Holloway, Thomas
Definition:
(1800-1883). British entrepreneur. The 'Age of Bold Enterprise' in the 19th century produced many colourful entrepreneurs, and Holloway was one of the most daring and successful. In 1855 he launched 'Professor' Thomas Holloway's ointment and Universal Pill with a press advertising campaign costing £30,000, a very large budget for that time. The wild claims and general hyperbole characterizing Holloway's advertising (and many other advertisers of the time) was aimed at exploiting a populace newly literate (especially after the Education Act of 1870) but still credulous and therefore gullible. Punch commented that Holloway's ointment 'will mend the legs of men and tables equally well and will be found an excellent article for frying fish in'. Huge profit margins sustained the massive advertising budgets, a charge still levelled today at some of our more visible advertisers. In the last decade of the century, it became clear that Thomas Holloway had been a harbinger of things to come, at least in the scale of his investment in advertising. Both Lever Brothers and Pears' spent annual budgets of more than £100,000 at turn-of-the-century values of the pound; Coca-Cola, launched as a 'brain tonic' in the USA in 1886 was being supported by an advertising budget of $120,000 by 1902; Beechams were spending £120,000 a year in 1895. Holloway had opened an American branch office as early as the 1850s. It prospered to the extent that George P. ROWELL commented: 'Millions who have never heard of Napoleon ... have heard of Holloway, the most general advertiser of today.' Later in his career, he quietly dropped the spurious title of Professor and began to spend his wealth on worthy projects, perhaps a private penance for his earlier opportunism. He built a sanatorium for 'the mentally afflicted of the lower middle classes' in Surrey and endowed, in memory of his wife, a seat of learning which was eventually to become London University's Royal Holloway College, also in Surrey. Thomas Holloway died at his house in Berkshire, valued by a Times leader writer without exaggeration at more than five million sterling' in 1883.
Cross-References:
[Rowell, George P]
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© Westburn Publishers Ltd 2002, The Westburn Dictionary of Marketing edited by Michael J Baker, ISBN 978-0-946433-01-8. www.themarketingdictionary.com. Entry: [Keith Crosier],.