Advertising History

The twentieth century heralded a new -and far more momentous- era in American advertising history. Industry leaders quickly converted outdoor advertising, the oldest form of the craft, into the latest rage when the first electric sign was erected in New York in 1891. Retailers actively engaged in- and depended on- advertising to boost sales. Copywriter Claude Hopkins gave Americans a breakfast product "shot from guns" as well as conferring a new status on the importance of copywriting in developing a successful advertising campaign. By the 1920s, American public- and private- consciousness was saturated with advertising. Newspapers, magazines, transit ads, billboards, posters, and window displays proclaimed America 's commercial and social progress. The age of mass production, mass selling, and mass advertising had arrived. And most Americans appeared to thrive on it. Broadway, "The Great White Way," attracted thousands of tourists, as did Hudson River steamboat excursions to Albany , during which passengers gazed at lighted billboards lining the riverbanks.

The most recent- and comprehensive- bibliographical source on advertising for scholars is Richard Pollay Information Sources in Advertising History. Pollay has dedicated himself to the proposition that advertising will be "a central focus in the history of the 20th century." The book opens with Pollay's plea to counter the advertising industry's almost insistently ephemeral self-image by urging historians to address advertising's importance in American business and culture as well as urging industry leaders to establish corporate archives and to encourage scholarly access to these materials. Extensive bibliographical essays follow- Julian Simon on economic data on advertising, Margaret A. Miller on professional data, Quentin J. Schultze on trade periodicals, and Pollay on types of literature available to historians. The remaining sections, gathered under such subject headings as histories, psychology, sociology, textbooks, and vocational guides, include brief but incisive bibliographical annotations and are completed by as detailed a listing as is available of advertising archives and special collections. A thorough index and a reliable system of cross-referencing make Pollay Information Sources in Advertising History an easy-to-use and indispensable reference tool.

Published two years later, after The Making of modern Advertising, Roland Marchand's Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 extends and enriches Pope's work by examining the social context of American advertising during the 1920s and 1930s. Marchand's study is the most comprehensive and lucid account we have of the specific ways in which the advertising profession complicated the American public's adjustment to the psychological and social intricacies of modern life by introducing new products and assisting corporations to respond more profitably to changing consumer needs, wants, and whims. Challenging the notion that advertising is a reliable and simple mirror of social behavior, Marchand argues that advertising drew much of its influence by borrowing freely from the other forms of popular culture that also gained prominence during this same period- principally radio, and especially soap operas, as well as photography, cartoons, and the tabloid press. Marchand's exemplary work is supported by a thorough bibliographical essay detailing important sources of information about the role of advertising in early twentieth- century American business and culture. Advertising the American Dream establishes a scholarly standard for the work needed on other areas and periods in advertising history.