1914 - 1929 The Modernist World Jump to:
1914 - 1929 The Modernist World Jump to:
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4 The Advertisement Era
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The country they saw may at times have been almost blotted out by billboards and the air they breathed tainted by gasoline fumes. But the alternative in many cases would have been the movie, the dance-hall, or the beer-parlor. The steamboat and the railroad began a century ago to open up the world of travel and provide some means of holiday escape from one's immediate enviromnent, but until the coming of the automobile, recreation along these lines was a rare thing. The wealthy could make the fashionable tour in 1825, the well-to-do built up the summer resorts of the 1890's, but every Tom, Dick, and Harry toured the country in the 1930's -- thanks to the automobile.
Whatever else called itself "modernist" in the first quarter of the 20th century - painting, architecture, literature - the great popular apostle of modernism was advertising.
It spoke not to an elite of connoisseurs and literati, but to the new "mass man" (in reality, a woman). And it spoke not of adaptations of a literary or architectural style for the new age, but of the engine of that age, the new economy of consumption, pleasure and desire.
Advertising men proudly proclaimed themselves missionaries of modernity, champions of the consumerist esthetics of novelty and progress.
Advertising provided the images of aspiration, the vision of a better future. it identified the anxieties of metropolitan life as personal problems such as "halitosis" and "clogged pores", rather than any wider or deeper social malaise. At this, "the dawn of the distribution age", the art of the advertising agencies of New York's Madison Avenue was, in Michael Schudson's memorable phrase, Capitalist Realism.
In about 1914, advertisements began to emphasize the benefits that products brought the consumer, rather than just showing the product itself. In stressing the pleasures and benefits of consumption, advertising started to sell not simply goods, but a whole set of beliefs concerning the good life, and a collection of assumptions abaut what constituted proper satisfaetions and rewards for industriousness. Wholeheartedly embracing their own ideology, advertising men saw themselves engaged in a form of public service, educating their readers in the new way of life.
Manufacturers, they argued, merely made products. Advertising manufactured customers, by stimulating desire not just for this thing or that, but for a higher standard of living generally. Properly used, advertising could regulate demand and thus keep the balance between production and consumption. Moreover, advertisers were ambassadors for the consumer to the producer; like the press barons, they saw themselves as representatives of public opinion, and missed the ironies implicit in their claims.
The delights of a week-end or Sunday motor excursion into the country were spread glowingly over the pages of popular magazines in the advertisements published by manufacturers of popular models. The automobile was "the enricher of life." A midwestern bank president was quoted in one two-page spread in the Saturday Evening Post as declaring that "a man who works six days a week and spends the seventh on his own doorstep certainly will not pick up the extra dimes in the great thoroughfare of life." Another advertisement invited the car-owner to make the most of the next sunny Sunday -- "tell the family to hurry the packing and get aboard -- and be off with smiles down the nearest road -- free, loose, and happy -- bound for green wonderlands." The suggestion -- which innumerable families took -aroused the resentment of those religious elements in the population which believed church-going rather than motoring the way to spend the day, but the automobile finally completed the gradtions, lunch-rooms, curio stores, antique shops, hot-dog stands, tourist camps, and signboards. It was the age of the automobile.
Public opinion, however, was regarded as fickle, flighty, and feminine. Recognizing that women were responsible for 85 percent of consumer spending, advertisers defined their mass market as having feminine characteristics. Persistently complaining that it was not possible to sell things rationally to irrational creatures, they acknowledged the "need" to manipulate consumers for their own good through appeals to their emotions. As one argued, "If exaggeration will induce a million people to brush their teeth every morning, who would otherwise neglect that office, then the end justifies the means."
Unlike the movie mogul, advertising men tended to come from the cultural elite. From the middle-class reformers of the previous decades they adopted the idea that they should raise the masses out of their present condition, and they combined this idea with the 1920s image of business as benign and paternal. They identified their tunetion as raising the intellectual and cultural standards of the mass audience, as well as improving its economic well-being.
John Benson, President of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, argued in 1927, "lt may be necessary to fool people for their own good. Doctors and even preachers know that and practice it. Average intelligence is surprisingly low. lt is so much more effectively guided by its subconscious impulses and instincts than by its reason."
Increasingly, advertising addressed its readers as a friend, advisor or coach, more experienced in the ways of the new world. Companies invented fictitious characters, such as General Mills' Betty Crocker, to persanalize their products and advise their use. They adopted a style of presentation that has been compared with radio "crooning", an intimate, conversational tone of voice that belied the nature of mass communications by implying an individual relationship between speaker and listener, advisor and consumer.
Advertisements reassured readers that the complexities and fragmentations of modem life could be enjoyed, and that experts in "public service" would provide them with as much advice as they needed in the new techniques and arts of personal presentation, appearance, manipulation and seduction.
4 Next Page: Radio, television and media
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