5.
Why are Shirley Polykoff and Ilon Specht important? That seems like a question that can easily be answered in the details of their campaigns. They were brilliant copywriters, who managed in the space of a phrase to capture the particular feminist sensibilities of the day. They are an example of a strange moment in American social history when hair dye somehow got tangled up in the politics of assimilation and feminism and self-esteem. But in a certain way their stories are about much more: they are about the relationship we have to the products we buy, and about the slow realization among advertisers that unless they understood the psychological particulars of that relationship – unless they could dignify the transactions of everyday life by granting them meaning – they could not hope to reach the modern consumer. Shirley Polykoff and Ilon Specht perfected a certain genre of advertising that did just this, and one way to understand the Madison Avenue revolution of the postwar era is as a collective attempt to define and extend that genre. The revolution was led by a handful of social scientists, chief among whom was an elegant, Viennese-trained psychologist by the name of Herta Herzog. What did Herta Herzog know? She knew – or, at least, she thought she knew – the theory behind the success of slogans like “Does she or doesn’t she?” and “Because I’m worth it,” and that makes Herta Herzog, in the end, every bit as important as Shirley Polykoff and Ilon Specht.
Herzog worked at a small advertising agency called Jack Tinker & Partners, and people who were in the business in those days speak of Tinker the way baseball fans talk about the 1927 Yankees. Tinker was the brainchild of the legendary adman Marion Harper, who came to believe that the agency he was running, McCann- Erickson, was too big and unwieldy to be able to consider things properly. His solution was to pluck a handful of the very best and brightest from McCann and set them up, first in the Waldorf Towers (in the suite directly below the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s and directly above General Douglas MacArthur’s) and then, more permanently, in the Dorset Hotel, on West Fifty-fourth Street, overlooking the Museum of Modern Art. The Tinker Group rented the penthouse, complete with a huge terrace, Venetian-tiled floors, a double-height living room, an antique French polished-pewter bar, a marble fireplace, spectacular skyline views, and a rotating exhibit of modern art (hung by the partners for motivational purposes), with everything – walls, carpets, ceilings, furnishings – a bright, dazzling white. It was supposed to be a think tank, but Tinker was so successful so fast that clients were soon lined up outside the door. When Buick wanted a name for its new luxury coupe, the Tinker Group came up with Riviera. When Bulova wanted a name for its new quartz watch, Tinker suggested Accutron. Tinker also worked with Coca-Cola and Exxon and Westinghouse and countless others, whose names – according to the strict standards of secrecy observed by the group – they would not divulge. Tinker started with four partners and a single phone. But by the end of the sixties it had taken over eight floors of the Dorset.
What distinguished Tinker was its particular reliance on the methodology known as motivational research, which was brought to Madison Avenue in the 1940s by a cadre of European intellectuals trained at the University of Vienna. Advertising research up until that point had been concerned with counting heads – with recording who was buying what. But the motivational researchers were concerned with why: Why do people buy what they do? What motivates them when they shop? The researchers devised surveys, with hundreds of questions, based on Freudian dynamic psychology. They used hypnosis, the Rosenzweig Picture-Frustration Study, role-playing, and Rorschach blots, and they invented what we now call the focus group. There was Paul Lazarsfeld, one of the giants of twentieth-century sociology, who devised something called the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer, a little device with buttons to record precisely the emotional responses of research subjects. There was Hans Zeisel, who had been a patient of Alfred Adler’s in Vienna and went to work at McCann-Erickson. There was Ernest Dichter, who had studied under Lazarsfeld at the Psychological Institute in Vienna and who did consulting for hundreds of the major corporations of the day. And there was Tinker’s Herta Herzog, perhaps the most accomplished motivational researcher of all, who trained dozens of interviewers in the Viennese method and sent them out to analyze the psyche of the American consumer.
“For Puerto Rican rum once, Herta wanted to do a study of why people drink, to tap into that below-the- surface kind of thing,” Rena Bartos, a former advertising executive who worked with Herta in the early days, recalls. “We would invite someone out to drink and they would order whatever they normally order, and we would administer a psychological test. Then we’d do it again at the very end of the discussion, after the drinks. The point was to see how people’s personality was altered under the influence of alcohol.” Herzog helped choose the name of Oasis cigarettes, because her psychological research suggested that the name – with its connotations of cool, bubbling springs – would have the greatest appeal to the orally fixated smoker.
“Herta was graceful and gentle and articulate,” Herbert Krugman, who worked closely with Herzog in those years, says. “She had enormous insights. Alka-Seltzer was a client of ours, and they were discussing new approaches for the next commercial. She said, ‘You show a hand dropping an Alka-Seltzer tablet into a glass of water. Why not show the hand dropping two? You’ll double sales.’ And that’s just what happened. Herta was the gray eminence. Everybody worshipped her.”
After retiring from Tinker, Herzog moved back to Europe, first to Germany and then to Austria, her homeland. She wrote an analysis of the TV show Dallas for the academic journal Society. She taught college courses on communications theory. She conducted a study on the Holocaust for the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, in Jerusalem. Today, she lives in the mountain village of Leutasch, half an hour’s hard drive up into the Alps from Innsbruck, in a white picture-book cottage with a sharply pitched roof. She is a small woman, slender and composed, her once dark hair now streaked with gray. She speaks in short, clipped, precise sentences, in flawless, though heavily accented, English. If you put her in a room with Shirley Polykoff and Ilon Specht, the two of them would talk and talk and wave their long, bejeweled fingers in the air, and she would sit unobtrusively in the corner and listen. “Marion Harper hired me to do qualitative research – the qualitative interview, which was the specialty that had been developed in Vienna at the Osterreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle,” Herzog told me. “It was interviewing not with direct questions and answers but where you open some subject of the discussion relevant to the topic and then let it go. You have the interviewer not talk but simply help the person with little questions like ‘And anything else?’ As an interviewer, you are not supposed to influence me. You are merely trying to help me. It was a lot like the psychoanalytic method.” Herzog was sitting, ramrod straight, in a chair in her living room. She was wearing a pair of black slacks and a heavy brown sweater to protect her against the Alpine chill. Behind her was row upon row of bookshelves, filled with the books of a postwar literary and intellectual life: Mailer in German, Reisman in English. Open and facedown on a long couch perpendicular to her chair was the latest issue of the psychoanalytic journal
When Herzog asked her subjects to draw a figure at the end of an interview, she was trying to extract some kind of narrative from them, something that would shed light on their unstated desires. She was conducting, as she says, a psychoanalytic session. But she wouldn’t ask about hair-color products in order to find out about you, the way a psychoanalyst might; she would ask about you in order to learn about hair-color products. She saw that the psychoanalytic interview could go both ways. You could use the techniques of healing to figure out the secrets of selling. “Does she or doesn’t she?” and “Because I’m worth it” did the same thing: they not only carried a powerful and redemptive message, but – and this was their real triumph – they succeeded in attaching that message to a five-dollar bottle of hair dye. The lasting contribution of motivational research to Madison Avenue was to prove that you could do this for just about anything – that the products and the commercial messages with which we surround ourselves are as much a part of the psychological furniture of our lives as the relationships and emotions and experiences that are normally the subject of psychoanalytic inquiry.
“There is one thing we did at Tinker that I remember well,” Herzog told me, returning to the theme of one of her, and Tinker’s, coups. “I found out that people were using Alka-Seltzer for stomach upset, but also for headaches,” Herzog said. “We learned that the stomach ache was the kind of ache where many people tended to say ‘It was my fault.’ Alka-Seltzer had been mostly advertised in those days as a cure for overeating, and overeating is something you have done. But the headache is quite different. It is something imposed on you.” This was, to Herzog, the classic psychological insight. It revealed Alka-Seltzer users to be divided into two apparently
