Mass Advertising’s Appeals: Market Enchantments

Cultural History, 2023

This article examines the first emergence of theories of advertising in the psychological language of the nonrational mind in Britain. The theories appeared from the close of the nineteenth century in a new genre of advertising literature: books, essays, pamphlets, course offerings, and periodical publications dedicated to advertising. In dialogue with a forgotten 1911 novel by Oliver Onions, Good Boy Seldom: A Romance of Advertisement, the analysis considers the anxieties that attended the new theories, which attributed unusual power to advertising and therefore challenged perceptions of the capitalist economy as disenchanted and disenchanting. It also shows the efforts that professional advertisers made to reconcile their theories with views of consumers as rational, and of the advertising industry itself as a rationalizing force. Their efforts suggest a misinterpretation by Onions and critics of advertising that he foreshadowed, who portrayed advertising professionals as bold canvassers of the public psyche. In fact, they were insecure and uncomfortable with their terms of expertise, and developed them because mounting criticisms leveled at advertising left them little choice. Nonetheless, Onions captured the lasting power of this transformation. Despite their insecurity, early professionals created a myth still harbored today, that advertisers are masters of subliminal control in capitalism.

Chapter 7 of The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment, and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022, open access 2023)

By the close of the nineteenth century, advertising professionals faced a challenge of self-definition. They wanted to extend their services in the growing market for advertising, but confronted the weight of criticisms that were attaining legalized forms. Criticisms denied professionals the comfort of integrating advertising with fields of knowledge, information, aesthetics, or common morality, and left its meaning in a conceptual vacuum. They were looking for a different ground for cultural authority, found in the concept of expertise in the human mind. Professionals relied on advertising literature—a peculiar genre that expanded from the mid-1880s—to self-brand as experts who worked magic across the distance between producers and consumers, capturing consumers’ attention and altering their desires. They thus claimed mastery over the scene of enchantment left unaddressed by law, in psychological terms. The psychological version took hold not simply because it suited advertisers’ proclivities, or because competitive market conditions mandated psychological control, but as an effect of the longer-term history examined in this book, which sent advertisers searching for a role that would not end in a backlash. The turn to psychology was controversial because it cast doubt on concepts of volition; therefore, professionals worked hard to reconcile the image of the market enchanters with the rationality of consumers as well as advertisers. Ultimately, professionals assumed the mythical role of the creators of enchantment, and presumed to be its rational tamers. There was paradox in the very definition of this goal, which remains elusive. Nonetheless, the myth of advertisers as the sorcerers of capitalism succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

We have already shown how consumerism has established itself as a set of modern rituals (Vincenzo, 2014). With the beginning of the twentieth century, the consumer goods were at the center of the symbolic representations that have filled the anomic void of society, the emptiness of symbols and rituals. As time passed, however, advertising has saturated modern imagination. The resulting consumer’s alienation has led to a shift from the consumption of material goods to the entertainment industry, to the “free time” consumption. We want to show how the anomie-saturation-alienation cycle is one of the fundamental characteristics of the order of a ritual society. In a society like ours, based on consumerism, the cycle concerned the advertising communication in particular. This was reiterated in the digital world, with commercial use of big data coming from the web. Relations between rituals, theater and entertainment world receive special attention. This text is a concise presentation of a broader research project on the social rituals and the social history of advertising, realized in partnership with Fausto Lupetti.

Historians constantly struggle with the difficulties of decoding the signs of the times according to which certain segments of history are recognised, become specific and distinct from others. Driven by the desire to quench their intellectual curiosity and the need to find out the truth, they are forced to add, select, group, reject and doubt documents and facts, searching for fragments from which they will attempt to piece together the picture of a past time. This picture is always a more or less pale copy of the "original"-of a past reality, once consisting of an uncountable multitude of threads which linked the moments of each individual life, of a network which it is impossible to connect again in the same shape due to its unique complexity. The obsessive devotion to studying political, military or diplomatic history and the pyrotechnic effects which have always accompanied wrangles over land, power and riches still cause a sort of "night blindness" in members of the sect of worshippers of the muse Clio, preventing them from seeing all those "ordinary", transient phenomena which much less noticeably, but still persistently and strongly influence the forming of everyday human existence. The despised (past) "quotidian life" is much harder for the historian to get to, also because it appears in countless hard-to-grasp forms; to study it, a new heuristics, a new methodology and different thinking about the past are needed in order to "resuscitate" some slice of the erased quotidian life. Sources for this reconstruction and analysis cannot always be subjected to criticism in the way that the strict old rules made for reading and understanding classical sources demand. They are also more numerous and varied, they require adaptability in the researcher and count on the awakening of his inventiveness and imagination. Also, most "testimony" about past quotidian life is very flimsy: the nature of their function was not to last long and testify. Their short-lived utility, like some self-destructing "genetic code", determined in advance the fate of these sources chosen at the historian's will. All this certainly applies to advertising (of goods and services), too, as it can be seen as an interesting additional historical source for studying economic and social history. What made this "Champollionic" problem into the nightmare of researchers of the modern era is the selection and reading of these "codes" from the enormous quantity of new textual and visual material which multiplied daily at increasing speed. The explosion of media in this short century (whose fuse was carelessly lit by Guttenberg) brought down the dams which had held the flow of information at a perceptually more bearable level. Conversion of most of the world into consumers of goods and information was supported in an organised fashion since the beginning of the 19th century by the introduction of a discipline which would with its special language, iconography and rules of application influence the creation of a "sign system" according to which periods would be recognised. Advertising and advertisements would become a special kind of communication typical to modern societies. This universality and readability-put in the service of selling goods and ideas-influenced the shaping of quotidian life, but also the creation of a Utopian image, in our country, too, of the "wide world" from which all wonders come. Here, too, the establishing of advertising was connected to the creation of the modern bourgeoise as a sepsocial stratum capable of accepting (wether selectively or unselectively ia

Explorations in Media Ecology, 2023

This paper identifies a variety of magical motifs that appear in ads and that consequently shape the popular practices of consumerism. In this context, magic refers to visual and textual content that suggest the world is suffused with supernatural forces and agencies. The author briefly discusses some basic approaches to the study of magic in advertising, proceeds to identify the range on magical themes that reliably appear in ads, and discusses an assignment that can be used to guide students toward a deeper understanding of this key aspect of consumerism.

Theory and Society, 2017

This article examines the way advertising was rationalized in the early twentieth-century United States. Drawing on a targeted archival comparison with the United Kingdom, I show how the extensive mobilization undertaken to legitimate and rationalize advertising, rather than changes in the techniques employed in the content of ads themselves, were seen by actors in the mid-1920s to explain most of the extraordinary advances made by American advertising. Building on that comparison, I show how American advertising was transformed, particularly around World War I, into a legitimate profession situated at the center of a network of expertise about consumers and their media. Under the banner of Btruth in advertising^ads came to be regarded as a legitimate, rational, and sustained business investment, leading to an enormous increase in aggregate expenditures. I argue that future research should examine how this process fuelled mass media and contributed to the conditions for modern consumerism.

Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Cultures, 2021

The chapter takes advertising as an umbrella term for persuasive communication. Looking at screen advertising as a specific type of communication -one that is made to persuade -the documentary, educational films, and avant-garde works of the 1930s and early 1940s come into view together under the label of advertising. Focussing on the work of John Grierson, Paul Rotha, and Hans Richter, the chapter shows how debates among intellectuals, pedagogues, and artists on both sides of the Atlantic revolved around concepts of propaganda and education to promote democracy. The chapter contributes to the field of useful cinema studies by mapping the transnational network of people, ideas, and materials involved in using moving images as tools for shaping the human mind.

Psychological Studies

Advertisements (n = 400) published in Bengali periodicals in four different time periods, 1947–48, 1971–72, 1991–92 & 2008–09 drawn following a multistage sampling were analyzed to see the pattern of change in concepts associated with products. They included four categories of products/ services : Jewellery, cosmetics, garments and banking. The analysis of advertisements indicated that diverse values are associated with products that have social and cultural connotations. Through such value addition, as if consumption of these commodities provides the consumer with an opportunity to construct, maintain and communicate identity and social meanings. However, the consumer emerged not as a passive victim, but an active agent in the construction of meaning.

2021

This chapter aims to deconstruct the category of modernity by confronting a prevailing abstracted view on screen advertising with the contingencies of its archival history. Taking as a case study the 1960s 'cola wars' and the marketing of cola soft drinks, the chapter shows how this competition between Pepsi and Coke related to stylistic innovations such as montage sequences, and what relevant mid-level finds can be made regarding one specific Pepsi campaign of that era without indulging in overly general arguments about modernism or modernity.

Business and Economic History Online, 2009