Demand engineering, too, found itself refitted for women consumers, as the “whisper” or “scare” campaigns, which warned of a social disgrace or judgment, from which the product at hand offered deliverance. Consider J. Walter Thompson’s 1922 advertisement for P&G’s laundry detergent targeting mothers. The copy reads, “If little Molly should be in an accident, what would the neighbors think of those ‘clean’ underclothes? Molly’s underclothes are supposedly clean, but actually they are gray and untidy.” Targeting the unwed, Listerine would retrofit its wildly successful “halitosis” campaign. In the “poor Edna” series, it is Edna’s stale breath, which of course no friend would tell her about, that has left her lovelorn, or in the enduring expression coined for the campaign, “often a bridesmaid but never a bride.”

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 217