Abstract
This article examines the way advertising was rationalized in the early twentieth-century United States. Drawing on a targeted archival comparison with the United Kingdom, I show how the extensive mobilization undertaken to legitimate and rationalize advertising, rather than changes in the techniques employed in the content of ads themselves, were seen by actors in the mid-1920s to explain most of the extraordinary advances made by American advertising. Building on that comparison, I show how American advertising was transformed, particularly around World War I, into a legitimate profession situated at the center of a network of expertise about consumers and their media. Under the banner of “truth in advertising” ads came to be regarded as a legitimate, rational, and sustained business investment, leading to an enormous increase in aggregate expenditures. I argue that future research should examine how this process fuelled mass media and contributed to the conditions for modern consumerism.
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Notes
Alongside legions of market researchers (the American Marketing Association alone boasts over 30,000 members and four scholarly journals (see: https://www.ama.org/membership/Pages/Membership.aspx; https://www.ama.org/publications/Pages/default.aspx, accessed June 15th 2014)), consumer research is the subject of a major academic journal, the Journal of Consumer Research, and the Association for Consumer Research, which brings together relevant researchers from industry, government, and academia: http://www.acrwebsite.org/, accessed June 13th 2014.
As Weber (2003[1905]) put it: “The appeal to national character is generally a mere confession of ignorance….”
The Convention records report speeches from previous and future Prime Ministers Baldwin and Churchill, current Prime Minister MacDonald, the Lord Mayor of London, Arthur Balfour, and countless others while the Prince of Wales was Patron and opened the Convention and President Coolidge sent a message. Nearly all the leading figures in British and American advertising, and many from elsewhere, were also present, as were numerous leading business figures.
In a review of the advertising literature prior to 1910, Coolsen (1947) reports ten books on advertising prior to 1895, four between 1895 and 1900, and seventy-five in the decade following. Subsequently, it is clear that the proliferation of such works continued apace. Similarly, in terms of university courses in advertising, the United States was well behind Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century but the undisputed world leader by 1920, with Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and New York University opening important programs of study alongside hundreds of other institutions (Leach 1993, pp. 155–163).
One notable scheme was the Potato-Bug Eradicator, purchased via mail order in the 1880s for a dime and consisting of two small pieces of wood with instructions to place the bug between the pieces and push them together (Jones et al. 2000, p. 26).
See: https://www.aaaa.org/about/association/Pages/default.aspx (accessed 3.26.2015).
Perhaps most notably the CPI’s National Advisory Council included the muckraking journalist most responsible for discrediting patent medicines and the “puffery” that promoted them (noted above), Samuel Hopkins Adams, and the president of an ad agency and the Advertising Club of NY when it launched the Truth in Advertising movement, William H. Ingersoll.
Although the American-trained leader of the United Kingdom’s World War I advertising effort, Charles Higham, received a knighthood for his efforts (he also pioneered British advertising’s postwar attempts to follow in the footsteps of their American counterparts), there is no evidence that British advertising profession as a whole made significant gains.
While there was common law precedent in both the United States and United Kingdom preventing local competitors from aping each other’s brand names and symbols, and although the United States Constitution mandated the creation of a Patent Office to protect intellectual property, the addition of a trademark department to its functions required a legal innovation, and one that had been repeatedly rejected by the Supreme Court before eventually being adopted in 1881 for international brands. It was the introduction of de jure legislation for trademarking domestic brands in 1905 (the same year comparable legislation was introduced in the United Kingdom), that established a legal framework for the ownership of trans-local economic symbols from brand names and images to package-shapes and phrases. As Wilkins put it (Wilkins 1992, p. 68), “When the separation between producer and buyer occurs, the name and reputation become intangible property rights that require legal support.”
Wilkins (1992, p. 77) notes that by the mid-1920s the courts recognized the right to the ownership of ad-invested symbols as equivalent to that for “investment in plant or materials.”
Indeed, other important lines of research into American life can be traced back to post-World War I consumer research. Sarah Igo’s The Averaged American (2007) briefly discusses the prior, formative role that advertising and consumer research had on the emerging field of public opinion research in the 1920s and 30s. Igo notes that “Commercial researchers may have been precocious in devising ways to glean the preferences of the American public, but they would soon have plenty of company” (p. 113). As Igo points out, market research into consumer desire, brand preferences, and so on were important precursors to public opinion research and the boundaries between the fields were “porous.” Her “big three” pollster-pioneers, George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley, were “first and foremost market researchers, devoted to the science of improving corporate profitability through carefully crafted advertising campaigns and public relations stratagems” (Igo 2007, p. 113). To take another example, Robert Lynd began his career in advertising, though he was to become outspokenly critical of it by the late thirties (Igo 2007, p. 114), before going on to conduct his seminal Middletown studies of twentieth-century American life in which changing consumption patterns played a prominent role (Lynd and Lynd 1929, 1937). In fact, Lynd wrote a chapter on “The People as Consumers” (Lynd 1933) in Recent Social Trends in the United States—the 1600 page report (there were also thirteen volumes of supporting material) of an unprecedented committee of social science researchers assembled by Hoover in Hoover et al. 1929 to “help all of United States to see where social stresses are occurring and where major efforts should be undertaken to deal with them constructively” (Hoover et al. 1933; see also Tobin 1995).
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I am very grateful for invaluable feedback from the Theory and Society Editors and reviewers as well as Peter Bearman, Claire Edington, Shamus Khan, Joshua Navon, Harrison White, and especially Gil Eyal.
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Navon, D. Truth in advertising: Rationalizing ads and knowing consumers in the early twentieth-century United States. Theor Soc 46, 143–176 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9286-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9286-2