MEMORIES OF ADMEN PAST

Close Shave, but Stirling Getchell Charms Colgate with "Small-Bubble Lather"

BY TAYLOR ADAMS Taylor Adams, onetime account executive at the old George Batten Co. (forerunner of BBDO), gives a first-hand account of how in the 1920's legendary creative great Stirling Getchell devised a classic campaign for a shaving cream and sewed up the Colgate account for George Batten. Mr. Adams, who started out in advertising in 1914, is now 85 and retired.
Stirling Getchell joined the copy department of the old George Batten Co. sometime in the fall of 1925, I think. Anyway, it was just in time to save the Colgate Rapid Shave Cream account which we'd gotten a few months before on a trial basis. If we were successful with it, we might get the whole Colgate line - soaps, toothpaste, toiletries - maybe even Vaseline, since Colgate then was the selling agent for Chesebrough.

	I was the account executive, or "representative," as Batten preferred to dignify the 
men who rode herd on the assorted geniuses and prima donnas who composed the creative 
department, while simultaneously maintaining a liaison with equally temperamental clients.



	Things were getting a bit tense. After three months, the research and copy people 
were still struggling to come up with the Big Idea. Closing dates for the first ads of the 
campaign were nearing, and young Bayard Colgate, son of the president, was hinting 
ominously at the wonderful stuff he was being shown by Stanley Resor of J. Walter 
Thompson Co., who was hot after the Ribbon Dental Cream business. Bayard was fresh 
out of Yale and had been made advertising manager by his father. He wanted to fire the 
small house agency that had handled Colgate for years and retain one of the big companies 
worthy of the prestigious Colgate company.


	
Before and After with Getchell

	This was the situation the day Stirling Getchell laid on my desk half a dozen 
microphotographs and a sleek "comprehensive" layout for a half-page ad in The Saturday 
Evening Post. The headline, set in the new Bodoni just coming into vogue in advertising, 
read:  "How small-bubble lather soaks your beard soft," followed by the subhead:  "And 
gives you the closest, smoothest shave you've ever had." For illustration, there were two 
diagrams, labeled "Before" and "After," and identified as being simulated from actual 
microphotographs, taken in the laboratory. The left-hand "Before" diagram showed several 
simulated whiskers, standing straight and stiff as telegraph poles, their bases surrounded 
by a mound of tiny bubbles.



	The right-hand "After" diagram showed these same whiskers now drooping, 
wilted, rubbery as the legs of Leon Errol in his famous act imitating an inebriated 
commuter weaving across Grand Central toward the train gate. A short paragraph under 
each picture told how the lather acted; how water, carried by millions of tiny bubbles, got 
down to the base of the beard, soaking it, softening it, making it ready for the razor. The 
main copy block, done in typical Getchellese (plenty of "eminent scientists" working 
tirelessly in "modern laboratories"), announced that Colgate Rapid Shave Cream brought 
these bubbles in effective quantity down to the skin line, as indicated by the diagrams, for 
the smoothest, most comfortable shave possible.



	Reading the ad, I saw right away that this was it ­ the Big Idea we'd been waiting 
for was right there in those miraculous small bubbles. I dashed over to show the ad to 
Bayard Colgate, who liked it and took it in to his father, who was equally enthusiastic. We 
slammed it through production in record overtime, catching the first of 13 half-pages in the 
Post. We merchandised the small-bubble idea to the hilt:  Posters for the display 
department, blowups of the microphotographs for window displays, kits for salesmen 
demonstrations ­ the works. Within three months Colgate "Small-Bubble" lather cream 
showed substantial gains in sales, and by the end of the year we had the entire Colgate 
billings, suddenly increased by a million-dollar appropriation to introduce Super Suds, the 
first of the new sulfonated detergents.



With Bill Benton ­ Unlikely Pair

	But we lost Stirling Getchell. I knew he wouldn't stay long on a job on salary 
where he couldn't be king. He was as restlessly ambitious as Bill Benton, who by 
coincidence, was at Batten at the time. (I learned later the two had been talking of teaming 
up to start their own agency. It would have been like trying to hitch up two tigers.) Nothing 
could stop either of them and it wasn't very long before both had started businesses of their 
own, Getchell picking up Chrysler ("Look At All Three"), Mobil (remember those 
wonderful "cut-away" pictures of engines?) and other big ones.



	In the rush of organizing the new campaign for Colgate, I'd been too busy to ask 
Getchell before he took off about those microphotographs. Who made them for him? How 
did they do it? Were they genuine? One day I met him on Park Ave. and put the questions 
to him.



	He laughed, "Oh, they're genuine, all right." he assured me. "I know a guy up in 
Stamford who monkeys around with microphotography. We bought some finetooth 
combs, you know, the kind they use on babies' heads when they get nits. We made up a 
mess of Colgate lather in a bowl, dunked the combs in it, let them stay a couple of minutes, 
the time it takes you to lather up, pulled 'em out and put them between sheets of glass and 
shot the pictures."



	When I told this told Dr. Itner, the Colgate chief chemist, he exclaimed:  "By golly, 
I'd never have thought of that. Itıs the perfect way to show how soap lowers the surface 
tension of water so it can penetrate into small spaces and get them thoroughly wet. Smart 
boy, that - what's his name?" Itner had never met Getchell. We couldn't have dragged the 
great idea man across the Hudson River to the Colgate plant in New Jersey. He simply 
wouldn't have faced the Hudson Tubes. Getchell was afraid of thunderstorms, subways, 
and couldn't sleep in a room without a light.
 




 
Advertising Age, July 22, 1974
 





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this page updated 11.13.96

april c. kilduff

dallas-@mail.utexas.edu