Advertising as the Businessman’s Partner

During the same time that grain-based health diets were evolving into commercial packaged cereals, advertising was changing from a disreputable con game into an important part of the emerging consumer culture. Until after the Civil War, most advertisers were travelling salesmen who bought large amounts of newspaper advertising space at wholesale prices and then peddled pieces of it to businessmen and merchants for whatever price they could get. Many greatly exaggerated the newspapers’ circulation and importance to charge exorbitant prices. Others sold the same space several times to different buyers. The merchant or businessman wrote his own advertisement and then hoped it would ultimately be printed.

In 1867, Francis Wayland Ayer revolutionized the business of advertising. He set up shop in Philadelphia and publicized that he would represent the clients’ interests, keep open account books and charge a flat fifteen percent commission for all the services he offered. This new open and honest approach was aided in 1869 by George Rowell’s annual American Newspaper Directory, which listed accurate circulation figures for newspapers. The J. Walter Thompson agency in New York applied the same principles of honesty and client service to buying ad space in the expanding magazine market. By careful choice of clients and deft persuasion, Thompson succeeded in getting many highly respectable magazines to open their pages to his clients’ advertisements.

By the eighteen-nineties, a new breed of advertising men pushed to make a series of stronger claims for advertising: that no business could successfully compete and grow without employing advertisements; that the most effective advertising copy was written by advertising experts, not the businessmen themselves; and, most audacious of all, that advertising men were serious businessmen whose efforts must be considered integral to any business success.

One of the most insistent voices was that of Ernest Elmo Calkins; in Calkins’ mind, advertising activities, whether writing copy or buying space, should be done by only the best kind of men—graduates from Ivy League colleges. Calkins used the pages of Printer’s Ink, the trade publication begun in 1895 by Rowell, to put forth his ideas about the future of advertising, thus gaining considerable attention for himself and his agency, Calkins & Holden.

The Forces Behind Force
Edward Ellsworth fit into this enterprising spirit. He saw grains as his road to wealth. In 1890, he bought Hornsby’s Oats, a small oatmeal mill in Craigville, New York and transported it to Lockport, Illinois, hundreds of miles closer to raw grain suppliers and linked with Lake Michigan transport. Renamed Pawnee, the new rolled oat product was sold widely in the Midwest. Ellsworth parlayed this modest success into bigger things. He bought a grain elevator in Buffalo in 1893, and incorporated two new companies: Force Food Company (a cereal manufacturer) in 1901 and H-O Company (a breakfast food manufacturer) in 1902. H-O used Hornsby’s formula to produce the oatmeal product; Force produced the first commercially successful wheat flake.

Ellsworth recognized the moneymaking potential of Force cereal. The trick to wealth was making a cereal product that could be produced, packaged, shipped, and stored on a grocer’s shelf without spoiling, while still appealing to the customers’ tastes. Wheat was cheap and plentiful; but before Force, the only cereals that had succeeded were Shredded Wheat and Cream of Wheat, the latter being a hot cereal. Force offered the convenience of a flake that could be served cold, and all the benefits, real and perceived, of eating wheat. However, his earliest attempts to sell the product sent contradictory messages. At first, it was not described as a breakfast food, but rather as “The Food that is all Food.” The box showed strong muscular men wrestling with chains while the promotion featured rosy-cheeked children (very much like the Campbell Kids that Grace Grebbie Drayton drew in 1904). Without a clear message, the product did not sell.

While in New York City in late 1901, the advertising manager for Force cereal asked Minnie Maud Hanff to come up with a new way to sell the product. Hanff was a twenty-three-year-old freelancer who had been writing jingles and children’s verses for newspapers for about five years. Assuming that the public already knew the claims made for eating grain products, Hanff created a character to embody these benefits: Jim Dumps became Sunny Jim after eating Force. Without ever specifying why Jim had been depressed and listless beforehand, or what qualities in Force caused his transformation, she created light, humorous jingles describing the change.

From May 1902 through the fall of that year, her jingles about Sunny Jim and his family and acquaintances, accom-panied by the line drawings of Dorothy Ficken, appeared in magazines, and on billboards and trolley cars in major cities.

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