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In an interactive, non-linear interface and its companion essay, I invite the user to explore how computational methods and digital tools can contribute to the study of advertising histories. The interface was built keeping three tenets in mind: a) that the collection, digitisation, annotation, and visualisation of data is an act of interpretation, and must therefore be open to critique and modification; b) that scholars can use their programming skills to make the former visible and query-able by its users; and c) that this work is an intellectual pursuit in its own right. In the companion essay, I reflect on the development of the interface, as well as its potential to contribute to the exploration and dissemination of scholarly knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his history of Unilever, Charles Wilson stated that cinema advertising was not part of the company's marketing strategy until the late 1930s. However, despite the paucity of surviving archival sources, recent research has proved that Lever Brothers was engaged with the new medium of cinematography from its earliest days and that the practice continued up to and after the formation of Unilever in 1930. William Lever is renowned for his innovative approach to advertising and marketing, and as a pioneer of creating brand identity, but he was also one of the first British businessmen to recognise the value of film as a marketing tool. This article will argue that Lever Brothers was active in the use of cinematography from the mid-1890s and that it played a significant role in the company's marketing campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the interwar collaboration in the Nordic advertising industry in relation to the literature on 'Americanisation' in advertising and business history. We argue that the focus on Americanisation has caused research to overlook other important arenas for sharing knowledge in the development of advertising and commercial practices in twentieth-century Europe. We show the importance of the systematic collaboration between advertising communities in the Nordic countries through which Anglo-Saxon ideas, as well as domestic experiences, were shared. The collaboration was a crucial platform for the advertising industry to achieve increased societal clout. We also find that the Nordic advertising industry, as a collective, clearly distanced themselves from continental Europe based on a perception that Anglo-Saxon and Nordic advertising shared the same foundations. The results raise questions concerning assumptions about Americanisation and the role of alternative sources of inspiration and transnational collaboration in advertising history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brothers John Harvey Kellogg and William Keith Kellogg understood the importance of public health concerns, particularly those relating to constipation, and of home economics and dietetics research. The Kellogg's Corn Flake Company's investment into home economics became integral to the brand itself and helped establish Kellogg's as a leader in addressing the growing dietary health concerns of the early twentieth century and in the breakfast food industry. The Kellogg's Corn Flake Company used "reason why" advertising appeals for its bran cereals to teach consumers about the connections between eating bran and health. While the campaigns changed over time, the main focus of eating bran to prevent constipation remained consistent. The company's success today can clearly be traced back to its original efforts to address health concerns through advertisements that taught women how to use bran cereal as both a curative and preventative food for constipation and related symptoms. Perhaps more significantly, the Kellogg's Company's Home Economics Department influenced early dietary standards established by the government for both the American public and military. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the development in London of the public commercial concert which made early and increasing use of the newspaper as a method of advertising. This was both an innovation for promotion of commercial entertainments and a huge rise in pervasiveness over existing methods such as flyers and bills. A detailed analysis of the advertisement texts shows how they used various advertising techniques to convey a persuasive message about the concert and employed concepts such as novelty, quality, and appeals to class, status and self-identity. Moving beyond the argument that early advertisements could be persuasive, this paper identifies and interprets the techniques of persuasion musicians used and discusses how they foreground those found in more recent and current advertising practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Speaking in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge warned advertisers not to abuse "a great power that has been entrusted to your keeping which charges you with the high responsibility of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world." His message reflected the hopes and concerns of twentieth-century critics who defended advertisements for educating the public about transformative products and services but denounced the industry for exaggeration and deception. This article examines more than a dozen seminal books, published between 1906 and 1999, to identify dominant themes and variations in advertising criticism in the United States. The study also analyzes the archival papers of a leading trade association for advertising agencies as well as more than thirty other primary sources, including speeches, period advertisements, and articles from newspapers, magazines, and trade publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian advertising industry took steps to improve its efficiency and reputation in the interwar period. These steps included restricting entry to the industry by means of a national accreditation system based on standardised courses and examinations. This article examines the development and application of this system by tracing the background and career of Edward Perugini, Australia's leading advertising educator and the architect of the industry's scheme. It finds that, under Perugini's guidance, the industry tempered its embrace of the 'science' of advertising – the dependence on research and sweeping psychological 'insights' – with attention to art in advertising, anticipating the 'Creative Revolution' of the late 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its importance in modern daily life, the history of the advertising industry in Israel has elicited little scholarly interest. This article seeks to fill this lacuna by offering the first comprehensive survey of Israel’s advertising industry from its early beginning in 1863 to the present day, while identifying four distinct phases in this process (1863-1922; 1922-1960; 1960-1993; 1993 to the present). It also suggests a theoretical model of influencing factors and processes that shaped - structurally and functionally - the development of this industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the discussion on female consumers in Swedish advertising journals and handbooks. The aim is to problematise the gendered aspects of Swedish consumer and early advertising history, by studying how the notion of the female consumer intersected with notions of social class, marital status and sexuality. The article also closes in on the persons who were invited to embody the consuming women and what kind of interests they represented. The article concludes that, from the start of the twentieth century, gender and class was prevalent in the advertising literature. The married woman was also from the start seen as the head of the consuming family. Therefore, reaching her through advertising became key for facilitating the relations between producer and consumer. With time, different women’s organisations, the weekly press, and new theories of advertising from the US addressing the notion of ‘Mrs Consumer’ came to influence the Swedish advertising trade press. The result became the favouring of a certain kind of middle class, urban and rational kind of femininity, strongly connected to homemaking and women’s roles in purchasing for the family. However, this femininity also paralleled notions of ‘the flapper’ and the professional woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a comprehensive overview of the evolution of marketing in Israel. By merging the histories of two leading disciplines within the marketing mix, advertising and public relations, it offers a fresh direction in marketing historiography based on the story-telling method and the periodization approach. Studying the evolution of both professions in a synergistic manner leads to several interesting insights that are otherwise overlooked. The article demonstrates how an integrated approach provides a better understanding of the evolution of both fields and substantially enriches the history of the professions within the marketing arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses Harold Innis's concepts of space- and time-biased media to examine digital media for 10 years beginning in 2005. Both syndicated spending data and industry trade press were used to assess trends and changes. After the recession of 2008, spending for online media surpassed spending on print for the first time. Digital was the dominant medium covered in most years of trade articles; however, the coverage of the rise (and fall) of media types was not as linear as was the actual change in spending. Additional analysis showed that trade press coverage focused mostly on the advertising agency business and that digital media were more central to core topics than were other media types. Concepts of time and space (Innis 1951, 2007) were also explored as overarching themes within the sample. Implications for theory, practice, and pedagogy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the link between the advertising images represented within Michelangelo Antonioni’sZabriskie Point(MGM, 1970) and the strategies employed for the film’s own marketing and promotion. I argue thatZabriskie Point’s critical and commercial failure is partly due to Antonioni’s misunderstanding of the function of studio publicity and promotion and to his studio’s misperceptions of late Sixties countercultural youth, who are both the subject of the film and its target audience. In order to stimulate new and productive ways of thinking aboutZabriskie Pointin relation to American media and marketing culture, I have structured this article around some particularly resonant advertising images displayed within and used to market the film – images that alternately conceal and confront the film’s own position within the American consumerist system that the foreign-born Antonioni intended to critique. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

National advertisers took an earnest interest in children during the first half of the 20th century. Throughout this period, food advertisers commonly offered children membership in clubs and premiums (prizes) in exchange for proofs of purchase, such as box tops. This article, relying upon primary research from the advertising trade press and ad agency archives, considers box tops as instruments that generated market-relevant knowledge. I argue that the submission of box tops to advertisers was an early form of data mining—used to learn about and better target consumers, but also as an audience metric, an ad hoc ratings system for print and radio broadcast sponsorship investments. These arguments are contextualized in critical theories that suggest commercial media audiences, as well as consumers more broadly, are manufactured and that measurement plays a central role in the processes of audience manufacture and commodification. I draw two important conclusions. First, this research demonstrates that consumer surveillance is not unique to the digital era of advertising. Second, I conclude that by “knowing” children through box top submissions, the advertising industry socially constructed the child consumer; that is, measurement through box tops constructed the very audience it sought to measure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Within the early Soviet Union, artists and theorists experimented with a variety of representational forms and modes that were designed to manipulate audience reception and effect a new Soviet subjectivity. Investigating Dziga Vertov's often overlooked and misread first feature-length film, Kino-Glaz (1924), this article discovers within this historical context a unique cinematic intervention that sought to institute an alternative hegemony to American narrative film, and dominant conventions of narrativity itself, by exploiting the subjects and composite forms of early cinema to evolve a new proletarian sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 11920s, the American advertising agency J. Walter Thompson opened offices around the world, and soon established themselves as a pre-eminent international agency. While trying to maintain a consistent standard of service to their clients, and searching for a universal language of advertising, they were aware of the need to cater to local markets and sensibilities. This article uses case studies of testimonial advertisements produced by the J. Walter Thompson agency and places them in their productive context by drawing on company records, correspondence, and oral history interviews. The first aim is to demonstrate the negotiation that occurred between local and global knowledges, and the tension between making changes for national markets and the belief in a universal key to advertising appeal. The second aim is to show the negotiation that can occur between local and global histories, by arguing that through the global and company-centred examination of advertisements, historians can learn more about the messages behind advertisements and produce more nuanced analyses than through other techniques such as semiotics for an international company such as J. Walter Thompson. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past is just one device used in advertisements to attract the attention of the consumer. This article examines Australian advertising's use of the past, asking when and how it has been used and what histories have been invoked. Based on a study of the magazine Australia To-day from 1905–63 and supplemented by interviews with contemporary advertising creatives who have also used the past, the article finds that Australian advertising has always drawn from a narrow repertoire of pasts, and that these usually have little connection to the product or brand. The use of the past in the Australia To-day advertisements reveals a great deal about the historical contexts in which they were conceived. Future scholars might find that today's advertisements provide a similar record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maps played a vital role in the development of US mass tourism in the Caribbean between 1898 and the 1930s. While conveying practical information, tourist maps widely distributed in the United States involved potential and actual tourists in imperial power dynamics at the heart of US hegemony after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Clothed in the language of leisure lay different, and at times competing, imperialist fantasies. The widespread use of this representational illustrates the nexus between leisure and imperial enterprise in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 1891, the Parisian and French authorities censored a poster created by designer Alfred Choubrac advertising a performance by the dancer Ilka de Mynn for outraging public morals. This essay analyzes Choubrac's case in relation to the law that defined obscenity violations and, more importantly, the commentary published in the press, which discussed whether the poster was explicitly appealing to base instincts and/or simply representing the female body in a manner considered beyond the boundaries of good taste. According to the press, the reasons for the poster's immorality were its clumsy form, its public accessibility and its manipulation of female sexuality, which, it was feared, would disseminate a contagion of desire to young females. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multimedia presentation Queer Ads: Gay Male Imagery in American Advertising chronicles the history of gay male images in American print and video advertising. It does this within the context of the history of the gay rights movement and with a focus on advertisements for a variety of product and service categories. It concludes that, although very rare, gay images appeared in subtle but non-judgmental portrayals early in the twentieth century. Starting at the end of the 1920s, imagery, equally rare, tended to depict gay men pejoratively as objects of ridicule or scorn. This approach changed in the 1970s when more positive and edgy images began appearing. Today, a broad range of gay male images - both positive and negative - appear in print and video advertisements. This document provides information intended to supplement the presentation. It includes (1) dimensions of what comprises a gay male image; (2) the method used to locate the images; (3) the narration script of the presentation annotated with references; (4) links to images for which copyright reprint permission was denied; and (5) a list of references. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical work on advertising is underscored by a teleological conception of its object. This often emerges in the form of an emphasis on advertising as an evolving, hybrid institutions that increasingly mixes the `economic' with the `cultural'. It is in this vein that advertising practitioners have been characterized as `new cultural intermediaries' deploying distinctive aesthetic sensibilities. Similar patterns of knowledge and behaviour, however, can be traced amongst early producers of advertising suggesting a generation of `old' cultural intermediaries. This unexpected phenomenon, it is argued, arises for two reasons. The first is that much critical work addressing the nature of contemporary advertising lacks historical context. The second is that culture and economy are normatively conceptualized as separate spheres. This separation underplays the multiple interconnections between the cultural and the economic in instances of material practice. Accordingly it is proposed that advertising be reformulated as a constituent practice that has historically relied upon the juxtaposition of `cultural' and `economic' knowledges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]