Advertising History

Abstract

Review Essay ADVERTISING HISTORY J O H N S I A U I) E N M A I E R, S. J., A N I) P A M E I. A W A I. K E R I. U R I T O LAIRD Material culture history typically evolves from antiquarian litera­ ture toward contextual analysis. Thus, with only four exceptions, histories of advertising published before 1975 were collections of curiosities, emissaries from advertising’s quaint past.1 Recently, how­ ever, the genre has come of age. Scholarly interest in advertising has so quickened in the decade that one can speak, if not of a “school” of new advertising critique, at least of a vigorous new universe of discourse. The works are mixed in quality, methodology, and thematic focus. In this essay we will discuss eight, offering a brief commentary, descriptive and critical, in an attempt to map the terrain. We judge two books to be the best of the lot and worth somewhat greater attention: Roland Marchand’s Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985) and Daniel Pope’s The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Marchand’s synthesis of the ideological and aesthetic content of mainstream advertising in its two most formative decades (1920-40) stems from an important methodological premise: before advertise­ ments emerge as published messages, they gestate in the womb of the advertising agencies’ in-house culture. Industry champions such as Stephen Fox speak of advertisers as “mirror makers” who respond to, rather than shape, American cultural values. Marchand reveals a more complex reality. Caught between their desire to see themselves as “missionaries of modernity” and their more pragmatic commitDr . Siaidenmaier is associate professor of the history of technology at the University of Detroit. Ms. Laird teaches at Emerson College and is a doctoral candidate in American history at Boston University. 'Neil H. Borden, The Economic Effects of Advertising (Homewood, Ill., 1942); Erank Presbrev, History and Development of Advertising (Garden City, N.Y., 1929); Henry Sampson, A History ofAdvertisingfrom the Earliest Times (London, 1874); James P. Wood, The Story of Advertising (New York, 1958).©1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3004-0005$01.00 1031 1032 John Staudenmaier, SJ., and Pamela Walker Lurito Laird ment to selling the product, they create not a mirror but a “Zerrspiegel , a distorting mirror that would enhance certain images” at the expense of others (p. xvii). The distortions are magnified by agency biases resulting in part from their urban, upwardly mobile homogeneity, a relentless male projection of the consumer as feminine (indexed references to “women” and “men” may well become a primary source for students of gender bias in public discourse), and the pressures, anxieties, and humiliations inherent in the agencies’ dependency relationship with client firms. Based on a thorough reading of standard professional publications such as Printers Ink and Advertising and Selling, agency publications and archives, and the spate of monographs written by such major successful practitioners as Bruce Barton and Albert Lasker, Marchand’s complex hypothesis provides the most balanced and sophisticated explanation to date of how agencies, as a distinct subculture, influence advertising copy and iconography. By studying over 180,000 ads published between 1920 and 1940, Marchand has also created an immensely helpful vocabulary of analysis—the con­ cepts of “great parables” and “visual cliches” being the most striking— to help the reader make sense of the seemingly incomprehensible mélange of shifting styles and strategies. Pope’s study covers a much longer period, with a different focus: advertising as a business enterprise. His governing question, “Who pays whom for what specific services?” provides a frame of reference for a remarkably thorough account of the agencies’ changing charac­ ter as they shifted front mid-19th-century space brokers to this century’s full-service establishments. Although his treatment of ad content and style is necessarily less thorough than Marchand’s, his final chapter, with its contrast between agency technique in the 1920s and today, goes well beyond Marchand’s chronologically more limited period. Pope also transcends his business focus to address...