Advertising Progress

by Laird, Pamela Walker

• ISBN13: 9780801858413
• ISBN10: 0801858410
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-09-01
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

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 why -- in the intense competitions for both markets and cultural authority -- the creators of advertisements laid claim to "progress" and used it to legitimate their places in American business and culture.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Preface and Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(12)
Part One Production as Progress
Marketing Problems and Advertising Methods as America Industrialized	13	(25)
Owner-Manager Control of Advertising	38	(19)
Printers, Advertisers, and Their Products	57	(44)
Advertising Progress as a Measure of Worth	101	(54)
Part Two Specialization as Progress
Early Advertising Specialists	155	(28)
Competition and Control: Business Conditions and Marketing Practices	183	(27)
The Competition to Modernize Advertising Services	210	(39)
Part Three Consumption as Progress
Taking Advertisements toward Modernity	249	(55)
Modernity and Success: Legitimating the Advertising Profession-I	304	(25)
The Appropriation of Progress: Legitimating the Advertising Profession-II	329	(34)
Conclusion: Patrons, Agents, and the New Business of Progress	363	(18)
Appendix: Distribution of Advertising Revenue, 1870-1890	381	(4)
Abbreviations for Archival Sources	385	(2)
Notes	387	(66)
Essay on Sources	453	(14)
Index	467