Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing

by Pamela Walker Laird

Overview

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

Originally published in 1998. Drawing on both documentary and pictorial evidence, Pamela Walker Laird explores the modernization of American advertising to 1920. She links its rise and transformation to changes that affected American society and business alike, including the rise of professional specialization and the communications revolution that new technologies made possible. Laird finds a fundamental shift in the kinds of people who created advertisements and their relationships to the firms that advertised. Advertising evolved from the work of informing customers (telling people what manufacturers had to sell) to creating consumers (persuading people that they needed to buy). Through this story, Laird shows how and why—in the intense competitions for both markets and cultural authority—the creators of advertisements laid claim to "progress" and used it to legitimate their places in American business and culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421434179
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2020
Series:	Studies in Industry and Society , #14
Pages:	506
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Pamela Walker Laird teaches history at the University of Colorado at Denver.

Table of Contents

Part I. Production as Progress
Chapter 1. Marketing Problems and Advertising Methods as America Industrialized
Chapter 2. Owner-Manager Control of Advertising
Chapter 3. Printers, Advertisers, and Their Products
Chapter 4. Advertising Progress as a Measure of Worth
Part II. Specialization as Progress
Chapter 5. Early Advertising Specialists
Chapter 6. Competition and Control: Business Conditions and Marketing Practices
Chapter 7. The Competition to Modernize Advertising Services
Part III. Consumption as Progress
Chapter 8. Taking Advertisements Toward Modernity
Chapter 9. Modernity and Success: Legitimatizing the Advertising Profession - I
Chapter 10. The Appropriation of Progress: Legitimatizing the Advertising Profession - II
Conclusion. Patrons, Agents, and the New Business of Progress

What People are Saying About This

Richard W. Pollay

This is the story of the formative years of America's most formative institution -- advertising. Drawing upon a wealth of archival and trade sources, Laird explores the way in which advertising came to be a propaganda for modernity and progress, with its practioners seeing themselves as 'apostles of civilization.' -- The University of British Columbia

Daniel Pope

This book will become the standard book to read on advertising in the late nineteenth and early twentiety century. -- Author of The Making of Modern Advertising

Editorial Reviews

The strength of this book lies in the depth of evidence Laird offers . . . [Advertising agents,] Laird argues, deliberately set out to 'create consumers' rather than 'inform customers.'.
—Matthew Hilton, Business History

Well-researched, tightly argued, and lavishly illustrated . . . Laird's treatment is destined to become the standard one on the history of advertising between the Civil War and the beginning of the 'New Era.'.
—Ferdinando Fasce, Reviews in American History

What gives the book its considerable depth and explanatory power is the nuanced and comprehensive way in which Laird discusses the shifting contexts of American advertising . . . A complex, sophisticated analysis of how entrepreneurs and professionals create messages designed to sell goods.
—Daniel Horowitz, Journal of American History

From the Publisher

Well-researched, tightly argued, and lavishly illustrated . . . Laird's treatment is destined to become the standard one on the history of advertising between the Civil War and the beginning of the 'New Era.'.

Reviews in American History - Ferdinando Fasce

What gives the book its considerable depth and explanatory power is the nuanced and comprehensive way in which Laird discusses the shifting contexts of American advertising . . . A complex, sophisticated analysis of how entrepreneurs and professionals create messages designed to sell goods.

Journal of American History - Daniel Horowitz

What gives the book its considerable depth and explanatory power is the nuanced and comprehensive way in which Laird discusses the shifting contexts of American advertising . . . A complex, sophisticated analysis of how entrepreneurs and professionals create messages designed to sell goods. —Journal of American History

Daniel Horowitz

Well-researched, tightly argued, and lavishly illustrated . . . Laird's treatment is destined to become the standard one on the history of advertising between the Civil War and the beginning of the 'New Era.' —Reviews in American History

Ferdinando Fasce

What gives the book its considerable depth and explanatory power is the nuanced and comprehensive way in which Laird discusses the shifting contexts of American advertising... A complex, sophisticated analysis of how entrepreneurs and professionals create messages designed to sell goods.
—Journal of American History

Daniel Horowitz

The strength of this book lies in the depth of evidence Laird offers . . . [Advertising agents,] Laird argues, deliberately set out to 'create consumers' rather than 'inform customers.' —Business History

Matthew Hilton

Laird (history, U. of Colorado, Denver) draws on both documentary and pictorial evidence to explore American advertising from the eve of the Civil War to 1920. She links advertising's rise and transformation to cultural and economic changes, and she traces its evolution from informing customers about products, to creating consumers by persuading people that they needed to buy. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

The strength of this book lies in the depth of evidence Laird offers . . . [Advertising agents,] Laird argues, deliberately set out to 'create consumers' rather than 'inform customers.'.

Business History - Matthew Hilton