Scott WD

Name: Francis Wayland Ayer

Achievements: Pioneer in advertising

Born: February 4, 1848; Lee, Massachusetts

Died: March 5, 1923; Meredith, New York. Aged 75

Field & Discipline: Business; Advertising; Advertising Executive

Language: English

Father: Nathan Wheeler Ayer

Mother: Joanna Wheeler

Siblings: Unknown

Spouse: 1) Rhandena Gilman; 2) Martha K Lawson

Children: 2 daughters (by Gilman)

Education: Privately at home; University of Rochester

Life & Times:

Although he had many offers of teaching jobs, Ayer was determined to be a businessman. He took the advice of a family friend and went into advertising, which at that time was virtually limited to placing announcements in the press. He began his career in 1868 in Philadelphia by taking a temporary job selling advertising space for the “National Baptist,” a religious weekly paper. He was on 25% commission, saved all he could, and a year later was in a position to refuse a generous offer from his employer in favor of founding his own advertising agency.

Ayer was only twenty-one and to add some gravitas to the firm he made his father a sleeping partner and called his firm N W Ayer and Son.  He began business by soliciting advertising for a number of religious weeklies. He was soon representing other newspapers and in 1870 moved to larger premises and hired an employee for the first time.

By the end of  1871 the agency was representing over three hundred publications. Ayer began publishing “Ayer & Son’s Manual for Advertisers” in 1874 followed by the quarterly “Advertiser’s Guide,” both of which provided information about rates and circulation and also included news items, jokes, short articles and anything else which made for lively reading. In 1875 he set up his own printing department.

In 1875, Ayer introduced to advertising the open contract which, with his partner Henry McKinney, he developed over the next five years. Instead of following the standard practice of buying space in the press at a low price and selling it on to the advertiser at a high price,  N W Ayer made a contract with the advertiser which allowed for payment of a commission to the agency.

This was a significant innovation which eventually  transformed advertising agents from middlemen making a short term profit by peddling newspaper space to consultants working for their clients, the advertisers.  Thereafter, open contracts became the norm in advertising practice.

By 1876, the year of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, N W Ayer and Son were employing twenty staff and offering space for advertisers in any newspaper published in the United States or Canada. At the end of 1876, they took over large new premises and in 1877 bought out the oldest advertising agency in the country, Coe, Wetherill & Company.

The majority of Ayer’s clients were advertising patent medicines and he derived two-thirds of his income from this business. Although Ayer was a devout Baptist and a lay preacher and was quite aware that many of the products were obviously spurious, he could not at this stage afford to ignore this area of business. He also advertised chocolates, cosmetics,  jewelry and silverware, dry goods, clothing, seeds and nursery stock. Among his first clients was John Wanamaker of [early client was] Wanamaker Stores*, and  N W Ayer also advertised Singer sewing machines and Mason & Hamlin organs. Largely as a result of the open contract system, N W Ayer began to provide an expanded service to the advertisers and in so doing set the pattern of the modern advertising agency.

In 1879,  N W Ayer went into market research  - initially as a one-off operation which was part of a push to obtain a valuable contract with a manufacturer of threshing machines in Battle Creek. They submitted to the manufacturers a report on the location of the cultivation of threshable grains throughout the US, and correlated this information with the advertising rates and circulation figures of  the newspapers most likely to be read by farmers in these locations.

The client was astounded to be presented with information they had spent years trying to get and immediately made an offer for it.  Ayer would not hand it over but his agency won the contract - and incidentally introduced to clients the idea of added value. The use of market research was later developed by others such as [anticipated work of] Walter Dill Scott* and [anticipated work of] Parlin*.

Over the next decade Ayer and McKinney gradually developed their market research service and matched it with the production of advertising plans aimed at specific markets. Between 1880 and 1895 N W Ayer also pioneered agency production of copy for advertisers. Journalists and writers were increasingly being used on an ad hoc basis by advertisers, and in 1880 N W Ayer announced that they had an in-house printer, artist and wood engraver for the production of advertisements.

In the same year, the agency began publication of the “American Newspaper Annual”  (later called “N W Ayer and Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals”) which contained a list of all newspapers and periodicals published in the US and Canada, together with information on their circulation, advertising rates and political affinity, and on the population and political majority of each state and county.

The “Annual” was colossally successful  and became the standard reference work in advertising. In 1884 N W Ayer planned and executed a campaign for Police Plug Tobacco involving newspaper a competition with prizes for the collection of tobacco tags which was declared by the Philadelphia “Evening News” to be “one of the best advertising schemes ever known to business.” In 1888 they employed a full time copywriter, who could not only write but also come up with new ideas for advertising campaigns.

Ayer was now a prominent and wealthy citizen. He was appointed a director of the Merchants’ National Bank of Philadelphia in 1888 and in the same year bought a farm in Meredith, New York which, despite being purchased mainly as a family retreat, also became a highly successful cattle-breeding and dairy business. During the 1890’s, N W Ayer dropped many of its more dubious patent medicine accounts such as that for Dr Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People and by 1901 only a fifth of their income was derived from medicines. Between 1901 and 1911, branch offices of N W Ayer were opened in New York, Boston, Chicago and Cleveland.

The agency was now advertising in magazines and out of doors as well as in newspapers and most of the space they took was for advertising cars, tires, tobacco, dry goods, food and drink, fuels and lubricants, and education.  Because of his strong religious beliefs and his adherence to the temperance movement, Ayer – at a considerable cost to agency finances - refused to advertise alcohol. He was a noted philanthropist remained active in the Baptist movement all his life.

Assessment: N W Ayer & Son is recognized as the first modern advertising agency.

Oneliner: FW Ayer, owner of  the first advertising agency

Bibliography:

• Hower, Ralph M, The History of an Advertising Agency, N W Ayer & Son at Work, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1949.