Advertising and the First World War

Poster advertising was much more common in Europe than the US before 1914. From the 1870s on, French roadsides were adorned with cheaply printed Art Nouveau lithographs, advertising, among other things, the Folies-Bergère Cabaret, and Lefèvre Utile biscuits. The suffragettes in Britain used a series of art posters to publicize their cause. When war broke out, all the various governments involved turned to posters as propaganda. The main requirement of fighting in World War I was young men to use as cannon fodder. The 'ENLIST!' posters dreamed up by advertising agencies on both sides of the Atlantic ensured a plentiful supply of recruits.

No less a political commentator than Hitler concluded (in Mein Kampf) that Germany lost the war because it lost the propaganda battle: he did not make the same mistake when it was his turn. One of the other consequences of World War I was the increased mechanization of industry – and increased costs which had to be paid for somehow: hence the desire to create need in the consumer which begins to dominate advertising from the 1920s onward.

Advertising Through The Great Depression

Post war affluence and optimism was short and sweet. Spurred by the introduction of "hire purchase" agreements, consumers treated themselves to costly new goods such as cars, washing machines, and radiograms, which all needed ads. Advertising quickly took advantage of the new mass media, using cinema, and to a much greater extent, radio, to transmit commercial messages to a widespread audience. The first radio ad appeared in 1922, and, because direct selling was not permitted, broadcast a 'direct indirect' message about the benefits of living in a particular development in Jackson Heights, New York.

· Radio Commercials from 1920s-40s —Old Time Radio

The public had an appetite for radio, but there was no real way to get them to pay directly for the costly broadcasts. Advertising stepped in as the middle component, paying the broadcasters for their listeners' time. This arrangement led to the direct funding of radio dramas by, for instance, Proctor & Gamble, hence the term 'soap opera'. However, when the Wall St. stock market crashed in 1929, the media landscape changed forever.

Hard-hit consumers cut back on newspapers and listened to the radio in even greater numbers. Cash-strapped newspapers and magazine owners put their publications up for sale, only to see them absorbed into the developing news conglomerates. Cinema attendance remained buoyant - picture palaces offered the only avenue of escapism in the economic gloom. The tide of advertising dollars that had flowed into print publications stemmed considerably, and then started to turn in other directions.

Advertising spending plummeted by around 60% after the Crash, and didn't return to 1920s levels until the early 1950s - although radio advertising spend did increase significantly in this period. Ad agencies were hard hit, often having to downsize considerably as the clients dried up. Perhaps as a result of this, advertising got tougher. By the mid-1930s, the 'hard sell' had become commonplace, with sex, violence and threats creeping into ads. Items were marketed as necessities, rather than luxuries, with items like hats or mouthwash positioned as vital tools in the battle to get, and stay, ahead. Rather than reassuring consumers, ads bullied and hustled, playing on fears in order to attach their target audience's sparse disposable income to their brand.

One agency that thrived during the Depression was Young & Rubicam. They focused on research and facts, investigating the impact of successful and failed campaigns. In 1932, agency head Raymond Rubicam hired an academic named George Gallup as the first ever market research director in adland. Gallup developed a lot of the techniques still used today to find out which ads work and why - questionnaires, focus groups, listeners' panels - as well as devising audience measurement techniques (the coincidental method for radio, and the impact method for print and TV).

Advertising & TV

The 1950s not only brought postwar affluence to the average citizen but whole new glut of material goods for which need had to be created. Not least of these was the television set. In America it quickly became the hottest consumer property - no home could be without one. And where the sets went, the advertisers followed, spilling fantasies about better living through buying across the hearthrug in millions of American homes. The UK and Europe, with government controlled broadcasting, were a decade or so behind America in allowing commercial TV stations to take to the air, and still have tighter controls on sponsorship and the amount of editorial control advertisers can have in a programme. This is the result of some notable scandals in the US, where sponsors interfered in the content and outcome of quiz shows in order to make their product seem, by association, more sexy. See the excellent Quiz Show (1994), directed by Robert Redford which deals with the disillusionment of the American people.

Unhappy with the ethical compromise of the single-sponsor show, NBC executive Sylvester Weaver came up with the idea of selling not whole shows to advertisers, but separate, small blocks of broadcast time. Several different advertisers could buy time within one show, and therefore the content of the show would move out of the control of a single advertiser - rather like a print magazine. This became known as the magazine concept, or participation advertising, as it allowed a whole variety of advertisers to access the audience of a single TV show. Thus the 'commercial break' as we know it was born. However, it was still a common practice to have single sponsor shows, such as The United States Steel Hour. In some instances the sponsors exercised great control over the content of the show—up to and including having one's advertising agency actually writing the show. The single sponsor model is much less prevalent now, a notable exception being the Hallmark Hall of Fame.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 897