Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (review)

Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. By Pamela Walker Laird. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv+479. $35.95.

Pamela Walker Laird's book is about advertising progress in both senses of the phrase, and it interrogates both the nature of advertising and the concept of progress. Advertising Progress ties the history of advertising to the broader histories of American business and technology, emphasizing the advertising of progress itself and analyzing three major ways that advertisers and their agents conceptualized progress: as production, as specialization, and as consumption.

As Laird acknowledges, her arguments revolve around a "well-documented change" at the turn of the century, as advertisers turned from writing their own ads to employing advertising specialists, and as advertising moved from a producer orientation to an emphasis on consumers. These changes, and the fundamental transitions involved in the creation of national markets and the shift from production-driven marketing to marketing-driven production, are familiar to students of advertising and marketing history. Laird's useful essay on sources points those who are not yet conversant with the literature to the work of Daniel Pope and Roland Marchand on advertising; Richard Tedlow, Regina Blaszczyk, and myself on marketing; Alfred Chandler and Philip Scranton on the business context; and David Nye, JoAnne Yates, and Olivier Zunz on business culture, among hundreds of other authors and many more topics.

Laird builds on this historiography, synthesizing it and asking the kinds of questions that can only be posed once a substantial amount of historical work has been made available to scholars. She has returned to some of the primary sources that other historians investigated, she has unearthed material from such serviceable older works as Ralph Hower's 1939 study of the N. W. Ayer advertising agency, and she has examined new sources, especially advertisements themselves, in a range of media. Beginning her narrative before the Civil War, she retells and resituates that well-documented transition by placing it in a longer historical context. She fleshes out pieces of the story that the recent literature has characterized in broad terms but not described in detail. And she puts pieces together that have not before been juxtaposed in a single book.

Laird's strength as a synthesizer is that she is tuned into the complex nature of historical change. She shows, for example, that it is not enough simply to describe advertising agents taking over functions formerly performed by the clients; they had competition for the manufacturing advertisers' favor in job printers and periodical publishers, trade journal publishers, and others. She is especially sensitive to uneven development and complicated periodization. "Earlier practices and beliefs never disappeared," she writes, for example, about owner-manager control over advertising. "What was rare in the nineteenth century is now common, but not universal; what was common in the nineteenth century still occurs in the late twentieth, especially when owners operate their own firms" (p. 7). Indeed, Laird mentions Steve Jobs at several points in order to argue that even at the end of the twentieth century, owner-managers could and did make different kinds of decisions than hired guns.

Parts of Advertising Progress do for the Gilded Age and the early twentieth century what Marchand did for the 1920s and 1930s in Advertising the American Dream (1985). Laird's new readings of images of factories, smoke, electricity, and goddesses of abundance indicate that she regards his work in that book as a model for analyzing advertising images and copy in the context of institutional and technological change. Like Marchand, she emphasizes that advertising may better be understood as the product of those changes and of the advertisers and agents who participated in them than as a mirror of the culture. But she argues that the involvement of owner-managers who did not attempt to play to the audience's needs or interests makes advertising from the early part...