1920s Campaign Strategy?

The most transferable lesson from 1920s advertising is not a tactic. It is a disposition. The best advertisers of the era were commercially serious people who happened to work in a creative field. They were not trying to win awards. They were trying to sell products. That orientation, where creative quality is a means to a commercial end rather than an end in itself, is what separated the work that built businesses from the work that merely looked good.

I was reminded of this early in my agency career, when I found myself unexpectedly running a brainstorm for a major brand after the founder had to leave for a client meeting. He handed me the whiteboard pen and walked out. My first thought was somewhere between panic and determination. But the thing that kept me grounded was a simple question: what does this brand actually need to achieve commercially? Starting there, rather than starting with creative ambition, made the session more productive than I expected. The 1920s practitioners had that orientation built in. They had to. There was no room for advertising theatre when your client was measuring sales against spend.

The second lesson is about reach. The 1920s brands that grew fastest were the ones that invested in reaching people who had never heard of them, not just converting people who were already interested. This is the demand creation versus demand capture distinction, and it matters enormously for how you allocate budget. If your entire marketing system is optimised for the bottom of the funnel, you are competing for a fixed pool of existing intent. You are not growing it.

Think of it this way: a person who walks into a clothing shop and tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone browsing online. But that person first had to be made aware of the shop, had to be given a reason to walk in, had to be reached before they were in buying mode. The 1920s understood that the work upstream of the sale was not separate from the commercial strategy. It was the commercial strategy. Growth frameworks that focus only on conversion optimisation miss this entirely.

The third lesson is about medium selection. Radio was not right for every brand in the 1920s. Some products needed demonstration. Some needed print’s ability to carry detailed copy. Some needed the prestige association of a specific magazine. The brands that grew were the ones that matched their medium to their message and their audience, not the ones that chased the newest or most exciting channel. That principle applies directly to decisions about pay per appointment lead generation versus brand investment, or any other channel trade-off you are evaluating today.

Finally, the 1920s remind us that the fundamentals of persuasion are stable even when the media landscape is not. Emotion, social proof, authority, scarcity, habit formation: these mechanisms were identified and applied commercially in the 1920s. They work for the same reason they worked then, because human psychology has not changed. What changes is the context in which those mechanisms are deployed. Growth loops built on modern product analytics are applying the same habit-formation thinking that Pepsodent used in 1923. The data infrastructure is different. The underlying logic is identical.

How Does 1920s Advertising Thinking Apply to Website and Digital Strategy?

One of the most useful exercises I recommend for any marketing team is auditing their digital presence the way a 1920s advertiser would audit a print campaign. Strip away the technology. Ask: what is this actually saying? Who is it saying it to? Why should they care? What do we want them to do next?

Most websites fail this test because they are written from the inside out. They describe the company, its history, its values, its product features. They do not start with the customer’s problem, the emotional truth that the 1920s advertisers understood was the entry point to any persuasive communication. A structured checklist for analysing your company website for sales and marketing strategy can help surface these gaps systematically, but the underlying question is a 1920s question: are you starting with what you want to say, or with what your customer needs to hear?

The 1920s also established the importance of consistency across touchpoints. A brand that appeared in a prestige magazine with one tone and in a radio broadcast with a contradictory one was undermining itself. Modern brands face the same challenge across a far more complex channel mix, but the principle is identical. Brand coherence is not a brand team obsession. It is a commercial asset.

There is also a useful parallel in how the 1920s handled the relationship between advertising and sales. The best campaigns of the era were designed to make the salesperson’s job easier, not to replace them. Advertising built awareness, credibility, and desire. The salesperson closed. That division of labour, and the importance of aligning the two, is directly relevant to modern B2B marketing, where the handoff between marketing-generated interest and sales conversion remains one of the most common points of commercial failure.

If you are working through the structural questions of how marketing and commercial strategy fit together in your organisation, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the frameworks I use to think about these problems, drawn from 20 years of running agencies and working with clients across 30 industries.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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