Kilmer House

From the earliest days of Johnson & Johnson, the Johnson brothers recognized the importance of advertising, and Robert Wood Johnson the first was often personally very involved in the development of ads for the Company’s products…sometimes too involved, the people at the advertising agency felt.  Johnson had excellent instincts about what would and wouldn’t work, and he kept J. Walter Thompson and his advertising agency busy with his many suggestions and changes. Thompson and Johnson were friends, and Thompson handled the Johnson & Johnson account personally.  (Robert Wood Johnson: The

RED CROSS® Kidney Plaster Ad in Slavonic from 1912  In recognition of the diversity of the world we live in, companies have been doing more and more multicultural advertising in recent years.  It's a necessity for any company that wants to reach its customers, especially customers who for a variety of reasons are not being reached through traditional mainstream advertising.  And certainly what is true now also was true almost 100 years ago.    Ad for Belladonna Plasters in Italian from 1912 The early part of the 1900s saw huge waves of immigration to the United States

Like every new company just starting out, Johnson & Johnson advertised, and the earliest Johnson & Johnson ad in our archives happens to be from 1886 – the year we started.  The 1886 ad is for our first consumer product, Zonweiss, which was a tooth cream -- the late Victorian version of a toothpaste.  Zonweiss, which meant “white teeth” in German, was applied to the toothbrush with a tiny spoon that was included in the package.  In a few years, when we became one of the first companies to package toothpaste – Zonweiss, of course – in that new innovation, a collapsible tube, the spoon w

In the late 1940s, a very well-known American artist had a connection to Johnson & Johnson first aid products.  (And no, it wasn’t because the artist was accident-prone.)  This artist had paintings in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and her works were widely exhibited in other places.  The artist was Gladys Rockmore Davis, and she was a noted painter of children and other subjects.  In 1948, Johnson & Johnson commissioned Davis to do a series of original paintings of children for an advertising campaign for the Company’s fir

Throughout its history, Johnson & Johnson has published a wide variety of information designed to educate doctors and surgeons, the public, and parents.  We also published information for retail pharmacists for several decades, in the form of a trade publication called the RED CROSS® Messenger.  It educated pharmacists about the Company, its products, and about how to increase their business.  And according to that publication, one of the most important things a retail pharmacist could do was to decorate the pharmacy window. An issue of The RED CROSS® Messenger The RED CROSS® Messenger was