Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s

Preface

Preface From its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, national advertising has evolved into a massive enterprise. In 2003, U.S. advertisers spent an estimated $236 billion, and today some scholars conclude that each day the average American is exposed to several thousand advertisements. By all accounts,advertising has saturated every nook and cranny of our lived experiences , bringing enormous social, cultural, and economic implications for this republic. Our media system is drenched in advertising and commercialism , yet these profit-driven enterprises are problematic for the democratic functioning of society and, some argue, for human happiness.1 And some Americans are unhappy. A 2004 study commissioned by the American Association of Advertising Agencies revealed a significant level of public dissatisfaction with advertising. Sixty-five percent of the respondents thought they were “constantly bombarded with too much advertising,” 61 percent believed that advertising and marketing levels were “out of control,” and 60 percent of those interviewed said they currently held a more negative opinion of advertising than they had a few years ago. Nearly half the respondents reported that the excess advertising and marketing detracted from “the experience of everyday life,” and 33 percent would be willing to settle for a slightly lower standard of living if this meant having a society devoid of marketing and advertising.2 In view of this apparent public antipathy, one might expect advertising to be scrutinized and debated just like our other major institutions are examined. This is rarely the case, however. To the extent that advertising is analyzed, discussions tend to focus on its excesses (its ability to project a certain set of viii . preface images and values) and not on its shortcomings (its inability, for example, to provide consumers with facts and information or, despite all its flag-waving patriotism, to serve as a truly democratizing force).Although advertisers countenance certain forms of symbolic criticism of their methods,such as the “inappropriateness” or anticipated ill effects of a particular ad or campaign, they will rarely, if ever, encourage a dialogue about advertising’s role in the economy or its power to influence cultural and social institutions. Interestingly enough, at the same time that advertising has increased its social and cultural impact,legitimate discussions regarding its exact function and overall merit have dwindled to the point to which they are virtually nonexistent. In this environment most Americans logically assume that advertising is a given, that it is a natural institution built into the American experience, much like free enterprise and its governing institutions. Nothing of the sort is true.Modern advertising is a relatively recent phenomenon resulting from dramatic changes in capitalism that crystallized approximately one century ago,and extensive government policies were initiated to protect and promote it.When it matured in the early twentieth century, advertising was met with ferocious political opposition, mostly in the form of a militant consumer movement arguing that advertising was business propaganda that undermined consumers’ ability to make wise choices in the market and citizens’ ability to live in a healthy industrial and civic environment.In the 1930s these consumer activists organized popular support for their campaign to significantly regulate and radically transform advertising into a medium that provided legitimate product information. The advertising industry responded as if its survival was in jeopardy and deployed a wide range of strategies aimed at removing criticism from the public agenda. Indeed, the advertising industry helped establish many techniques that would become staples of public relations. In this book I chronicle the struggle between consumer activists and the advertising industry over the role advertising would play in our economy and culture. This is a book, then, not really about advertising as a cultural phenomenon so much as it is about the political debate surrounding advertising as an institution in U.S. society. In the 1930s, for the only time in U.S. history, a public debate erupted and persisted over how best to craft federal regulation to control advertising.At this moment activists had a real chance to reroute advertising and commercialism from their well-established course, a course that has led at least one observer to characterize twentieth-century U.S. life as “the age of advertising.”3 When consumers lost that legislative battle with the passage of the Wheeler-Lea Amendment in 1938, advertising preface · ix never again faced a direct challenge to its legitimacy. Soon thereafter, with tremendous encouragement by the advertising industry’s public...