Advertising in the Age of Persuasion: Building Brand America, 1941‐1961DawnSpring. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Abstract

Advertising in the Age of Persuasion: Building Brand 1941-1961 Dawn Spring. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.Advertising in the Age of Persuasion, written by independent designer and interdisciplinary scholar Dawn Spring, traces the institutionalization of advertising in American politics and culture during the 1940s and 1950s. Spring charts how, after World War Two, a coalition of advertisers, businessmen, media moguls, politicians, and religious leaders became the invisible hand that guided the global expansion of free enterprise (6). This ideology collapsed the divides between name-brand products, American diplomacy, and foreign relations to envision brand America, arguing that mass production and mass consumption would create national cohesion and spread American democracy abroad (4). Ultimately, Advertising in the Age of Persuasion reveals how both advertisers and politicians at the start of the Cold War worked together to facilitate a long-las ting network and process for disseminating persuasive information now engrained in American culture.Over the course of eight chapters Spring charts the formation and praxis of the free enterprise ideology and roots its success in advertisers' multiplatform, multimedia approach which was developed during the 1940s. Speeding through the turn-of-the-century, Spring argues that advertisers faced an unfriendly climate during the Depression, which propelled companies like Procter and Gamble and J. Walter Thompson to market their services to the American government by World War Two (15). Advertisers, broadcasters, and brand-name manufacturers who formed the War Advertising Council framed advertising as a political tool to raise money, organize resources, and stabilize wartime production to garner governmental support. As the peacetime Ad Council, the organization helped construct and implement two national branding campaigns: the Freedom Train and Miracle of America. The Ad Council, the American Heritage Foundation, and the American Economic System sent templates of prepackaged advertising to churches, schools, local newspapers, and stores to encourage workers and families to interact with these experiential forms of advertising and marketed them as educational programs to thwart allegations of propaganda.In the second half of the book, the author charts the parallel histories of corporate advertising and American diplomacy, revealing their explicit intersections during the start of the Cold War. These initial postwar service campaigns helped structure a national public diplomacy apparatus that enabled companies to use the themes of brand America to market their name-brand products domestically and internationally (45). In examining the methods and evolution of this increasingly intertwined economic and political relationship, Spring evidences the power of diversification. …