Advertising for Patent Medicines Spread across the Country

Posted by thomasmickey - April 9, 2014 - Uncategorized

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The Best Tonic from Pabst followed in the tradition of patent medicines, or products that companies put out that would cure health problems.

Stephen Fox in his book The Mirror Makers writes: “In the decades after the Civil War, patent medicines became the first product to be advertised on a large scale, the first to aim directly at the consumer with vivid, psychologically clever sales pitches, the first to show – for better or worse – the latent power of advertising.”

The Pabst adman A. Cressy Morrison managed the advertising for the Pabst Tonic from 1889 to 1897.

His many advertising strategies rang with a common theme: Pabst has used its skill in brewing beer to provide a beverage that offers the nutrients necessary for many health problems facing the modern woman.

Morrison, of course, had the example of decades of patent medicine advertising to serve as a model. At times he even referred to Pabst Tonic as a patent medicine.

Pabst Spent Extensively on Advertising its Malt Tonic

Posted by thomasmickey - February 28, 2014 - A. Cressy Morrison, advertising, Writing

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From 1887, when Pabst came up with its medicinal beverage Best Malt Tonic, the Brewery spared no expense in promoting it.

It became the most advertised of any of the Pabst beverages at that time.

According to the 50th anniversary booklet from Pabst in 1894: “The Best Tonic is probably as well known as any of the company’s products…Today its sales equal or exceed any other malt extract in the world. This supremacy has been attained by merit coupled with the energetic efforts of the company to make it known.”

By the time advertising manager A. Cressy Morrison left the Pabst Brewery in 1897 , the advertising department of the Pabst Brewery was spending annually for advertising more than $1000 a day.

Cressy had kept the name ‘Best Tonic’ before the public with ever-new methods of publicity, including a national magazine advertising campaign.

Time to Edit the Chapters I Have Written

Posted by thomasmickey - January 22, 2014 - Writing

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Right now I am editing the book chapters that I spent the last year writing.

What seems daunting to me is that at the moment the length of the manuscript is a bit short of my goal.

Do I need to worry about word length, or simply a book worth reading? I would opt for the second choice.

Every day I sit down, review, and rewrite a section of a chapter.

It is a slow process but necessary for the book to have any readers.

I take the job day by day.

Advertising Became More Scientific by the late 1800s.

Posted by thomasmickey - December 11, 2013 - A. Cressy Morrison, advertising

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The ability to sell a product to someone who did not need it became the goal of advertising by the earty twentieth century. Mass production of goods outpaced the distribution and consumption of such goods.

The talent to create an ad for a magazine or newspaper to sell a product to someone was therefore an important talent.

This was happening at the same time that advertisers began to look at sdvertising as a science.

A. Cressy Morrison [courtesy of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. 1937]

A. Cressy Morrsion, the Pabst advertising manager in the 1890s, became a believer in modern advertising as a science. His success at Pabst with the Best Tonic proved his methods worked.

Emily Fogg-Meade wrote in her article “The Place of Advertising in Modern Business” in 1901 in the Journal of Political Economy, “Advertising is a mode of education by which the knowledge of consumable goods is increased. It sets forth the peculiar excellence of novelties, keeps in mind the merits of staple articles, and thus increases the general demand for commodities.”

To be ‘scientific’ meant that there was a method, which could be carried out and measured for its success.

Fogg-Meade wrote in the same article that “Advertising experts differ as to the possibility of reducing advertising to a science, but they all acknowledge the importance of skill.”

Cressy showed his skill at advertising by making the Pabst Best Tonic the number one product for the brewery.

Cressy Launched an Ad Campaign with an Egyptian Theme

Posted by thomasmickey - November 13, 2013 - A. Cressy Morrison, advertising, Beer

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I just bought this ad on Ebay.

Over the period of his final three years at the brewery 1895-97 the Pabst advertising manager A. Cressy Morrison carried out a publicity campaign that focused on the three periods of brewing beer: the beginnings with the Egyptians, then the Germans who developed the art of brewing, and finally Americans who perfected brewing.

Brewing began in Egypt. This is what Cressy wrote in the booklet called “Ominous Secrets”: “So far back in the beginning of history that the archeologists can only approximate the date by thousands of years, humanity had discovered—humanity, whose wisdom was already so developed as to create the pyramids and those stupendous architectures now buried amid the sands of ancient Egypt,–humanity has discovered that in the preservation of the health and the development of the strength of the people lay the secret of progress, the power to build, the possibility of national defense.

“In almost every sepulcher, buried with kinds and with the people, embedded as in amber in their language and the rubric letters of their literature; on tablets of stone, in hieroglyphs with untold histories, and carved by the cunning sculptor in the very temple of Isis, we find the secret of the nation’s strength and wisdom ‘The two-rowed barley of the Egyptians,’ the first food grain, the most perfect strength-giver which nature has ever yielded to the pursuit and inquiry of man.”

Thus Cressy’s creative skills as an adman inspired him to link the beginnings of brewing to the Egyptians.

Notice the ad [above] promoted the Best Tonic which certainly had the qualities of the beer that the Egyptians gave the world. Tonic had not only its qualities but also its content. The Tonic was really beer.

Modern Advertising Began in the 1890s

Posted by thomasmickey - October 9, 2013 - A. Cressy Morrison, advertising, Beer

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The Pabst Brewery had achieved its status as the world’s largest brewery by the 1890s.

By that same time advertising provided for the financial success of national magazines like Ladies Home Journal. No longer did articles reflect the value of a magazine. Money generated from advertisers made LHJ the most popular national magazine of its time.

The new advertising demanded that the adman include illustrations and images to promote the product. People wanted to see pictures, not just words, in an ad.

Jackson Lears writes in his book Fables of Abundance that according to a Printers Ink contributor in 1898, not words but pictures constituted “the quickest-acting medium for the transmission of one man’s thought to another man’s mind.”

It was in that kind of advertising environment that A. Cressy Morrison, advertising manager at Pabst, guided the promotion of the Pabst product called The Best Tonic.

Advertising was changing mass publishing, and Cressy was in the midst of it.

Right Now I Am Editing

Posted by thomasmickey - September 25, 2013 - Uncategorized

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I began to write the nine chapters of the book one year ago. As is my style, I put a lot into the chapter, some of it because I wanted to include it, other material I inserted to fill out some missing area.

Right now I am editing those chapters. This is not difficult work, but it demands attention to detail.

I hope to finish this editing by mid October.

Back on Track with Writing the Book

Posted by thomasmickey - September 4, 2013 - A. Cressy Morrison

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Now that Labor Day is over, I can get back to the task of writing my book on the Pabst medicinal product called Pabst Extract or Best Tonic, first introduced in 1887.

Soon I will outline a new schedule for the next few months to pace my rewriting of the nine chapters of the book.

I continue to collect materials about A. Cressy Morrison (1864-1951), the Pabst advertising manager for Best Tonic for ten years. Much of it needs to be integrated into the story.

What demands most of my energy, however, from this point on is that I need to rewrite and edit what I spent the last year writing.

Shakers Sold their own Medicinal Beverage

Posted by thomasmickey - August 7, 2013 - medicinal beverage

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Last week I visited Shaker Village in Canterbury, New Hampshire.

There I discovered that the nineteenth century Shakers sold a medical beverage that had ten percent alcohol.

I toured the museum on the property where I found a wooden box used for bottles of Corbett’s Sarsaparilla. The Shakers bottled and sold this beverage.

: Tall ‘Queen of the Meadow’ plants on the left frame buildings at the Shaker Village in Canterbury, NH

Educated at Darmouth, Thomas Corbett was a both a Shaker and a medical doctor who served the nineteenth century Shaker community in Canterbury.

According to the museum guide, the box dates to the 1820s.

People were in search of medical help from such concoctions like the Corbett product. The label on the product claimed this beverage from the Shakers could help with many ailments including stomach problems.

In an ad for the product NH Speaker of the House at that time Stephen H. Ayer said this product helped him with his bronchitis.

So when Milwaukee’s Pabst Brewery came out with its medicinal beverage, Best Tonic, in 1887, there had already been a stream of such products, including this one from the Shakers on the East coast.

Pharmacies Sold the Pabst Tonic

Posted by thomasmickey - July 25, 2013 - advertising, Milwaukee

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Miss A. Rhoda walked into Milwaukee ‘s Kopf Pharmacy on October 21, 1897. She ordered one bottle of Best Tonic , which cost her twenty-five cents. The Hugo S. Kopf Pharmacy, located at 78 Juneau Avenue, was one of many pharmacies that sold the Pabst Tonic.

The customers were middle class women who would not enter a saloon for alcohol, but would have no fear in buying alcohol-based medicinal beverages from the pharmacist. There were no laws regulating patent medicines until 1906 so the manufacturers used whatever methods necessary to provide the product to its customers.

Cards and pamphlets about the product were also distributed in the pharmacy. Advertising of patent medicines was possible because the manufacturers supplied the promotional material as well the campaign strategies they thought would attract customers. For example, it was not uncommon to conduct a contest to see what pharmacist would construct the best window display with the patent medicine as the focus of the display.

So it was that the local pharmacy became a major outlet for Pabst Tonic.