Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising

Prophet Motives

Christopher Wixson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319786285
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

This book charts how promotional campaigns in which Bernard Shaw participated were key crucibles within which agency and personality could re-negotiate their relationship to one another and to the consuming public. Concurrent with the rise of modern advertising, the creation of Shaw's 'G.B.S.' public persona was achieved through masterful imitation of patent medicine marketing strategies and a shrewd understanding of the relationship between product and spokesman. Helping to enhance the visibility of his literary writing and dovetailing with his Fabian political activities, 'G.B.S.' also became a key figure in the evolution of testimonial endorsement and the professionalizing of modern advertising. The study analyzes multiple ad series in which Shaw was prominently featured that were occasions for self-promotion for both Shaw and the agencies, and presage the iconoclastic style of contemporary 'public personality' and techniques of celebrity marketing.

© The Author(s) 2018

Christopher WixsonBernard Shaw and Modern AdvertisingBernard Shaw and His Contemporarieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78628-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: “Press as Corrected, G.B.S.”

Christopher Wixson¹

(1)

Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL, USA

Christopher Wixson

Email: [email protected]

Should you set out to extol or to advertise Bernard Shaw, you know that this has already been done with incomparable energy and talent, and that it has been done by one who knows. ¹

—John Palmer

End Abstract

In its November 18, 1950 issue, The New Yorker reported that Scribner’s bookstore, the day after Bernard Shaw’s death, “threw together a window display made up of a number of his works and a sign reading, ‘G.B.S. 1846–1950.’” The short article went on to recount how “Scribner’s Shaw remained a hundred and four years old until the next day, when the year of his birth was moved up to 1856. It was Scribner’s that was born in 1846.” ² The bookseller’s mistake actually produced an ideal piece of marketing in which the writer (Shaw) is obscured by the client (Scribner’s) and the brand (“G.B.S.”). It also creates two competing pictures of Shaw—an author transfigured into a commodity by marketing over which he had little control and a copywriter who expertly deployed self-advertising to market his work and a larger political, ethical, and aesthetic vision.

Raymond Williams maintains that “the half-century between 1880 and 1930 [saw] the full development of an organized system of commercial information and persuasion, as part of the modern distributive system in conditions of large-scale capitalism.” ³ For Roy Church , this apogee had its roots in “the late seventeenth century when, to strengthen sales appeal, rhetoric was added to information in the form of announcement concerning the availability of goods,” coextensive “with the appearance of newspapers which proliferated during the eighteenth-century in London and also in the provinces.” ⁴ Most accounts of the advent of modern British advertising identify the abolition of the advertisement tax (1853) and the newspaper stamp (1855) as the impetus for its proliferate growth, contemporaneous to the swell of commodity culture. In Advertising in Britain: A History, T. R. Nevett additionally attributes the expanding circulation growth of magazines and newspapers (hence advertising) to a decrease in prices, an increase in wages, and advancements in transportation and mass production. ⁵ Indeed, “the publishing trade was one of the most highly industrialized sectors of British manufacturing [and,] using modern systems of production, communication, and distribution, publishers created a mass public for their products” and a showcase for those of their advertisers. ⁶ If this network initially sought to promote goods and services, it evolved quickly to focus on the registering of brands on the public consciousness in order “to build long-term reputation … [and] guarantees [of] the consistent quality of the branded product.” ⁷ An enormous uptick in the amount and visibility of press advertising and agencies occurred in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Shaw was born into “a widespread culture of brand advertising in Ireland”: “From the period of the Famine onwards … the Irish press, from north to south, and from supposedly non-partisan and widely distributed freesheets to paid-for newspapers of various political hues, was inextricably wedded to advertising.” ⁸ He would observe in the 1890s that, “in the present century of universal progress, no art, perhaps, has attained to such subtly-varied developments, as that of advertising.” ⁹

Concurrent with the rise of modern advertising, Shaw’s prolific campaign to create and sustain his “G.B.S. ” persona in the public consciousness endured for more than seventy years. As Brad Kent has argued, the “self-fashioning and creation of a public personality was an integral element of literary culture in the modern period,” ¹⁰ and, beginning in the 1880s, Shaw skillfully brokered print appearances by “G.B.S.” in newspapers and periodicals to enhance the visibility of his literary writing and dovetail with his Fabian interests in getting important ideas into public discourse for debate. Although he wrote to Otto Kyllman in 1903 of an intention to “give [his] mind to the whole business of advertising one of these days,” Shaw indeed was already and always a consummate salesman. ¹¹ As shrewdly as he could imitate professional marketing strategies, though, Scribner’s shop window is indicative of how “G.B.S.” could be a marketing tool for other hands besides his own. Alice McEwan has observed that the brand he created “was so successful that it was co-opted by the marketplace, assuming its role within a myriad of advertising gimmicks and promotional strategies in mass culture,” eventually surpassing its creator. ¹²

Advertising’s double-edge for Shaw is pointedly displayed in his 1910 play Misalliance by the characters of Gunner and Lina Szczepanowska. Arriving in the play to exact revenge on Tarleton, Gunner musters no resistance to the lure of commodity upon entering the Tarleton household when he is suddenly and mysteriously arrested by the sight of the unwrapped Turkish bath unit, one of the most widely recognized and advertised home-cure contraptions: “his attention is caught by the Turkish bath . He looks down the lunette, and opens the panels.” ¹³ His preoccupation is disrupted by the arrival of Hypatia and Joey, and he quickly takes refuge inside the bath. As the lovers banter, Shaw writes that “the head of the scandalized man in the Turkish bath has repeatedly risen from the lunette, with a strong expression of moral shock.” ¹⁴ The humor of Gunner’s head popping up through the bath is not derived solely from the farce of unexpected and undesired eavesdropping. E. S. Turner reminds that “hardly any magazine or store’s catalogue of the ’eighties and ’nineties was without an illustration of one of these domestic sweat-boxes, with the patient’s head protruding from the top.” ¹⁵ Original audiences would surely and immediately have recalled the ubiquitous image of the disembodied head atop the Turkish bath contraption from decades of periodical advertisements (see Fig. 1.1). The man depicted is wholly absorbed by commerce, his individual agency fully co-opted by the marketplace.

Fig. 1.1

Turkish bath advertisement, The Windsor Magazine 35:204 (December 1911), p. xviii

A more empowering relationship to advertising is illustrated by another unexpected visitor to the Tarleton home, Polish acrobat Lina Szczepanowska who, with her speeches and demonstrations, proves to be a master copywriter, styling herself like a patent medicine that sells an entire lifestyle, a vision of robust health and well-being. As such, Lina is an incarnation of the figure Shaw promoted throughout his life, animated solely by individual will but operating under the auspices of “a dynamic ever-moving biological Life Force.” ¹⁶ Like Lina, Shaw was his own copywriter marketing salubrious Shavian physical, mental, and spiritual fitness via “G.B.S. ” Throughout his life, Shaw endeavored to harness marketing successfully as a vehicle towards individual and collective advancement and to fend off as much as possible being harnessed like Gunner into a mere hoarding, complicit with oppressive economic forces. His eventual forays into commercial campaigns were always fraught with anxious negotiation to retain integrity apart from client and product.

Advertising’s double-edged potential informs Shaw’s understanding of the word itself and governs his usage of it in his literary work. Actually, the meanings gathered during the etymological journey of the word “advertising” seem themselves very Shavian indeed, beginning with a provocative amalgam of promulgation and admonishment. Derived from Old French, “advertising” initially meant to “give notice of (something)” or “to make generally known,” often as a formal and sincere warning. It referred to the action of both taking and giving note, announcing information for consideration and the heeding of counsel. This sense certainly endured, as newspapers even into the modern period retained the title of “advertiser.” Surprisingly, it is another great playwright (William Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing) who provides the earliest recorded usage of the word to mean “calling public attention to.” By the early eighteenth century and the advent of print media, “advertisement” gains further texture as publicity transfigures to promotion, announcement to a means of selling services or commodities, arriving closer to our contemporary definition. At that point, in practice, the word thus embarked upon what Shaw calls its “adventures in Capitalism in pursuit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: “Press as Corrected, G.B.S.”
• 2. Prescription and Petrifaction: Proprietary Medicine, Health Marketing, and Misalliance
• 3. “The Shadow of Disrepute”: G.B.S. and Testimonial Marketing
• 4. “The Biggest Scoop in Advertising History”: Personality Marketing, G.B.S., and the Near-Testimonial
• 5. “Those Magic Initials, G.B.S.”: Copywriting for the Irish Clipper
• Back Matter