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5 casting lures Tourism Advertising and the Experiential Ethos P oking fun at the barrage of ads pitching cities, states, and nations in postwar magazines, Advertising Age featured a cartoon in 1947 showing an agitated railway stationmaster snapping at a customer. “Look, mister, it may be advertised as America’s ideal vacation spot in all the magazines,” he barked, “but you’ve got to remember the name of the place before I can sell you a ticket.”1 The cartoon alluded to a nation on the go, packed with novice tourists learning the ins and outs of vacation travel. But at the same time, it lampooned the incredible uniformity exhibited across tourism advertising as a genre. The cartoon playfully pointed out that everywhere claimed to be “America’s ideal vacation spot.” Glancing at the cartoon, admen in the know could chuckle at the genre’s anachronistic aesthetic. Owing as much to nineteenth-century boosterism as modern advertising, community advertising, or the notices placed by tourist boards and semiofficial booster groups, usually presented readers with a hodgepodge of generic lures that could just as easily be claimed by countless other places. “Smiling fisherman with gigantic catches, scenic panoramas, gay crowds, lovely beaches, lofty peaks, historical places” along with “luscious gals in swim suits” constituted the genre’s typical mise-en-scène, observed a pair of marketing professors in 1938. But industry insiders could also appreciate the unique problems that selling travel posed to advertisers. Nearly every region had awoken to the economic powers of tourism by the late 1930s, and most offered some variation of the same basic set of attractions. As one 1939 Printers’ Ink article summed up this quandary: “What can a community say? Aren’t all travel copy angles more or less alike? Where is the chance for variety? . . . How can we give our community an individuality that will make tourists prefers us to other communities?”2 The stationmaster cartoon exaggerated the extent to which all community ads offered a chorus of identical calls. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, 104 the holiday makers a number of aggressive boosters and tourist boards had embraced systematic advertising methods. As seen earlier, ads crafted for California and other spots went well beyond pitching the sandiest beaches, instead tapping into Depression anxieties and wartime hopes. And while the authors of the 1939 report in Printers’ Ink acknowledged that originality posed a real problem, they identified a range of novel angles that savvy advertisers had used to their advantage. In the early 1930s, Bermuda targeted allergy sufferers, boasting “no hay fever in this glorious blue golden island.” At other times, advertising explicitly cast the island as a step outside machine-age clamor and into a peaceful, bygone past. “Yes, we have no factories, street cars, motorcycles, or automobiling,” the tourist board trumpeted. The All-Year Club targeted the same frazzled crowd, imploring “men worried about breakdowns” to “Bake Out Your Troubles in S.C.”3 But even with these notable exceptions, much tourism advertising looked atavistic and unsophisticated in the mid-1940s. For every group like the All-Year Club that embraced the scientific ethos of modern advertising, there were many others for which it was completely foreign. And the latter overshadowed the former enough to where Advertising Age could make the genre’s self-defeating uniformity a laughing matter. Yet tourism advertising would look very different a decade later. This chapter tracks its transformation, examining how midcentury advertisers forged new ways of casting areas as vacationlands through narrative and imagery. No less than editorial profiles, tourism ads were produced as a form of geographic pedagogy, created to persuade readers to think about faraway landscapes in highly particular ways. As travel boomed, public and private boosters aggressively marketed their regions in the hope of establishing themselves as preeminent vacationlands. Many turned to Madison Avenue, where leading agencies systematically approached the problem of luring would-be tourists to an area. Early efforts ranged from boosting off-season traffic to vetting out and refuting the negative stereotypes that kept tourists away. Influenced by new strands of social thought and consumer psychology, the most sophisticated ad agencies of the era recognized that the desires animating leisure travel were highly experiential in nature. Pitching areas as sites of personal transformation and transcendence, these marketers combined enduring narratives of place with patently therapeutic conceptions of consumer fantasy. In doing so, they recognized that it was much more persuasive to sell...

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