‘Madison Avenue puts on its best hair shirt’: US advertising & its social critics

Abstract

This paper examines how the American advertising industry responded to its critics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Criticism of advertising was not new. Advertising had come under scrutiny during the Progressive era and the New Deal years. What made this wave of criticism novel was that it occurred during a period of economic affluence and relative social stability. Although recent academic scholarship from authors such as Michael Schudson (1984) and Jackson Lears (1994) has challenged the social critics, popular discourse in the English-speaking world concerning advertising's social impact still reflects the views of Vance Packard (1957) and John Kenneth Galbraith (1958). Likewise, the arguments put forward by leading advertising practitioners almost four decades ago are still found in public relations initiatives on behalf of the industry.