Marketing Modernity: The J. Walter Thompson Company and North American Advertising in Brazil, 1929-1939

In 1929 the J. Walter Thompson Company (JWT), a leading North American advertising agency, opened an office in São Paulo. JWT's founding of a Brazilian subsidiary emerged from a decade's worth of discussion of how to increase North American exports and of what role advertising would play in this expansion. Manufacturers, advertising executives, and representatives of key sectors of the U.S. government took part in these discussions through articles in the nation's leading trade publications and participation in conferences on the subject. These businessmen and bureaucrats envisioned exports and overseas advertising as a way to guarantee the nation's future prosperity, protect and extend North American economic power, and raise backward regions to the economic and cultural level of the United States, then immersed in the triumphalist consumerism of its Second Industrial Revolution.

The General Motors Corporation (GM) was an early adherent to the expansionist creed, establishing assembly operations in São Paulo in 1925 and a Brazilian advertising department the following year. In 1927 GM and Thompson signed an agreement that would make JWT the first major U.S. advertising agency to open offices in Brazil. The modern advertising agency, having served the U.S. corporate economy at home since its inception, would now serve the emerging multinational arm of this economy abroad. ¹

With the opening of the São Paulo office in 1929, Thompson executives hired former employees of the General Motors advertising department, professionals already attuned to North American methods and modalities. The advertising men also began to cultivate new clients and initiated the first surveys of the Brazilian market, research that not only afforded them greater insight into local business and the lives of Brazilian consumers but that also provides historians with the opportunity to examine North American attitudes toward Brazil during this period. Finally, the new office conducted the work for which it was founded: the creation and dissemination of advertising for an array of complementary products, thus promoting a certain vision of modernity that was to be assembled in Brazil.

The JWT experience had, in turn, far-reaching effects on Brazilian society. With Thompson's entry into the Brazilian market, other North American agencies were forced to follow. These agencies, along with JWT, provided the training that created a new group in Brazilian society, a group of Brazilian advertising men who formed part of a larger professional-managerial elite that looked increasingly to the United States as a model for their own country. The expansion of JWT and its subsequent competitors also led to an increase in advertising; this increase stimulated the expansion and professionalization of Brazilian media, with a consequent growth of dependence on advertising revenue on the part of media outlets. Finally, advertising's appeals reached the men and women of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, who received and interpreted these appeals in different ways.

Envisioning Overseas Advertising

By the 1920s, U.S. industry had reached unprecedented levels of production. Increasingly, exporting and advertising were looked upon as the means to ensure future prosperity, contain European competition, and carry out the Americanization and modernization of host countries. At a 1925 convention, no less an authority than James A. Farrell, president of U.S. Steel, urged his colleagues to increase their exports, "an increasing element in the prosperity of our country," in order to keep up with the production capacity of U.S. industry. ² The previous year, a contributor to Printer's Ink, the leading advertising trade publication, called for greater overseas sales, writing that exporting "is and has been a policy of economic necessity, an answer to the urgent demand for markets which will absorb production and keep factories humming." ³ Government officials agreed, including Henry H. Morse, chief of the Specialties Division of the Department of Commerce, who saw exporting as...