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Technology and Culture 44.2 (2003) 417-419



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Brought to You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream. By Lawrence R. Samuel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Pp. xxi+266. $50/$22.95.

As long as marketers have sought markets, they have subsidized state-of-the-art communication systems for building audiences and projecting their messages. Lawrence R. Samuel provides a lively history of the early decades of one media system, television, emphasizing the reciprocal development of advertising practices and television's capabilities between 1946 and 1964. Fortunately, Samuel assesses advertisements' effectiveness by contemporary data rather than his own intuition, and he spares readers excessive moral appraisals and the customary attempts at meaningful interpretations. Even so, his enthusiasm for commercial television's importance in framing and promoting the American Dream often carries his conclusions beyond his evidence.

Well before anyone knew quite how to use the new televising tool, enthusiasm abounded among both consumers and marketers. Advertising agencies held symposiums and built new departments to figure it out, urging their clients to take on its challenges—and costs. Consumers, for the most part, eagerly accepted their own costs for viewing, namely receivers and commercials. In 1946, fewer than one-sixth of Americans in the market [End Page 417] for a set had ever seen one in operation. Two decades later, owners of television sets would respond to breakdowns with a sense of urgency that demanded one-day repairs.

Samuel primarily examines how professional users of this new technology probed its possibilities. Uncertainties compelled pioneers to experiment widely, sometimes making costly mistakes. One executive exclaimed, "This thing is so big, we don't know what to do with it." Another effused, "No matter what you try, it's never been done before" (pp. 12, 18). Historians of technology will find Samuel's narration of these trials both interesting and useful. For example, advertisers and their producers tried to blend promotions seamlessly into live broadcasts, sometimes resulting in embarrassing glitches. Avoiding such mistakes added significantly to the many reasons for the shift to prefilmed spots. Other early technical problems included finding lighting methods that prevented glare, calculating optimal camera distances, and matching scripts to the small screen.

Samuel's abundant illustrations clarify some of the production adaptations made to early technical limitations, such as placing cameras and lights tight up against their subjects. A wonderful series of eight mid-1950s pictures shows how the J. Walter Thompson Company pitched its technical and artistic skills to clients, complete with serious male professionals appraising and manipulating "suitable" women, "unpredictable" children, and "priceless" packages (pp. 55-58).

As Samuel moves into the 1960s, both pictures and discussions of technical factors decline, except for a summary of color's new challenges and advertisers' eagerness to pay for its development. Within the maturing system, ratings and promotional strategies apparently replaced earlier technical concerns at the top of advertisers' worries. Accordingly, Samuel blends in television's responses to 1960s' racial issues while discussing advertisers' reactions to various external pressures.

Samuel has ably, although narrowly, researched his subject. His foreshortened vision exacerbates a propensity for applying unsupported and sometimes awkward superlatives: television as the "loudest voice of capitalism" and the "massest of mass media" (pp. 222, 224). He relies on only a few resources to describe American culture after 1945, asserting, against most evidence, that Americans needed television's encouragement to take up consumption after years of enforced thrift. No one questions that television's portrayals influenced postwar shaping of the American Dream. Why then insist that it did ideological battle alone and against great foes? More specific inaccuracies surface because of the short time frame, such as stating that advertising's tax deductions were initially a wartime policy.

All but one of the "firsts" that Samuel attributes to television advertising has a precursor. Nineteenth-century chromolithographed advertisements once flourished as both popular art and entertainment, like television, "promoting an ideology grounded in the values of consumption, materialism, [End Page 418] and upward mobility" (p. 221). Likewise, many other entertainment and/or advertising...

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