Advertising. From its origins in colonial handbills, signboards, and newspaper announcements, American advertising by the late twentieth century had grown into a multi‐billion dollar industry. Its transformations reflect both the course of American
business and the shifting patterns of American culture. For most of its history, observers have seen advertising as a central feature of the American social landscape and have considered the United States the “promised land” of advertising. For example, historian David Potter (
People of Plenty, 1954) treated advertising as emblematic of American abundance and a pervasive means of democratic social control.
In the
Colonial Era, where production for market was constrained, currency in short supply, and goods rarely identified with their producers, advertising remained small scale and intermittent. Yet by the eighteenth century a network of shopkeepers and craftsmen sought customers among the growing number of colonists who could afford manufactured amenities and luxuries such as pottery, books, furniture, and musical instruments. Sellers trumpeted the wide range of choices available and portrayed their goods as appropriate for refined and fashionable men and women. Benjamin
Franklin's
Pennsylvania Gazette introduced innovations such as headlines, illustrations, and advertising notices placed next to news items. At times, more than half of the newspaper was devoted to advertising. While it may be an exaggeration to speak of an eighteenth‐century Anglo‐American “consumer revolution,” the spread of advertising impressed observers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Nevertheless, down to the
Civil War, advertising developed slowly. Steam‐powered presses and cheap newsprint allowed the emergence of a “penny press” in the 1830s, but most of these innovations limited attractive displays and confined advertisements within column rules. Display advertising became common only in the 1870s.
Magazines generally segregated advertisements in the back pages and barred eye‐catching display. “Announcement” remained a near‐synonym for “advertisement.”
There were exceptions.
P.T. Barnum's promotions usually involved finding free publicity, but he wrote accurately in his autobiography, “I thoroughly understood the art of advertising.” Jay Cooke's marketing of Union bonds during the Civil War entailed vivid advertisements in papers across the North. The pioneers of persuasive advertising copy, however, were usually medicine makers. Employing a range of media, these “Toadstool Millionaires” (the title of a 1961 book by James Harvey Young) won customers for their nostrums with emotional appeals to fear and faith.
The appearance of mass retailers, in particular downtown
department stores, and the rise of mass‐produced, brand‐named consumer goods after 1880 gave advertising much of its modern form. Volney Palmer, generally considered the nation's first advertising agent, and his successors solicited advertisers to fill space in the newspapers and magazines they represented. By the 1890s, advertising agencies were taking over the preparation of advertising copy and design, and being compensated through a discount for the space they purchased from publishers. Freelance copywriters gave way to a new generation of agency employees. In the early 1900s, agencies increasingly boasted of their broad competence as sales and marketing professionals. The 1912 introduction of Procter & Gamble's shortening, Crisco, involved a multifaceted marketing campaign. Meanwhile, new general‐interest magazines provided a medium for advertising to a professional and managerial middle‐class market. By
World War I, the institutional triad of advertisers, agencies, and media had assumed roles that largely endure today. Meanwhile, the industry developed voluntary associations to tighten standards and win popular respect. The leading trade journal,
Printer's Ink, and the Associated Advertising Clubs of America launched an energetic, if self‐serving, “Truth in Advertising” movement to upgrade ethical standards.
Although President Calvin
Coolidge in 1926 proclaimed advertising “part of the greater work of the regeneration and redemption of mankind,” advertising experts thought of themselves in less exalted terms. They hoped to entice ill‐informed and manipulable consumers into acceptance of modern, corporate‐dominated society. In the 1930s, Depression Era advertising turned shrill, playing upon Americans' economic worries and matching the industry's combative response to
New Deal Era consumer‐protection proposals. As they had in 1917–1918, advertising leaders in
World War II sought legitimation through contributions to the war effort. The War Advertising Council, founded in 1942, lived on after 1945 as the Advertising Council, usually promoting uncontroversial causes like forest fire prevention. The subtexts consistently touted advertising's social benefits and the industry's service to the nation.
Advertising in the postwar era both facilitated and reflected economic prosperity and a culture of consumption. Expenditures grew from under $3 billion in 1945 to about $187 billion in 1997.
Television advertising accounted for approximately one‐quarter of this. TV's combination of visual appeals, motion, and sound gave advertisements new dimensions and greater power. Although postwar advertising generally emphasized conformity through consumption of standardized products, by the 1960s segmentation was becoming a dominant marketing strategy. Product distinctions proliferated, mass media gave way to specialized ones, and advertisements “positioned” products for targeted “niche markets.” Advertising agencies diversified as well. A younger generation of men and women, often from ethnic minorities, undertook what they liked to call a creative revolution: elements of fantasy, humor, irony, and even self‐mockery assumed a larger place in the repertoire of persuasion. However, advertising remained a business; agencies knew that clients' sales constituted the bottom line. Geographic expansion also characterized late twentieth‐century advertising. While New York's Madison Avenue still symbolized the industry, large firms were increasingly multinational, and agencies from Richmond, Virginia, to Poland, Oregon, gained industry acclaim.
As it became more ubiquitous, advertising attracted scholarly and critical attention. While some scholars pointed out the uncertainties and limits of its sway, a host of cultural critics including Vance Packard (
The Hidden Persuaders, 1957) warned of its persuasive powers and of the materialism and consumerism it was said to promote. Yet despite the attacks, at the end of the century, advertising remained central to the nation's economy and culture. With its ever‐changing forms and styles, its omnipresence seemed assured for the foreseeable future.
See also
Consumer Culture;
Consumer Movement;
Fifties, The;
Gilded Age;
Journalism;
Mass Marketing;
Post–Cold War Era.
Bibliography
Otis A. Pease , The Responsibilities of American Advertising, 1958.
Stuart Ewen , Captains of Consciousness, 1976.
Daniel Pope , The Making of Modern Advertising, 1983.
Stephen R. Fox , The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators, 1984.
Roland Marchand , Advertising the American Dream, 1985.
Richard S. Tedlow , New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America, 1990.
T.J. Jackson Lears , Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, 1994.
Daniel A. Pope
