One brand’s advertising budget rose from 400,000 to nearly 20 million in six years

Evidence

In 1925, the elder Hill died, leaving the American Tobacco Company entirely in the hands of George Washington, who was determined to make Lucky Strike, his pet brand, America’s leading cigarette, and to spend as much as necessary to do it. Whatever the merits of the product, his money was good, and he believed in the power of advertising. By 1931 he would be spending nearly 20 million per year on it, up from 400,000 in 1925; it was at the time an unprecedented outlay, and possibly the most spent on advertising a single product up until that time. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 229

Categorization

• XREF: A 50x advertising spend increase on a single product connects to Wu’s broader argument about escalating attention capture budgets in later chapters and to Claude Hopkins’s hard-sell methods established earlier in the book.