Description
Book SynopsisSelected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleOriginally published in 1998. Drawing on both documentary and pictorial evidence, Pamela Walker Laird explores the modernization of American advertising to 1920. She links its rise and transformation to changes that affected American society and business alike, including the rise of professional specialization and the communications revolution that new technologies made possible. Laird finds a fundamental shift in the kinds of people who created advertisements and their relationships to the firms that advertised. Advertising evolved from the work of informing customers (telling people what manufacturers had to sell) to creating consumers (persuading people that they needed to buy). Through this story, Laird shows how and whyin the intense competitions for both markets and cultural authoritythe creators of advertisements laid claim to progress and used it to legitimate their places in American business and culture.
Trade ReviewThe strength of this book lies in the depth of evidence Laird offers . . . [Advertising agents,] Laird argues, deliberately set out to 'create consumers' rather than 'inform customers.'.
—Matthew Hilton,
Business HistoryWell-researched, tightly argued, and lavishly illustrated . . . Laird's treatment is destined to become the standard one on the history of advertising between the Civil War and the beginning of the 'New Era.'.
—Ferdinando Fasce,
Reviews in American HistoryWhat gives the book its considerable depth and explanatory power is the nuanced and comprehensive way in which Laird discusses the shifting contexts of American advertising . . . A complex, sophisticated analysis of how entrepreneurs and professionals create messages designed to sell goods.
—Daniel Horowitz,
Journal of American HistoryTable of ContentsPart I. Production as Progress
Chapter 1. Marketing Problems and Advertising Methods as America Industrialized
Chapter 2. Owner-Manager Control of Advertising
Chapter 3. Printers, Advertisers, and Their Products
Chapter 4. Advertising Progress as a Measure of Worth
Part II. Specialization as Progress
Chapter 5. Early Advertising Specialists
Chapter 6. Competition and Control: Business Conditions and Marketing Practices
Chapter 7. The Competition to Modernize Advertising Services
Part III. Consumption as Progress
Chapter 8. Taking Advertisements Toward Modernity
Chapter 9. Modernity and Success: Legitimatizing the Advertising Profession - I
Chapter 10. The Appropriation of Progress: Legitimatizing the Advertising Profession - II
Conclusion. Patrons, Agents, and the New Business of Progress
