Making Advertising Material: Checking Departments, Systematic Reading, and Geographic Order in Nineteenth-Century Advertising

As advertising grew into a powerful economic and cultural institution in the late-nineteenth-century United States, it was built on a bedrock of quotidian work. While undoubtedly the product of long-unfolding processes ranging from industrialization to rationalization, the industry was also the product of daily labors performed by agency owners and their employees. This essay explores what was perhaps the most mundane part of advertising work—checking. Checking department employees spent their days sorting periodicals from around the country and then reading them to ensure that clients' ads ran when, where, and as they should. Once agencies confirmed that their clients' notices had indeed run as commissioned, they could file the paper away, close the job, and seek payment. To modern eyes, checking appears a behind-the-scenes logistic, rightly overshadowed by copywriting, account management, and other, more glamorous sides of the field. Early advertising agencies, however, made checking departments central to the public face they showed the wider business community, touting them as evidence of the trade's systematic rigor, authority, and all-seeing omniscience.

Drawing on materials produced by many of the earliest agencies—George P. Rowell & Company, N. W. Ayer & Son's, J. Walter Thompson Company, and others—along with contemporary reports from the popular press, trade news, and other sources,¹ this article explores the cultural meaning of advertising checking files in the second half of the nineteenth century. While a number of outstanding studies have traced the professional, institutional, and ideological roots of advertising,² little work has been done on the mundane practices necessary to circulate commercial messages around a sprawling nation. Exploring agency operations can tell us much about advertising's early development and how it fit into late-nineteenth-century American culture. In particular, checking files shed light on how everyday work routines, like systematic reading and the paperwork that went along with it, served a dual role as both a means to administer complex business processes and act as cultural performances that imbued the advertising trade with desirable traits.³

The essay also illuminates an early chapter in the development of media monitoring, a vital but almost unstudied dimension of print culture and media history. Careful surveillance, accumulation, and processing of print media have been central to the development of commercial media systems. These tasks have allowed advertisers to study publications as ad vehicles, publicists to track press coverage, and market researchers to mine valuable information.⁴ In this regard, media monitoring, which required workers to cursorily and continuously scan through high volumes of print media as a form of labor, represents one of the "specialized styles of literacy" that, as Thomas Augst has observed, helped to construct nineteenth-century market culture.⁵ By examining how early advertising agencies created monitoring systems to track their messages through time and space, we can better understand how American businessmen came to envision thousands of scattered villages, towns, and cities as a singular, national market of consumers.⁶ We can also see that the problem of an unwieldy media culture is an old one. Americans have grappled with it since the mid-nineteenth century, and for much of that time, people did the work now handled by microprocessors and algorithms.

The crux of my argument is that checking departments materialized the nation's chaotic and ephemeral print culture, bringing countless publications, produced over thousands of miles, into a central place where they could be seen, held, and inspected. These operations were carried out as a form of commercial surveillance and documentation for an emerging corporate, managerial class that was operating on an increasingly national scale and required confidence in print advertising as a marketing medium. The departments offered a compass and eyes in what Scott Sandage has called the mid-nineteenth century's "placeless realm of blind exchange."⁷ Their files closed a circuit by empirically showing that the messages discharged from a firm's offices did eventually appear before consumers in distant places. In doing so, checking departments helped rationalize advertising to businessmen put off by the trade's origins...