Advertising Today and Tomorrow (RLE Advertising)

W.A. Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136666018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Advertising Today and Tomorrow surveys the structure and function of modern advertising (and in particular the modern advertising agency), investigates how appropriate its machinery is for modern business requirements, and suggests how, both for the good of itself and its clients, it can best equip and refine itself for the future. It is of great use to students of business, particularly of marketing, in the colleges, universities and business schools, as well as being of great help to young people seeking to make advertising their career.

First published in 1974.

PART I

Chapter 1

Advertising Yesterday

Personal Communication

If advertising were a profession (which it is not), it would almost certainly by now have been described by somebody as the second oldest profession in the world. If the description has no other merit, it at least serves to indicate how long advertising has been with us, not as an organised industry but as a more personal activity, unnoticed, unintentional, innocuous, indulged in every day by all of us as part of the business of projecting ourselves and our personalities, communicating to others the intricate patterns of our own identities, ideas and idiosyncrasies.

Our motives for self-advertisement vary, of course, a great deal; some are good, some bad. The same is true of the results; indeed, most of the time we advertise ourselves unconsciously, and it is this quality which makes advertising inseparable from our very existence.

It is not, however, on this level that this book will discuss advertising; it is rather on advertising as a tool of mass communication that we shall concentrate – communication seen, heard and experienced every day by everyone through hundreds and thousands of messages in the written and spoken word; and in order to understand the complex structure of modern advertising, shaped and fashioned as it has been by the technological marvels of the twentieth century, we must first trace its growth and development through the ages. For since advertising is so inevitably a part of our social scene, its evolution is part of our social history.

This ubiquitous presence of advertising is deceptive. It might be thought that its very quantity would dull its edge and, like a surfeit of rich food, impair the appetite. Yet much as people may feel that they are ignoring it, frequently they are inadvertently reacting to it; our industrialists are far too profit-conscious to spend the amounts they do on advertising without the expectation of return. The phenomenon is taken so much for granted that few of us pause to think (beyond the occasional passing comment on its humour or its technique, its dullness or its banality) what goes into its creation, why it is happening, or what it is trying to achieve.

Perhaps the reason is that few advertisements are directed at all people. In this modern age of finely differentiated market segments the promotional wavelength is very narrow and target audiences are very precise. Even the same product sold to different prospective customers can require a very different message, like the small motor car which can be offered to readers of the Daily Mirror as a prime method of transport and to readers of The Times as a shopping runabout. Yet the business of advertising is still an imperfect science, and advertisers must accept that to reach their target markets they will have to tolerate some wastage of readership or viewership. Thus we all see advertisements which are largely irrelevant to our needs, and they pass unnoticed.

Also, the focus of advertising has tended to change with changing conditions of life. These days most advertising concentrates on discretionary purchases, a perfect example of Maslow's hierarchy of needs in practice; in the old days the emphasis was very much on the essentials of existence – staple commodities, patent medicines, basic tools – but these requirements are now largely taken for granted. If you open your morning paper or your magazine, if you watch an evening's television, if you examine the hoardings in the high street, you will find that for the most part they advertise the things you could in theory quite well do without: cosmetics, convenience foods, electric toothbrushes, sweets, exotic drinks, hi-fi, packaged holidays and the rest. These are not absolutely imperative, but they make life more enjoyable, and they are rapidly becoming necessities in an age in which it is difficult to define the meaning of luxury goods; for who is to say that we should not have them?

Were it not for advertising, we should not be as we are: our habits, our attitudes, our possessions, perhaps even our very characters would be in some way different and the world would not be like the world in which we now have our being. Some people claim that it would be a better world; they may be right, but we cannot now change what has happened, and even if organised advertising were to be abolished tomorrow the effects of its past activity would be indelible. They cannot, like an old currency, be withdrawn from circulation and exchanged for something new and different overnight.

History and Development

Early Civilisations. We have to go back to the very beginnings of recorded history to discover the first examples of advertising. On the shards, bricks and tiles unearthed from the buried ruins of early Mediterranean civilisations we find the signatures and imprints of the artists and craftsmen who made them, thus permanently identifying their origin and telling those who saw them where to come back for more. The distinction between an art and a craft was not then a very clear one, nor did it become any clearer for a very long time; this tradition of signing the finished product has continued down the centuries from pre-classical times, through the great sculptures of fifth-and fourth-century Athens, the monuments and household products of imperial Rome, the great cathedrals of the medieval masons and the timber-framed houses of the jobbing builder, to the potters who provide us with our modern breakfast cups and butter dishes. All these things proclaim the identity of their makers, some in pride and some for profit, but they all ‘advertise’ in the modern sense of the term (first employed by Shakespeare) ‘to bring to the notice of.

Ancient Rome. It is in classical times that we find the first instances of poster advertising, consisting sometimes of commercial publicity for household services but mostly of political propaganda and personal insults. Visitors to Pompeii can see, as clear and as legible as on the day it was written 1,900 years ago, an exhortation daubed on a wall in bold red letters to vote for Furius, who was standing for political office and who, we are informed, was a ‘good man’.

In the internecine squabbles which punctuated the last years of the Roman republic, the warring factions (such as the followers of Clodius and Milo, immortalised by Cicero) would conduct their battles not only with the sword but also the pen (or rather the paintbrush), plastering the city buildings with their choicest insults.

Roman trade announcements give us a very clear idea of the types of commerce conducted at the time, but perhaps the most famous of all are the notices advertising forthcoming public entertainments, in particular the gladiatorial combats so dear to the Roman heart and pre-empting by centuries the gay and dramatic billposting of modern Spanish corridas.

Ancient Rome supplies us with our first ‘commercial break’. M. Porcius Cato, elected censor in 184 B.C., conducted in the Senate his own personal publicity programme for the destruction of Carthage, which, in his opinion, represented a constant threat to the safety of Rome. Whatever the subject under debate, Cato ended every speech he made with the words ‘Delenda est Carthago’ (Carthage must be destroyed) before resuming his seat. His campaign was effective: the Romans eventually razed the city to the ground.

The First Printing Process. The practice and purpose of advertising changed very little in the first 1500 years A.D. The reason is not hard to find: no advances were made in the two prime areas which constitute both the possibility and necessity of advertising practice – on the one hand the means of mass communication, on the other the need to employ it. The possibility was provided by the invention of printing, which represented the first major extension of the opportunity to advertise: communication could at last be conducted on the grand scale, the same message could be reproduced hundreds, thousands of times, and its audience could be broadened immeasurably. The new printing process gave rise to the newspaper, first on a local and limited, and then on a national and unlimited scale. As well as newspapers came pamphlets, circulars and posters, leaflets, broadsheets and tracts. The communications industry had been born.

Extension of Horizons. Advertising, then, had at last extended its horizons further than the eye could see. The possibilities had been created, but it was not until the great upheaval in industry at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries that the necessity to advertise arose on a scale never previously envisaged. The industrial revolution provided the real ingredients of the modern sales and marketing operation: firstly, the production of goods in mass quantity; secondly, the need for mass distribution to enable these goods to be sold; and thirdly, the need for mass communication to promote their qualities and thus facilitate the selling process.

It is really from this time that we begin to measure the growth of the bread-and-butter of advertising – packaged goods – and the emergence of the system which has developed as a result, the advertising agency.

The First Agency. It is a curious fact, and perhaps unique to advertising, that the way in which the modern advertising agency operates is in essence identical to that which was put into practice in the first agency to be created. It is to an American, Volney Palmer, in 1841, that the credit for founding the first agency must go; he was a dealer in real estate, wood, coal and other commodities in Philadelphia, and at the same time he solicited advertising revenue for a number of local newspapers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. This side of his business developed rapidly: he made it quite clear to his ‘clients’ that the newspapers were his principals and that he was their ‘agent’. His clients were charged no more for their advertising space than if they had bought it direct from the newspaper, and Palmer was paid an agreed commission by the newspapers. He was very successful, and soon had branches in other cities, including New York, Boston and Baltimore, but it is doubtful whether, successful as he was, he ever realised that he had founded a totally new industry, which, by 1973, would be accounting for a turnover of over £600m a year in Great Britain alone.

While Volney Palmer gets the credit as the founding father of modern advertising, he must also be held responsible for its inherent anomalies. These will be discussed in full in a later chapter, but it must be confessed that for an industry to operate for almost a century and a half on business principles which were created virtually by accident is, to say the least, remarkable.

The Golden Age. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, for advertising, the age of the flamboyant and spectacular, as they were for so many other aspects of life. Present-day advertising may be characterised by tricks and gimmicks, but they are nothing to the antics of Barnum and Bailey, Barratt or Carroll, the great sensationalists of the early days. One of the favourite stories amongst advertising men is of the notice erected in Barnum and Bailey's travelling zoo pointing ‘To the egress’; movement of customers was consequently brisk to see this intriguing beast, which turned out to be nothing more exciting than the exit.

William Hesketh Lever (the first Lord Leverhulme), in 1891, sent a pavement artist to South Africa to advertise Sunlight Soap, appoint new agents and carry out sampling operations. The artist's name was Carroll and, after an initial setback when he failed to get permission to have ‘Sunlight Soap’ written on Table Mountain in letters large enough to be read by everyone in the city of Cape Town, he reached Port Elizabeth determined to cause a sensation; rather than risk a second refusal, he acted without asking for permission for what he was doing. Thus it was that two days after Carroll's arrival Port Elizabeth woke up to find the words ‘Sunlight Soap’ stencilled neatly at regular intervals on both pavements of its main street. Naturally enough, the publicity was immense, and Carroll coolly answered the mayor's anger by promising that, if he had offended any of the city's bye-laws, he would pay for the removal of the signs: ‘Mr Mayor, buy a case of Sunlight Soap and set your men to work.’ The mayor was mollified, and the signs were scrubbed out – by the very product they advertised.

On a more public-spirited plane, the Boer War provided Bovril with a splendid promotional opportunity. A ‘Bovril War Cables’ Service was set up, using a fleet of khaki-clad bicyclists to bring important war news to shops in the London area. News of the relief of Ladysmith was wired to the headmasters of schools throughout the country, giving rise in many cases to the award of a half-holiday. The Sphere, reporting the incident (14 April 1900), commented drily that ‘these boys will certainly grow up with immense faith in the advertiser's art’. (It is, incidentally, to Bovril that the S. H. Benson agency owes its foundation; Benson himself was a Bovril employee until he set up in business on his own account in 1893 with Bovril as his first client.) The advertiser's art was still uncertain and wayward at this time, sometimes brilliant, sometimes banal, sometimes simply shocking; but through the confusion the great figures stand out. Thomas J. Barratt, described by Lord Northcliffe as ‘The Father of Modern Advertising’, is one such; head of A. & F. Pears, the soap manufacturers, he embarked on an advertising programme on a scale never seen before. In the 1880s he was spending at the rate of £ 126,000 a year, without an agency. One of his great fancies was testimonial advertising, particularly testimonials from men of medicine and chemistry praising his soap's hygienic qualities; but his most famous testimonial of all was used to promote its beautifying virtues. Pre-empting Lux by several decades, he persuaded the actress Lillie Langtry to claim in an advertisement ‘Since using Pears’ Soap I have discarded all others’. (Punch parodied the advertisement by showing a tramp writing his own version: ‘Two years ago I used your soap. Since when I have used no other.’ Barratt borrowed the cartoon at once.) The Langtry advertisement had an unfortunate sequel: the actress's signature appeared under her testimonial, and the temptation was too much for one experienced thief – he forged her signature and lifted £ 40,000 of jewels from her bank, many of them bought with Barratt's money.

It was Barratt also who, when he visited the United States, gatecrashed a reception given by Henry Ward Beecher, the spiritual leader and brother of the author of Uncle Tow's Cabin, and persuaded him to write a testimonial for Pears' Soap. Barratt immediately cabled the owner of the New York Herald, who was in Paris at the time, and negotiated the unprecedented purchase of the paper's whole front page on which he displayed Beecher's testimonial in full.

Barratt was associated with many of advertising's great events. He took to publishing and introduced Pears Cyclopaedia. He also purchased from Sir John Millais the famous painting of ‘Bubbles’ and much to the artist's consternation (and later delight) reproduced it as a Pears advertisement from a chromo-lithograph. In this he offended Marie Corelli who wrote in 1895:¹

I am one of those who think the fame of Millais as an artist was marred ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Frontmatter Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Index