Advertising in the Age of Persuasion

Building Brand America 1941–1961

D. Spring

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780230339644
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Advertising in the Age of Persuasion documents and analyzes the implementation of the American strategy of consumerism during the 1940s and 1950s, and its ongoing ramifications. Beginning with World War II, and girded by the Cold War, American advertisers, brand name corporations, and representatives of the federal government institutionalized a system of consumer capitalism which they called free enterprise. In their system, government and business worked together to create consumer republics, democracies based on the mass consumption of brand name goods using advertising across all major media to sell products and distribute information. Many of the free enterprise evangelists believed it represented the fulfillment of America's god-ordained mission. They envisioned an American lead global consumer order supported by advertising based media where the brand took precedence over the corporation that owned it; and advertising, propaganda and public relations were considered the same thing. To support this system, they created a network and process for disseminating persuasive information that survives into the 21st Century.

CHAPTER 1

“Persuaders in the Public Interest”^*

Between the late 1800s and the 1940s, free enterprise capitalism and the persuasive information industry emerged in the United States and the companies whose representatives championed these causes in the 1940s and 1950s were some of the most important early practitioners. Free enterprise was born in the late nineteenth century with the sale of goods to mass national markets; the large-scale production of brand goods, such as Ivory soap by Procter & Gamble and the Kodak camera; and the development of the profession of advertising. Together, these advertising and brand-name companies crafted a version of capitalism dependent on the advertising of brand-name goods, mass consumption, mass media financed by advertising, mass production, and perpetually expanding markets. As free enterprise capitalism increasingly dominated American corporations, advertising went from being a questionable practice in the late 1800s to a place of prominence, assisting the American government win World War II.

After a fall from the boom period in the 1920s, by 1941, American advertisers faced mounting criticism about their value in American society. Advertising agencies, whose business had grown steadily since the 1870s, found revenue dropping throughout the 1930s. Historic agencies and companies that developed their business through the use of advertising and mass marketing found the value of that advertising challenged. The work of advertisers and public relations specialists in selling World War I faced attacks. Their work with President Wilson’s Committee for Public Information during World War I had been heavily criticized as being propaganda, leaving industry participants such as public relations pioneer Edwards Bernays to suggest that advertising, government information and, public relations professions no longer use the term propaganda when describing persuasive information.¹ However, World War II and the era of American internationalism that it ushered in erased many of the concerns regarding the value of advertising in the United States. With the War Advertising Council during World War II, advertisers proved their usefulness to politicians, creating a permanent relationship with the White House and U.S. national security agencies.

Advertising and brand-name manufacturing developed during the late nineteenth century and laid the foundation for modern American free enterprise. While many American companies and politicians did not embrace free enterprise until after World War II, the ideas and techniques—advertising, brand management, commercial broadcasting, mass markets, and overseas expansion—were in place by the war. Fledgling advertising agencies like Cincinnati-based J. Walter Thompson and brand-name companies such as Procter & Gamble and Eastman Kodak used advertising to sell goods on a national level. From the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I, advertising went from being primarily a service that sold newspaper and magazine ads to providing full service marketing strategies.

During the 1920s, radio became commercial broadcasting, establishing the precedent for advertising to be the bedrock of radio and television. After rising to social acceptance, influence, and profits in the 1920s, advertising expenditures slid rapidly as the U.S. economy fell into depression and a new consumer movement pushed for the regulation of advertisers. As advertising prepared to defend itself in the early 1940s, America entered World War II, and a permanent relationship between American advertising and the American government was born. During World War II, advertisers and brand-name manufacturers proved their usefulness to the White House, and after the war the Advertising Council incorporated as a permanent nonprofit entity with bipartisan support.

Pioneers

Three companies played a unique role in the pioneering use of advertising and the brand structure: the Eastman Kodak Company, the J. Walter Thompson Company, and the Procter & Gamble Company. In the 1870s, Procter & Gamble began its first mass marketing of a brand good, Ivory soap. George Eastman began building his film and eventually camera business, Kodak.² And, in 1877, J. Walter Thompson bought the William J. Carlton agency from William James Carlton, changed the name to J. Walter Thompson, and began turning it into the country’s leading advertising agency. While just a few of the many brand-name companies emerging at the turn of the century, these three companies played went on to play pivotal roles in developing advertising, branding, broadcasting, government partnerships, and public information campaigns.

Procter & Gamble’s branding and marketing of Ivory soap quickly became a model of a mass produced, mass marketed brand-name good. Unlike other companies, P & G did all its advertising in-house and did not work with outside agencies until it hired J. Walter Thompson to do the Crisco campaign in 1911—putting itself in the position of being a leader in the twentieth century in terms of the range of goods produced, how they were researched, developed, and manufactured, and how advertising and brand names could be used to create new markets. Between the 1880s and 1900, Procter & Gamble also helped develop the American advertising profession.³ It helped pioneer the idea of the brand, which began literally as a branding iron mark used on the outside of wood boxes to make them easily identifiable as Procter & Gamble Star candles.⁴ Procter & Gamble branded its new soap product, Ivory, after a biblical passage and began a successful national marketing campaign. By the late nineteenth century, Procter & Gamble became one of the United States’ largest advertisers.⁵

Kodak’s Four Fundamentals

Within a decade of spending his own savings to start his camera business, George Eastman started doing Kodak business in England in 1885 and getting the company’s first overseas patent there.⁶ Kodak first advertised using the J. Walter Thompson agency in 1888, when the agency placed ads for Kodak in many of the major national magazines, including Scientific America and Harper’s.⁷ While over the decades J. Walter Thompson taught many companies how to market, they also learned marketing from Kodak. By the end of the nineteenth century, Kodak spent over three quarters of a million dollars, one of the biggest expenditures on advertising in the nation.⁸ In 1878, George Eastman laid out his four fundamental business principles: mass production done by machinery, prices low enough so as to make the product useful, demonstration of the product combined with extensive advertising, and worldwide distribution. These principles represented some of the basic tenets behind free enterprise capitalism; however, while many companies in the United States undertook practices similar to Eastman’s domestically, his final principle of expanding world markets remained contested until after World War II.⁹

World Markets

In 1898, the Spanish-American War sparked debates among American politicians and businessmen about expanding business overseas and using former Spanish holdings such as Cuba and the Philippines as a launching point for American business to have access to consumer markets in other countries. The Spanish-American War opened up new markets for both Kodak and J. Walter Thompson. As the new century began, Mr. Thompson claimed that J. Walter Thompson could operate in the world without restrictions—that “any spot on earth where goods are to be sold by advertising is inside the fence of the Thompson field.” As American action overseas generated increased trade, Thompson declared: “Trade follows the flag. Where trade goes the J. Walter Thompson Agency is ready to go also.”¹⁰ Shortly after the Spanish-American War, J. Walter Thompson’s New York office set up a Spanish department and began preparing advertising for Latin American countries and the Philippines. Within five years, J. Walter Thompson was placing ads in local publications in Hawaii, Latin America, and the Philippines. It opened its first overseas office in London in 1899. There, it worked to both provide advertising for companies and encourage American businesses to expand overseas, producing resources such as the “Thompson Blue Book of Advertising” in 1904 that described American export trade around the world.¹¹

Stanley Resor and J. Walter Thompson

The early twentieth century witnessed the continued growth of all three companies and the techniques of advertising and brand-name marketing. The rise of the Hollywood movie industry brought additional business and influence for Kodak and advertisers benefited greatly from the exploding auto industry.¹² J. Walter Thompson continued to expand its domestic business. In 1911, Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble hired the local agency to market its new product made out of cotton by-products. J. Walter Thompson executive and testimonial advertising specialist Stanley Resor changed the name of the product from Krispo to Crisco, creating another of Procter & Gamble’s famous brands.¹³ As manager of the Cincinnati office, Resor made the fateful decision to persuade James Webb Young to give up his career as a Bible and religious book salesman to work writing advertising copy for the J. Walter Thompson Company.¹⁴ In 1916, Resor; his wife, Helen Resor; and several associates bought the J. Walter Thompson Company from Mr. Thompson, making the Cincinnati office of J. Walter Thompson one of the most important offices and Resor one of the country’s most powerful advertising executives. He exerted considerable influence in expanding both the company and the profession, helping to found the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) in 1917 and building the company into the “world’s biggest agency.”¹⁵

World War I and the Crusade for Democracy

World War I marked the first foray of advertisers and public relations experts into government information campaigns. In April 1917, President Wilson created the executive order 2594 that established the Committee for Public Information (CPI). Since he appointed George Creel as head the CPI also came to be known as the Creel Committee. The federal agency worked with advertising and public relations executives to create campaigns to advertise America The Creel Committee developed the Crusade for Democracy campaign with slogans such as “the war to end all wars” and “the war to make the world safe for democracy” and produced such famous campaigns as the Uncle Sam poster—“I want you”—for army recruiting. It created multi-platform campaigns that ranged from print advertisements, posters, and cartoons to the 4 Minute Men speakers, who gave four minute speeches across the country. In 1918, James Webb Young was “drafted by the first World War Creel Committee for Public information, to develop a plan for propaganda on the western front.”¹⁶ Young provided recommendations for the creation of wartime propaganda, preparing a report for the Creel Commission entitled “Enemy Country Propaganda from an Advertising Viewpoint.” The Creel Commission remained only a wartime entity and was disbanded after World War I amidst criticisms of propaganda, leaving Young and others to return for the moment to advertising for business purposes.¹⁷

Postwar Years

The 1920s brought a booming free enterprise economy and prosperous times for advertising. Advertisers left the propaganda business and focused on expanding across the nation and overseas and developing the radio into a commercial advertising medium. Buoyed in part by Young’s 1919 advertising copy for deodorant—“Within the curve of a woman’s arm” for Cincinnati-based Odorono—which dramatically increased sales and brought industry attention to Young’s techniques, J. Walter Thompson helped lead advertising to its first phase of major growth in the twentieth century. The 1920s saw further international expansion by both Kodak and J. Walter Thompson. By that decade, Kodak did business in Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark, Egypt, India, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Argentina, Singapore, and Portugal and the J. Walter Thompson London office produced advertising for American and British clients across Europe.¹⁸ Throughout the 1920s, Kodak also continued its expansion into Brazil, Mexico, Lebanon, Uruguay, Chile, Greece, Hong Kong, Kenya, Panama, Peru, and the Philippines, while J. Walter Thompson helped General Motors grow its business overseas.¹⁹ In 1927, J. Walter Thompson as part of its contract with General Motors International opened an office in every nation that General Motors had an assembly or manufacturing plant. To establish these offices Young traveled across Europe with J. Walter Thompson staff, resulting in offices being created in Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, and Egypt.²⁰

During this period several important mechanisms and methods of advertising and public relations developed, such as the use of psychology and market research to study the effectiveness of advertising. During this period, the Psychological Corporation, which also did educational testing in the twentieth century, began working with advertising agencies. In the 1920s Raymond Rubicam hired George Gallup to conduct opinion polls. In 1924, Procter & Gamble created one of the first “market research departments” in order “to study consumer preferences and buying habits.”²¹ During the 1920s, Young also spent time developing further skills for market research and persuading consumers. He pursued the study of psychology with Dr. John Watson, “originator of ‘behaviour psychology,” and worked at the University of Chicago with Dr. Anton Carlson. Young, who technically retired from JWT in 1928, went on to teach advertising at the School of Business at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, helping to train a new generation of advertisers and gain legitimacy for the profession.

Radio and Commercial Advertising

Advertising’s growth occurred not just in offices and print campaigns, but also across mediums as radio quickly became an ideal advertising medium. While the Happiness Candy Company sponsored a series show on the AT &T network in 1923, advertising agencies did not embrace the radio until the mid-1920s. In 1922 in New York City, AT & T created the first commercial radio broadcasting, as radio began transitioning from a hodgepodge of local stations to a national commercial media.²² Procter & Gamble was one of the earliest innovators in commercial radio broadcasting and by the 1930s was one of the “biggest advertisers on the airwaves.” In 1923, Procter & Gamble began sponsoring radio cooking shows on behalf of Crisco, and during that period sponsored radio programs began with companies such as Goodrich Tires sponsoring shows. Procter & Gamble also created the first radio “soap opera” in the 1930s.²³ In 1926, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) launched the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and began selling the idea of radio advertising to advertising companies. In 1927, the federal government established the Federal Radio Commission, creating a permanent system of commercial broadcast within the United States.²⁴ While advertisers took to the airwaves throughout the 1920s, JWT did not utilize the radio until 1929. Like JWT, once engaged in the medium radio advertising and commercial broadcasting quickly became well established.²⁵

Advertising during the Depression

Throughout the 1930s, advertisers sought to grow business despite an unfriendly climate. During the Depression, politicians, academics, and consumer ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “Persuaders in the Public Interest”
• Chapter 2. “Miracle, U.S.A.”
• Chapter 3. The Brand Names Foundation’s “Worthwhile Community Activity”
• Chapter 4. “Advertising—A New Weapon in the Worldwide Fight for Freedom”
• Chapter 5. Saving the World through Religious Revival
• Chapter 6. “The Crusade for Freedom”
• Chapter 7. One Nation, One World with Television
• Chapter 8. “The Conscience of America” and “The Arsenal of Persuasion”
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index