This course examines the relation of advertising to society, culture, history, and the economy. Using contemporary theories about visual communications, we learn to analyze the complex levels of meaning in both print advertisements and television commercials. About the Course The course covers a wide range of topics, including the origins of advertising, the creation of ads, the interpretation of ads, the depiction of race, class, gender, and sexuality in advertising, sex and selling, adverting and ethics, and the future of advertising. The lectures will discuss theoretical frameworks and apply them to specific advertisements. Course Syllabus Week 1: What is advertising and where did it come from? Week 2: Am I being manipulated by advertising? Week 3: What’s in an ad beyond that which meets the eye? Week 4: How do ads get made? Week 5: What do ads teach us about race, class, gender, and sexuality? Week 6: Does sex sell? Week 7: What is the future of advertising? Recommended Background No background is required; everyone is welcome! Suggested Readings Although the lectures are designed to be self-contained, we recommend that students refer to the free online textbook ADTextOnline.org. Other free resources will be suggested for each week’s module. Course Format Most videos will be lectures with instructor talking. Each lecture will be illustrated with PowerPoint slides, print advertisements, and TV commercials. The videos for each week will consist of segments that add up to about an hour. Each week will have one quiz that will appear as stand-alone homework. All resources beyond lectures will be available online to students at no charge. Most of these will be from ADTextOnline.org. Others will be visits to the sites of ad agencies in the US and abroad, open access websites that deal with course topics, and open-access journal articles.
1.2 A Brief History of Advertising in America
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En provenance du cours de Duke University
Advertising and Society
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À partir de la leçon
What is advertising and where did it come from?
Focus on 3 definitions of advertising, one of which emphasizes its antiquity, another its modernity and connections to capitalist society, and a third that traces its evolution from face-to-face salesmanship through print, radio, TV, and now the Internet. In addition, a brief history of American advertising from its European origins through the colonial period in America when most manufactured goods were imported, to the advent of mass production in 19th century America, mass consumption (and the emergence of contemporary advertising as a means to facilitate it), to the present.
Rencontrer les enseignants
Professor William M. O'BarrProfessor
Cultural Anthropology, Sociology and English
Hello, and welcome back to Advertising in Society.
Today I look at the history of advertising in America.
This is of course, an enormously broad topic and it would very difficult,
even in a whole course to do justice to this particular topic.
So what we'll do today instead is to look at a few high points in the history
to provide for us a kind of basic outline of the history of advertising in America,
some of the big changes that occurred.
I talk about its beginning, and where we are at present.
I also, at the end of this lecture, will give you some references for
further reading and viewing that will help you follow up on some of
the themes mentioned today.
Our brief history of advertising in America begins actually in England
in the 1600s, remembering that America was an English colony at that point in time,
and therefore what was done in England was in significant ways done in the U.S., but
to a much lesser degree.
Here's a really interesting add from 1609, published in England, and
it's offering planters opportunities to move to Virginia.
It shows the sailing ship in a woodcut, and talks about the excellent
fruits by planting in Virginia and inviting people to consider moving there.
So that kind of thing happened, but also in the 1600s, here's another one.
Very interesting.
This was a handbill passed out in the streets and it advertises coffee.
It talks about coffee is now available.
It talks about what it is, where it comes from, how to make it, and
all the virtues of coffee that it is, good for all sorts of problems and
diseases and helps you stay awake and so forth.
It's actually remarkably like a contemporary ad for coffee, but
here it is in the form that it existed in, in around about 1615.
Now let's jump forward to America itself around the time of American independence.
Benjamin Franklin, the famous, famous American was producing his newspaper and
in it printing a variety of different advertisements.
What he did was to put these in, they often appeared on the front page.
They were newsworthy, but often they repeated themselves over long periods of
time, because there wasn't really a great deal of change that was available.
It was more like an announcement, perhaps then contemporary advertising.
Let me read just a few of these to you.
Odran Dupuy, next door to the bell in Arch Street, on Monday,
February 10th opened a French school where whoever inclines to
learn the French language may be taught it on reasonable terms.
His wife also teaches ladies needlework.
And further on, a servant's man, a servant man's time for
three years and four months to be disposed of.
He is a likely hearty young fellow.
Inquire of the printer hereof.
And that means Franklin, of course.
And then further on, it lists Antigua Rum, St. Kits molasses, chocolate, cotton,
ginger, pepper and other sundry items of the sort of goods sold by wholesale or
retail by William Graham at the house where Henry Hodge lately dwelt.
Well, these things show a lot about the kind of society that existed in America
that point in time where very little was manufactured here in this country and
a great deal was imported.
There was the situation of indentured servants and
in other ads like the following one,
you can see advertisements for people, where slaves were being sold.
So it's interesting to read back then because you not only see the history of
advertising style, but you can read out of it, the history of the society,
based on what's being advertised and what's available and where it comes from.
So lot of things from England that were manufactured there, a lot of stuff from
the Caribbean, the triangular trade was in a great sway, slaves coming from Africa.
So there was a big international global kind of network across the Atlantic, but
not much manufacturing in the U.S.
because very little of this talks about things made here.
Now Franklin introduced another innovation into American advertising, and
that was the images that you see here.
These are wood cuts and they refer to ships that will be sailing.
They're rather repetitive, they're not very interesting by contemporary terms,
but this was something new.
Before him, American advertising had not had illustrations of any sort.
So Franklin was kind of ahead of his time in one sense by doing things earlier and
quicker and more forcefully than other people did.
And in some ways we might consider him even the father of
American advertising here in the late 1700s.
If we look forward to America in the mid to late 1800s,
American manufacturing had begun to produce a variety of goods that were
domestic, and so the ads begin to reflect the fact that things are produced here and
not just imported.
But also the, probably the most important person of this period was
James Gordon Bennett publisher of the, of the New York Herald newspaper.
Now he had a very interesting idea about all of this, and
it was that ads should be treated as news.
They should not appear again and again.
But he placed the limit on ads that they could only appear once, and
after that they had to be rewritten, a new ad had to be done.
And he also wanted to make them more Democratic so
that everyone's ads sort of had a more equal footing.
And he restricted illustrations.
So what Franklin had put in he took out again.
Now his restriction on ads appearing just once and in a similar
kind of type made it very hard for some, for any particular ad to stand out.
There were people who tried to get around this in various ways, and
here's an example of that, where the same ad is printed over and
over again, and this becomes visually interesting and draws the eye to it.
But except for this kind of thing where people would try to get around
his limitations, advertising in this period was limited to
one run one day and no illustrations.
Now in the latter part of the 1800s,
we begin to see the emergence of a poster culture.
Here's a picture actually from London in 1874.
But New York would have been the same and
other big cities in the U.S. where the walls of train stations and
other public places were plastered with various kinds of advertisements like this.
And these began to have some illustrations in them.
Not a lot.
You could see one or two in what's shown here.
But it's not a really popular thing to do to have lots of
lots of illustrations in ads.
That would come later.
Now a very important characteristic of advertising in the 1800s was that what we
know today as advertising simply didn't exist.
There was rather something that is probably better referred to
as salesmanship.
And salesmanship was things like this,
where you could see a single man standing in front of a crowd, and
he's talking to them about the virtues of a product that he's selling.
It's probably a patent medicine.
And they're there listening to what he has to say, and
may end up actually buying the product.
This was what occurred before advertising as we know it
emerged a bit later in the 1800s.
Let's have a look at a clip from a music video where you can see a parody
of what actually happened in these sorts of situations.
But it illustrates pretty well how salesmanship would have worked.
>> Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?
Gather round, come on, gather round!
>> Step right up, step right up!
Come on ladies and gentlemen, gather round.
Let me tell you all about the Mack and
Jack Wonder Potion, guaranteed to give you unbelievable power.
Yes my friends, it can give you the strength of a raging bull.
>> I'll try one.
>> Here's a young gentleman, would like to try one.
Yes sir. Here you go.
Drink it up.
Let me help you with that, my friend.
[SOUND].
Try it.
>> Whoo!
[LAUGH].
>> Sir?
>> [SOUND].
>> [SOUND]
[MUSIC]
Step right up, step right up.
Come on ladies and gentlemen, gather round.
Let me tell you all about.
>> The important characteristic to note is it's face to face to a small crowd of
people where the person who's got the product is advertising it directly to them
and can to some significant degree tailor the message to the people in the crowd.
It's a way of sort of demonstrating things.
It's a way of also looking out and seeing who has what kind of need, and
if someone is bald maybe suggesting the medicine will grow hair, or
if someone is bent over and stooped that it's good for arthritis and so forth.
It's a very personalized interpersonal way of communicating selling messages.
[MUSIC]
Also in the 1800s in the decade of the 1860s,
emerged the modern American advertising agency.
Rather simultaneously in the mid 1860s in New York and in Philadelphia two
big agencies came into existence that continued well into the 20th century.
One is still in existence, the other has been bought up and
acquired by a much larger group.
But these agencies emerged with the, with a particular role
that was created that really made them invaluable to a lot of business people.
Since there was the rule that ads had to change every day and
be replaced by new ones on a successive day, then advertising agents, stepped
in to help the people who were placing ads, business people in particular.
And they, they offered physically to take the ad from the business to the newspaper
to stand in line, to pay for it, and for this they got a small service fee.
Now this was the beginning actually of the advertising agent who
would do this kind of work for a business.
But very quickly after this was working, a second function was added and
that was that they began to help write the ads as well as
being sure that they were placed in the appropriate media.
Now these two things, placing the ad and writing and creating the ad
are still very much the essential functions of a lot of advertising today.
So we see it happening here.
It happened in a particular cultural context, but it has evolved over time.
And these are functions that are very much a part of contemporary advertising.
Now some of these early agencies still exist today.
The two I mentioned, J.Walter Thompson founded in the 1860s in New York,
still exists today as JWT Worldwide.
And N.W. Ayer founded in the 1860s in Philadelphia was acquired
by the Publicis Group based in Paris in 2004 and the name is no longer in used.
These are the founders of each of the agencies, Mr. Ayer on the left and Mr.
Thompson on the right.
And you'll notice that these are white men, which was what the population of
advertisers was up until about the 1950s when advertising began to become
much more diversified with women, with ethnic minorities, with people of color.
Still not highly prominent in advertising, but they began to come into it and
change the complexion, and face and attitudes in advertising.
But, it took a good nearly hundred years for that change to occur.
Now a big change occurred in advertising when
radio became available as an advertising medium.
This happened in the late 1920s.
Radio had been greatly enhanced and developed during World War I
as a mechanism for communicating with troops on the battlefield.
Then after the war was over and it was no longer used for
that, people got the idea that it might be used as a commercial media.
And so the question came up when it was,
it was happening of whether this would be managed by the government or privately.
Some countries made the decision that it would be operated by the government.
Britain and Canada in particular did that, and the U.S. went the other direction,
which was to make it a private radio station, and therefore had advertising.
The British and the Canadians did not originally have advertising,
although in both those countries today there is
also nongovernmental stations, and therefore advertising.
Now World War II was another very big watershed event in
the history of advertising.
What happened then was that consumer goods largely became unavailable as
factories shifted from producing consumer goods, like automobiles and
refrigerators, to making war material.
And this meant that consumers really couldn't buy the things that
ads had been promoting prior to that.
And so advertising did a couple of things during that period.
One, is it promoted the war effort and secondly,
it promised things for the future.
Now here's an example of what some companies were doing.
This is a Ford ad from
the mid 1940s and it talks about, there's a Ford in your future.
It's a way of dreaming about what you can have after the war,
because cars really weren't available in any large numbers during the war.
And thus this idea of dreaming about it and looking into a crystal ball to predict
the future was a way that Ford kept the idea of a new car before the public.
Although it couldn't actually provide the consumer goods at that point, it wanted to
keep this idea alive even though the goods weren't themselves available.
Now here's another example of the war effort of
turning something into a patriotic message.
It talks about the upper berth on the, in the sleeping car on the train.
And what it talks about here is the idea that trains are now becoming
a way of transporting troops around the country, and
that people should learn that they need to do things like double
up as you see in the bottom, or make room for the make room for the troops.
So it's a way of sort of talking about you can still travel by rail, but
it's not going to be like it was before.
We have to accommodate things to fit the war effort.
So lots of interplay between the war and advertising where things were different.
But often advertisers cleverly turned these things into patriotic messages and
took what were disadvantages and made them seem like patriotic duties.
Now following World War II, television became a commercial medium.
Again, it had been helped by the war effort where it got a large
technological set of changes that occurred in it.
And it was much more useful than it had been before,
although the idea had been around for a while.
So around about 1948, some of the big cities,
New York, Chicago, Los Angeles began to have television programming.
First, just a few hours a day.
And like radio,
it was decided in this country that television would be an advertising medium.
And thus the television commercial was born in this context, along with the fact
that television became a way of communicating to the public.
Now, I want you to watch this particular television ad, a early one from the 1950s.
Because what you see here is how, how it was talked about so
much at that point in time, that it was really radio with pictures.
Because the jingle was all important during the radio period
where things were sung and said and little catchy phrases were around.
People would whistle tunes or repeat these phrases.
And so when television started, it simply took that form and
added some pictures to it.
And this is a very good example of how that looked.
It took a while for
the television commercial to evolve into what it is we know today.
[MUSIC]
This brief look at the history of advertising would not be complete without
asking the question, what's next for advertising?
Well the internet, which has been around for many years now,
about 25 to be precise, has really transformed advertising so
that it's become oddly like the original salesmanship situation,
an interpersonal mechanism for talking to as few as a single consumer at the time.
But the question is, what occurs after this, after the internet runs its course?
No one's really quite sure about this.
We know that the social media are very important in advertising,
product placement is.
It's very difficult to predict the future.
But I think the real answer is,
we should stay tuned because advertising has evolved in response to
technology and the things that were available as mechanisms for communicating.
And as the internet changes and the kind of
digital communications that are now part of our society become even more complex,
advertising will surely follow suit through this and do other things as well.
Some people believe that we should not even use the word advertising anymore
because it's changing into a situation where consumers are much more involved
in responding, interacting, posting comments on message boards,
and even in some cases writing the ads that appear in places like the Super Bowl.
So it's hard to say what the future of advertising is, but I think that we can
expect it to be changing and developing as things progress technologically.
Now I like to say one other things about American advertising.
And that is that around about 1900,
American advertising began to advertise American products abroad.
They did this in an interesting way.
The J.Walter Thompson Company, as you can see there,
an advertisement for the Spanish language advertising.
This is a house ad advertising the advertising agency's services.
They list a series of countries, and
they talk about how they can produce ads to go in those places.
They didn't actually have offices there because in the beginning
the Spanish Department consisted of three people in an office in New York
who literally translated American ads, didn't change anything about them, and
shipped them off primarily to newspapers in South America.
Now we've come a very long way since then, because what has happened is that
American advertising not only does international things like this, but
it has become a very central part of global advertising today, so
that it's really hard to talk about advertising in any national sense.
It's really in fact, a global phenomenon, because they're global products.
One need only think of Coca-Cola, McDonald's and
things like this that are sold all over the world.
And the American agencies, most of the big ones,
are very involved in this process as well.
So as I said at the beginning,
this is a few key points in the history of advertising.
You can see through what I've said that it began in the 1800s.
It developed in various ways, but
really important things that happened was the shift from print to radio, and
then from radio to television, and from television to the internet.
These are major, major changes in how advertising works in our society.
You'll hear more about this in other lectures, and
you can also read a much more extensive history covering the points that I've
mentioned but also talking about them in greater detail and
adding other parts to the story of the evolution of American advertising.
You can find this on ADText in an article called A Brief History of Advertising.
I strongly recommend that you have a look at it, and read it all if
you can because it will complete and flesh out the story that I've told you today.
This course is a collaborative venture of Duke University and
the Advertising Educational Foundation.
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