Here is a brief summary of Advertising the American Dream:
Chapter One - Apostles of Modernity
Advertising agents began to gain respect as professionals. They viewed their task as integral to the economic prosperity of the country. The public was the unpredictable, “most disruptive element in the economic system” (2), so they sought to “induce consumers to answer their needs” by making them dependent on products “offered them impersonally through the marketplace” (2). The job of advertising agent was to “see satisfaction” to the consumer. The advertising trends in the 1920s reflected a “shift from the ‘factory viewpoint’ to concern with ‘the mental processes of the consumer,’ from ‘the objective to the subjective,’ from ‘descriptive product data’ to ‘talk in terms of ultimate buying motives’” (11-12). “The result of this trend toward emphasis on consumer satisfactions was called “dramatic realism” (24).
Chapter Two - Men of the People: The New Professionals
As creators of the advertisements that circulated in the 1920s and 1930s, Marchand explores the make-up of advertising agents: who they were and how they defined their relationship to their audience. Agents saw their industry “as a public service” (27). In an effort to boost public opinion of their trade by “acquiring a learned experience through advanced education” (26). Internal controversies within the industry about advertising being an art or public service absorbed into each other in the 1920s—into “one unifying conception with which both view points were compatible” (29) . . . . The burden of this unifying idea was that a new mode of social communication had now come to maturity, and that the creators of advertisements played a pivotal role in it. . . . Advertising had been chosen to preside over a communication process that was essential to national prosperity and business modernization and was also ripe with potential for social betterment” (29). However, Marchand reveals that advertising agents were not representative of the “public in any demographic sense” (33), they were overwhelmingly male, and (after 1920) mainly college educated (sometimes from Ivy League institutions).
Chapter Three - Keeping the Audience in Focus
Two problems fascinated the advertising elite “and intensified its problem of defining and identifying with the consumer audience: the tabloid paper and the confession magazine” (53). Advertising agents in their role of the “Apostles of Modernity” took time (and the needs of the Depression era) to adapt to the tabloid press’ rudimentary style of promoting only “pictures and a single headline to rivet attention” (60). The confessional magazine, similarly, aroused suspicion but helped advertisers recognize how important emotional appeals were in advertising. The True Story Magazine, under the guidance of Mary Macfadden, published letters from the public in 1919, after recognizing the commercial value of letters sent in response to her husband’s (Bernarr Macfadden) magazine Physical Culture. The enterprise was a great success and, while contributing to the advertising industry’s knowledge of the public’s mindset, also helped to inspire the idea that the advertising industry should provide guidance “to lift the cultural gap by using advertising to uplift the tastes of the masses” (71).
Chapter Four - Abandoning the Great Genteel Hope: From Sponsored Radio to the Funny Papers
The first radio broadcasts in the U.S. adopted a stance of “sponsorship only” (90) radio advertising. The radio offered a “special promise of intimacy” (91) and offered a very human appeal that print advertisements lacked. It also added a flare of sophistication that, Marchand implies, would have been lost with unsolicited advertisements. As the advertising market became saturated (94), advertisers experimented with different styles and themes to attract the public’s attention. This eventually led to a palatable (to the public) integration of radio and advertising, which weaved advertisements into broadcast programs without offending public tastes (106). Advertisers learned, from the success of radio, that the public liked to “eavesdrop” on dramatized conversations with radio hosts (106). This led to a dramatic shift in program content involving “comedy, light drama, and variety shows” (108). The public became enamored with certain hosts and the characters they portrayed. Some advertisers (to the chagrin of some of their peers) experimented with comic-strip print advertisements—with radio’s popularity, “the comic-strip technique provided an effective means for creating advertising ‘tie-ins’ among the media” (115).
Chapter Five - The Consumption Ethic: Strategies of Art and Style
During this period advertisers and manufacturers, in an attempt to stay marketable in an increasingly “saturated” advertising market, started to focus on images of “style and luxury” (120) “in favor of a new, more pleasure-minded consumption ethic” (119). Style and fashion, and their association with pleasure, led to ads that exploited vivid color schemes in conjunction with the modern influences of “cubism, futurism, vorticism, impressionism, Art Deco, and expressionism” (140) in an effort to attract consumers. These types of ads had “feeling tone” (123), which related to certain distinctions in class and taste that characterized the ensemble trend in advertising. The ensemble trend “drew its style image from association with its surroundings.” Towel manufacturers, for example, would use ensemble ads to sell matching product sets by ‘selling’ the consumer on the idea (or fantasy) of having a bathroom that might appear like a luxury bathroom of an upper class family. Photographic images also became popular in advertising because of their authenticity, and the photographer’s ability to “reveal people’s feelings and character” (149). “The photographic image itself became a ‘consumer product.’ Appeals to luxury and the massive amount of choices consumers had as a result of modernization led to “wastefulness, self-indulgence, and artificial obsolescence, which directly undermined the values of efficiency and the work on which the system [of mass production] was based” (158).
Chapter Six - Advertisements as Social Tableaux
Social tableaux are particular types of advertisements “in which persons are depicted in such a way as to suggest their relationships to each other or to a larger social structure” (165). Marchand adapts the phrase from a late nineteenth century entertainment type called “tableaux vivants” (“living pictures”), which involved a staged scene with motionless actors in natural positions who suddenly come to life and surprise the audience who thought they were static models. These scenes are like advertisements created in the 1920s and 1930s because while the images in ads were static, they were manipulated by copywriters and artists in such a way as to elicit a reaction in the public: emotional, moral, patriotic, motivational, guilty, etc (166). Social tableaux ads were “social fantasies” that were “perhaps more reflective of ‘the reality’ of the social aspirations of American consumers” (167). Women, who were responsible for “80 percent of all consumer purchases” (167), were the main subjects and target audience of social tableaux—although, even in high fashion tableaux, they were placed in roles that perpetuated stereotypes of women’s role in the home, with the added freedom to read, play with their children, visit friends, and become members of clubs that new consumer appliances allowed. The modern women in social tableaux was always on the go (184). Men were always in positions associated with the business world or in poses of removed contemplation. Obedient children were also depicted in these ads to complete the image of the family unit. Tableaux of family scenes always depicted affluent families to appeal to the public’s “social fantasies” (202).
Chapter Seven – The Great Parables
“[D]idactic advertising tableaux may be called ‘parables’ . . . because they attempt to draw practical moral lessons from the incidents of everyday life . . . . [L]ike the parables of Jesus, they sought to provoke an immediate decision for action” (206-207). Advertising parables used dramatic techniques to get their message across: “melodramatic parables” (207). The advertising parable “was ‘ordered in such a way as to get in gear with the hearer, engage him in the movement of the story, and release him at the end back into his own situation in such a way that the parable happens to the situation” (207). Marchand describes four advertising parables which aimed to tap into the new “`culture of personality` in the 1920s and 1930s, which emphasized the cultivation of one’s ability to please others” (209) in order to succeed in the objective, fast-paced world that the industrial and commercial environment created:
- The Parable of the First Impression
- Advertisements that were geared to indicate the importance of first impressions in the new industrialized era.
- Ads to cure bad breath (halitosis); family character as depicted by an immaculate, color-coordinated bathroom; external appearance as an “index to . . .true character” (214).
- The Parable of the Democracy of Goods
- ”By implicitly defining ‘democracy’ in terms of equal access to consumer products, and then by depicting the everyday functioning of that ‘democracy’ with regard to one product at a time, these tableaux offered Americans an inviting vision of their society as one of incontestable equality” (218).
- Democracy of Afflictions
- Negative counterpart of the parable of the Democracy of Goods.
- Reminded “careless or unsuspecting readers of the universality of the threat from which [products] offered protection or relief” (219). Example: Listerine’s halitosis ads.
- The Parable of Civilization Redeemed
- Sensationalized “believe-it-or-not” (223) advertising to promote the health effects of vitamin fortified foods.
- Way to “regain Nature’s intended gifts without sacrificing the fruits of progress” (223).
- The Parable of the Captivated Child
- This parable provided guidance to mothers on how “to mold their ‘little outlaws’ into happy, healthy youngsters without . . . harsh discipline” (229) and by instilling healthy eating habits.
Chapter Eight - Visual Clichés and Icons
The vast array of ads created during this period, and the patterns that copywriters and artists re-used in different ways across advertising tableaux, established a set of visual clichés that Marchand, quoting from psychologist Jerome Singer, suggests are “`integral to daydreaming and fantasizing`” (235). Repetitive visual patterns in advertising ”may induce individuals to recapitulate in their own fantasies some aspects of the shared daydreams of society” (235). [This is why Marchand’s book is so important in our project of creating a philosophical concept for how to build an apparatus to think in Electracy.] Marchand writes that repetitive patterns became part of the “nation’s visual vocabulary” (238). In chapter eight, he reviews the patterns of depictions characterizing “Mr. Consumer” (238), the typical man, in advertisements that display his public power or “fantasies of domain” (242) (large windows overlooking his factory from 1920-1925; futuristic cityscapes with skyscrapers in the 1930s); the soft focus of the family circle that imbued ads with nostalgia, harmony, and tenderness (248); the “Eternal Village” which suggested unreachable possibilities in futuristic cityscapes; and the nostalgic idea of small town villages offset to the side in ads bearing images of cityscapes to reassure the public that such natural, sentimental places still existed outside the effects of modernity. Additionally, iconic imagery of beams of light made their way into advertisements during this period. These advertisements neatly curtailed obvious religious associations by limiting the awkward use of text and focusing the product and its message in the less direct (and more open) nuances of the image alone.
Chapter Nine – Advertising in Overalls: Parables and Visual Clichés of the Depression
The effects of the Depression significantly changed the makeup of the advertising industry. Those advertisers that took the utmost pride in living up to a certain set of moral standards in their advertising profession were forced to change the focus and mediums of disseminating advertisements to reach and stimulate public spending. Some advertisers resorted to putting product costs on advertising, and others began the now common trend of “competitive copy” (304)--comparing products to other brands in order to produce sales. Also, new advertising parables, such as the parable of Unraised Hands and Skinny Kids instilled guilt in parents who did not feed their children (apparently) well enough. These advertisements drew attention to the future beyond the depression by focusing on the children who were that future. While some advertisers scrambled and went to any length to sell products in the tough consumer market (to the detriment of the industry), others “rolled up their sleeves” and created ads that depicted the need to be patriotic and get down to work in order to make it through the depression. During this period, the popularity of product icons in radio and advertising reached an all time high. Ballyhoo, a magazine that ridiculed the tactics of the advertising industry, was an overnight success. The FDA, under the Roosevelt administration, proposed to “regulate advertising as well as [product] labeling” (314). Threats such as these rallied up the industry and their beams of light became “economic sunbeams” to reassure and inspire the public. New visual clichés emerged, such as the image of the “clenched fist” (324) of determination.
Chapter Ten – The Therapeutics of Advertising
The therapeutic task of advertising “emerged as the cumulative by-product of individual merchandising strategies that proved successful in selling products. . . . [A]dvertising men had now become broader social therapists who offered, within advertising tableaux themselves, balms for the discontents of modernity” (360). Marchand asks, “Does this mean that advertising, as society’s ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall,’ provided benign, therapeutic deceptions rather than reflections on social reality. If we focus on the case of characters in the tableaux . . . [or the] “their specific prescriptions and advice” (360) the answer would be no. “But if we focus on the perceptions of social and cultural dilemmas revealed in the tableaux, we will discover accurate, expressive images of underlying ‘realities’ of American society in the 1920s and 1930s reflected in advertising’s elusive mirror” (360).
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