M e d i c i n e A v e n u e Rx A dvertising M isses the Madison A venue Boom McAdams moved its operations to New York City in the 1930's, continuing with Squibb but also pursuing nonmedical accounts. In 1939, the decision was made to concentrate only on professional advertising to physicians. This decision expressed a faith in the future growth of medical advertising, for pharmaceutical promotion prior to World War II was a backwater compared to the boom that general advertising was experiencing. Buoyed by the expansionist 1920's and not markedly impaired by the depression years of the early 1930's, consumer advertising had soared. The combination of a plethora of heavily advertised consumer products (automobiles, household appliances, soaps, foods, cosmetics, and cigarettes) with effective media (color enhanced magazines, radio, outdoor, and newspapers) and fueled by a mass-marketing philosophy, created the giant Madison Avenue advertising agencies and hundreds of lucrative smaller shops around the country. In contrast, pharmaceutical promotion was an unglamorous trade exercise that stressed salesperson rapport and service to physicians and pharmacists. There was little product differentiation since the companies were, for the most part, marketing generic drugs. Journal advertising in a limited number of publications— JAMA, Medical Economics, Modem Medicine and a few state journals—was used for the few branded products and companies who did invest in institutional advertising. (Squibb was successful with a campaign that associated the company with a medical sage of Baghdad who pronounced that "quality is the priceless ingredient" and that it rested on the honesty and integrity of the manufacturer.) In the 1930’s, substantial advertising budgets did exist for "ethical OTC," branded non-Rx products that companies promoted to MDs and pharmacists, 16
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