What Purity Means

Brand

Schlitz

Copywriter

Claude C. Hopkins (attributed)

Agency

J.L. Stack

Year

1903

Country

USA

Schlitz ad in Harper's Weekly, 1903, from the purity campaign of the early 1900s. In My Life in Advertising (1927), Claude Hopkins wrote that he handled Schlitz for J.L. Stack when it was in fifth place and every brewer was advertising "Pure" without explaining it. On a tour of the brewery he was shown plate-glass rooms where the beer cooled in filtered air, wood-pulp filters, bottles cleaned four times by machine, artesian wells 4,000 feet deep, six months of ageing and a yeast developed through 1,200 experiments. Other brewers worked the same way, but Schlitz was the first to tell the story. Hopkins wrote that Schlitz went from fifth place to neck and neck with first in a few months. The ad itself is documented by historian Uwe Spiekermann; its attribution to Hopkins is likely but not confirmed, and sources date his Schlitz work anywhere from 1902 to 1907.