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.
