Literature of American History II

Nicole Kalian

March 21, 2003           

Study Questions and Reading Notes for Advertising the American Dream – Making Way for Modernity 1920-1940 by Roland Marchand

In this text, Marchand uses extensive research to examine the social context of advertising and gauge whether ads reflected or shaped the ideas and values of American society - he does not attempt to determine how the ads affected the consumers.  His findings conclude that advertising may be a mirror of American society, but it is an extremely complicated and distorted mirror which attempted to coerce consumers to accept the advertisers’ pressure to modernize. 

Introduction

·         In the 1920s, the advertising industry perfected “their techniques for depicting the product or its benefits “situationally” – that is, in the life of the consumer” (page xvi)

·         In the early 20^th century, advertisers decided that Americans aspired to be higher class and so had their ads reflect upscale settings rather than the social realities

·         The audience that the advertisers wanted to attract was upper-middle-class to upper-class in the 1920s and 1930s and the advertisers themselves were also of a higher class and that tended to distort their own reality and was conveyed in their ads

·         “The ads failed to hold up a true mirror to society” (page xviii) – but Marchand still believes that using ads as historical documents has merit

·         Although it is difficult to test the effects of ads, it still holds true that advertisers studied audiences and their responses more than any other industry

·         Marchand argues that many of the techniques of modern advertising began in the 1920s and 1930s – the practice of repeating ads ad nauseam (and no, the term ad nauseam does not come out of the advertising field – it’s Latin) reinforced the ideas in the minds of the consumers; and the shift from displaying only the product in the ad to displaying the consumer using the product created more of a connection between the consumer and the advertisement

·         The ad creators considered themselves “missionaries of modernity” and they “championed the new against the old” (page xxi)

Chapter 1 – Apostles of Modernity

·         Advertisers sought to “further rationalize the operations of the marketplace, to lubricate its mechanisms, and to achieve greater control over its functioning” (page 2) – they wanted power over the consumer and, consequently, the economy

·         Advertisers realized that the tempo of American life was increasing and so they tried to create ads to reflect that with “quick-drying furniture paint” and “quick-service filling stations” (page 3), while also trying to calm the masses in the new perplexing world of rapid transformations

·         Through the 1920s, money that companies spent on advertising increased exponentially and at the same time, the advertising industry was “becoming more consolidated and complex” (page 6)

·         Advertising agencies came to be called Madison Avenue at this time

·          Some government officials believed that because of the success of advertising, the economy would never again falter (obviously, wishful thinking!)

·         The inferiority complex had become important in advertising because it drove people to buy

·         Another form of advertising called “scare copy” became prominent in the 1920s and created a connection of help from the product to the consumer – Lysol disinfectant could keep those scary germs away

·         Many ads attempted to recreate the layout of a magazine article so as to lure the consumer into believing they were reading part of the magazine

·         The campaign for Listerine was a new form of advertising called a social shame campaign and was a huge success because the ad campaign reflected the consumers’ insecurities and fear of having halitosis – the campaign also created new indications for Listerine such as a cure for dandruff and an after-shave tonic, among other uses

Chapter 2 - Men of the People: The New Professionals

·         In the 1920s, advertising professionals were attempting to assert their role as prestigious members of higher professions – they wanted a higher status

·         Advertisers believed that their high stature was well-deserved because they were the ones who kept the economy going and they were “molding the human mind” (page 31)

·         Advertisers felt that their higher purpose “was to sell a product that would improve the buyer’s standard of living” (page 50)

Chapter 3 – Keeping the Audience in Focus

·         Magazines and newspapers by the late 1920s were attempting to carve out their niche so that advertisers could reach the audience they wished, be it male or female, upper-class or middle-class, city or rural

·         Advertisers viewed the consumers as part of a democratic citizenship – each consumer who could afford to purchase a product had one vote, while those who could not afford a product were “disenfranchised”

·         Advertisers then divided the “voters” into class and mass audiences – class being the wealthiest class and mass being all of the “voting” public, not those who were disenfranchised

·         The predominantly male advertising world fortuitously recognized that their audience was predominantly female and attempted to cater to that audience – however, some ad men denigrated the women who they catered to, not comprehending how women could be duped by these ads or how they could enjoy these ads more than “read[ing] philosophy” (page 70)

·         They also denigrated the masses (not specifically women) they catered to and were revolted by “the vulgarity and emotionalism of the masses” (page 70), but were forced to recognize that they were the ad men’s “bread and butter” (page 71) and had to “know thy audience” (page 72) in order to be successful

Chapter 4 – Abandoning the Great Genteel Hope: From Sponsored Radio to the Funny Papers

·         Advertisers were both excited and tentative about the new medium of radio – it was a way to directly reach elite consumers in the privacy of their homes, but advertisers were nervous about being too intrusive in this traditionally private environment

·         Around this time, advertisers were also becoming anxious about the saturation of advertising – the consumer was almost becoming immune to advertising because there was so much of it, so the advertisers came to feel that exploitation of radio was not such a bad idea and might be more effective than the print advertisements that everyone was using

·         The concept of interweaving radio programming with indirect advertising caught on – in the midst of programming, one of the characters would mention how great Vaseline was - wasn’t intrusive to the listeners

·         Another outlet that advertisers discovered was the funny papers – companies began to sponsor comic strips in the early 1930s

·         Advertisers recognized that low-brow could be successful and slowly abandoned the belief that advertising had to be serious

Chapter 5 – The Consumption Ethic: Strategies of Art and Style

·         Companies and advertisers believed that if they created new styles and colors for their products, they could create a new excitement among consumers

·         Advertising attempted to employ modern art into their advertisements to create a sense of modernity and sophistication

·         Photography in advertising experienced a huge growth at the end of the 1920s – it helped consumers view the products as “sincere” and “authentic”

Chapter 6 – Advertisements as Social Tableaux

·         Advertising may not accurately reflect the class level of a society, but it does reflect certain aspects of a society – “the state of technology, the current styles,” among other things (page 165) – it can also reflect the social relationships and social structure of a society

·         The woman of the house became the most prominent part of advertisements and she was known as the G.P.A. (general purchasing agent)

·         Most men in advertisements were cast simply and generically as “businessmen”

·         The wealthy was basically the only social class depicted in advertisements because it created a desire for social mobility among the middle and lower classes of which these products could readily assist one in achieving

Chapter 7 – The Great Parables

·         Parables helped advertisers create “an inducement to action” (page 207) –

·         Examples of these parables were: the parable of the first impression where to create a good impression, one had to have whiter teeth or a smooth shave; the parable of the democracy of goods publicized the image that the best products were within everyone’s reach not withstanding social class; the parable of civilization redeemed attempted to prove that one could overcome “Nature’s curse” (page 223) by using certain products to lose weight or have good breath; the parable of the captivated child encouraged mothers to nurture their children better by providing Campbell’s Soup so that Bobby would have a good diet

·         These parables did not challenge the “entrenched values” of society, but they enticed men and women who wanted to be modern

Chapter 8 – Visual Clichés: Fantasies and Icons

·         Advertising contributed visual images to society which created “shared daydreams” (page 235), visions which society began to aspire to

·         Some of the typical visual cliches included a man in a large office with a magnificent window view; a picture of the family in soft focus; a subject looking above, usually towards some source of light

·         Religious figures and quotes from the Bible were rarely, if ever, used in advertisements because “advertisements were secular sermons, exhortations to seek fulfillment though the consumption of material goods and mundane services” (page 264), so not just were they secular, but they were the anti-religion

Chapter 9 – Advertising in Overalls: Parables and Visual Cliches of the Depression

·         Ad men were viewed with mistrust during the Depression because they “served as public spokesmen for a business system now brought under suspicion” (page 285)

·         Immediately after the stock market crash in 1929, advertisers felt that they could reverse the effect the crash had on the economy by reinforcing the public’s belief in business

·         Advertisers reacted to the Depression by creating ads that promoted money consciousness – Listerine toothpaste can save you money

Chapter 10 – The Therapeutics of Advertising

·         The advertisers had created “an audience both enamored of modernity and discomfited by its complexity and impersonality” (page 336)

·         The voluminous increase in the amount of products on the market in the 1920s and 1930s had also promoted the boom in advertising and advertisers relished their newfound responsibility to create an “informed” public

·         Advertisers believed that were able to instill social values, for example by showing women how to raise their children or manage their home

·         They also believed that in their role of advisors, “they relieved consumers of the anxieties of numerous trivial decisions” (page 349), but did they really help the consumers make informed decisions?

·         Advertisers adopted “a therapeutic mission” to assuage people’s discomfort with the “complexity and impersonality of much of modern life” (page 359)

Study Questions

·         How did advertising change from the first two decades of the twentieth century to the second two decades of the twentieth century?

·         How did the public’s perceptions of the field of advertising and ad men change in that period?

·         What was women’s role in the advertising world and what was their role in the advertising audience?

·         Does Marchand answer the question he lays out in the beginning of the text – “Did advertising shape American society or did it simply reflect it?”

Becky Amato

Literature of American History II

March 21, 2003

Reading Notes

Marchand, Roland.  Advertising the American Dream.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Introduction

Thesis (p. xxii): “The advertising of the 1920s was the response of advertising agents, representing the economic and cultural elite, to their perception of a new consumer constituency in much the same way that Jacksonian politics and the Whig “Log Cabin” campaign of 1840 represented the response of a political establishment to perceptions of a new political constituency….The advertisers…made greater efforts to examine the full dimensions of the needs and desires of their new constituency, and then not only to ‘pander’ to it but also to counsel and uplift.”

Other major points

n      p. xvi List of sources, including newspapers and periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s (Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, American Weekly, Saturday Evening Post, L.A. Times, etc.)

n      Cannot prove conclusively that advertisements and their values were absorbed by American consumers

n      Can we really discern consumers’ actual values by reading these ads?  Are they useful historical documents?

n      Anxiety and modernity

Ch. 1, Apostles of Modernity

n      Advertisers see their work as a civic duty, “furthering the processes of efficiency, specialization, and rationalization” and improving the function of the market; praised by Coolidge

n      New proliferation of branding

n      Ad-man as remnant of P.T. Barnum and patent medicine salesperson.

n      What does Marchand mean by “modern”?

n      People, not products, the focal point of 1920s ads

n      “Coaching” (giving intimate advice); “scare copy” (frightening consumer into buying product; “Dramatic Realism” (melodramatic situations  into which consumer can insert themselves)

n      Three turning points of advertising: Fleischmann’s Yeast (finding new uses for an old product); Listerine (creating new need for an old product); Kotex (intimate advisor developed – Nurse Buckland)

Ch. 2, Men of the People: The New Professionals

n      Two versions of advertising professionalism: social and cultural uplift or practical client-service

n      Advertising as an art – trade awards and own galleries displaying their visual expertise

n      P. 32-33 – What Marchand means by “advertisers” – mostly white, non-ethnic, male, college-educated, urban (or urban transplants); once employed in advertising, they are paid upper-middle class wages

n      Tension between creating unique, artistically coherent ads and pleasing the client, often at the cost of doing something creative

n      Competition means constant fear of losing an account; emphasis on youthful ad-men; relatively common nervous breakdowns – the absurdity of the situation often leads to, as Marchand puts it, “a private ethic of amoral craftsmanship.” (48)

Ch. 3, Keeping the Audience in Focus

n      New tabloid sensationalism of True Story conforms to desire to “democratize” the masses through journalism; emphasis on seriality (has precedence in mid 1910s film) – compare to McGerr’s version of Pulitzer and Hearst.

n      Question of which products of advertised in which periodicals – class comes into play

n      P. 59 – McGerr’s definition of “tabloid”

n      Consumers and moviegoers are the same crowd – desire of moviegoers for “escape” and “illusion” and hypnotic reaction to the close-up are all observed and instituted by advertisers

n      P. 64 – the “Consumer Citizen”

n      Style and content allied with class considerations, too

n      Assumption that women comprise 85 percent of consumers…most other assumptions about consumers (perpetually child-like, culturally uninformed, bored, lethargic, driven more by emotion than logic) are also linked with “femininity”

n      Who makes up the consuming audience?  Is it homogenous? 

n      Research studies include: sociological studies (Middletown); “keyed” advertisements urging consumers to send in traceable coupons; advertising professionals slumming it with real consumers by masquerading as dept. store door-to-door salespeople

n      Advertisers’ assumptions about typical consumer seem to be mirrors of themselves: upper-middle-class, well-dressed, golfers, etc. (see ad on p. 81)

n      Attempt to understand what was in the minds of consumers: Marchand argues that one can discern people’s attitudes only in the categories of “cultural anxieties and dilemmas” (p. 84)

n      Advertising as a redemptive force

Ch. 4, Abandoning the Great Genteel Hope: From Sponsored Radio to the Funny Papers

n      Radio reaches its public in the home, in private, insulated spaces

n      Desire to use radio for cultural uplift precludes ad-men from using the new medium for “vulgar” advertising – at first; slow progression of advertising into radio, first during the day, then at other times through different methods (“precious voice” campaign, interweaving ad into program text, sponsorship of programs, etc.)

n      Mid- to late-1920s see advertising market saturated and other forms of leisure abounding, promoting increased competition for consumer’s attention

n      “Super advertising” a response to competition – outrageous claims, more superlatives, questionable taste  (see ads on 101 for Lucky’s and 102 for Scott’s Tissue)

n      “Editorial copy” – camouflaging ad copy within periodicals (still happens today)

n      Comics start to take over advertising – advertisers assume that consumers will always choose fantasy, escapism, frivolity over reality because they lack taste

Ch. 5, The Consumption Ethic: Strategies of Art and Style

n      Style and look of ad. Inflates sales as much of content of copy or utility of product

n      Color

n      Color, scents, and ensembles promoted as ways to express personality and individuality – harmony of colors and styles – does this have origins elsewhere in cultural history?  Consider Bushman.

n      Co-optation of Modern Art tropes for advertising – which consumers were recognize these artistic allusions?  Is Marchand simplifying this?  What about Russian Constructivism, German Expressionism, etc.?   Was this as calculated as he makes it appear or was it simply a use of already-recycled artistic conventions? (diagonals, off-center layout, “kinetic silhouette,” unresolved tension, expressive distortion, and simplicity)

n      Use of photography – adds air of authenticity; re-enactments; ambiguity of authenticity of photograph coupled with its depiction of fantasy used to advantage of the advertisement (discussion on 153)

n      Introduction of pre-planned obsolescence to encourage more sales

n      Class self-consciousness – what you buy, which brands you buy, and how many products you buy, make up who you are

n      Heightened consumption leads to more work – seen as a boon to the market

Ch. 6, Advertisements as Social Tableaux

n      tableaux as window into people’s social lives

n      Little Woman, G.P.A. – balancing housework and leisure – leisure usually pre-determined by advertisement, as well (childcare, reading, other genteel pursuits)

n      Art Deco designed illustrations of wealthy women juxtaposed against squat, poor women; canted postures of women (need for male sturdiness; response to anxieties about the “New Woman”) in ads.

n      Supporting cast: Men always businessmen, usually non-descript; children always well dressed and groomed; elderly always sitting; families always small and gender balanced; rarely depictions of black or ethnic people; few depictions of working class

n      “French maid” as visual cue for class status of her employer

Ch. 7, The Great Parables

n      Understanding advertising parable in terms of a biblical parable – is Marchand successful in doing this or is the discussion overdone?

n      Parables: Tragedy of Manners (first impression is most important and a bad one can doom you); Democracy of Goods and Democracy of Afflictions (you can own what the wealthiest people own and even the wealthiest people have, say, bad breath); Civilization Redeemed (even if modern times bring anxiety, all of those ills can be neutralized and nature can be restored if you buy this product); Captivated Child (children need to be entertained and coaxed into doing the right thing, otherwise you’re a bad parent)

Ch. 8, Visual Cliches: Fantasies and Icons (icons in bold)

n      Visual cues are directly tied to fantasy and behavior

n      Can say with pictures what might be offensive in words

n      Visual clichés as “a social history of the imagination” – Clifford Geertz

n      Businessman at work and emphasis on status  made by giving him an office window with a view (either on factory or skyscraped city)

n      Scenes of people positively effected or dominated by the businessman’s power (consumers) rarely seen; only other skyscrapers – symbol of future and domain

n      Women rarely get a window view and then only to emphasize their shame, judgment,  or mistrust of others

n      The family circle – always in soft focus as compared to sharp focus of office space; often product like radio inserted into family circle; newspaper placement worth analysis; family democracy

n      Heavenly City – looking into the future, often a skyscraper populated city with futuristic highways and airplanes (this could be a film reference, considering popularity of Lang’s Metropolis in 1927)

n      Village America – small provincial, towns, church or town hall steeple, few references to mass production or consumption

n      Attempts to obliquely emphasize the spiritual awe of certain products (dominance of product above a cityscape, adoring throngs, fascinated ensembles of spectators around a product; linking with transcendent values like patriotism or holiness; radiant, divine beams of light; nimbus glows)

Ch. 9, Advertising in Overalls: Parables and Visual Cliches of the Depression

n      With onset of Depression, advertisers raise the gauntlet and see themselves as heroic saviors of the American state of mind in times of trouble; need to appear more like laborers than intellectuals; themes of courage and success

n      New emphasis on price of product

n      Parables made more extreme, more immediate

n      New parables including Unraised Hands, Skinny Kids (children needing parental guidance and suffering from malnutrition, misunderstanding, neglect, etc – see p. 299)

n      New, bolder look for adds – “louder,” heavier type, more visuals, less text, , premiums and contests, clenched fist of determination icon, relationships between fathers and sons – all advertisers’ response to the perceived “buyers’ strike”

n      Cultural and social uplift takes backseat to sales – “mail order” style

n      Ballyhoo magazine – parody of advertising conventions

n      Your Money’s Worth – rise of consumer advocacy

n      FDA threatens to regulate less-than-truthful ads, leading to more self-regulation

Ch. 10, The Therapeutics of Advertising

n      New visual literacy

n      Advertisers perceive the result of their efforts as: soothing and adaptive images for those disquieted by modern paces and patterns; education and sophistication of the masses; offering guidance to those confused by proliferation of products and stimuli; developing new roads for expressing individuality

n      Other results: advertising creates needs that it thinks it can fulfill (halitosis solved by Listerine, “nerves” solved by Lucky Strikes); a new aura surrounds consumption – now the properties of the product are as important to the consumer as how that product makes the consumer feel); loss of personal relationships salved by identification of consumers with fictional advertising characters like Betty Crocker and Mary Hale Martin; “consumption of other people’s personalities”

Questions to consider:

n      How successful is Marchand in reading these visual texts?  Did he leave anything important out?

n      Can advertisers’ methods be traced back to any other historical phenomena besides P.T. Barnum?

n      Are these texts instructive about people’s values in the 1920s and 1930s – are they a “distorted mirror” or no mirror at all?

n      Does consumption offer new modes for expressing individuality or does it narrow the range of possibilities for doing so?