Advertising the American dream : making way for modernity, 1920-1940
Looks at the decades when advertising discovered ways to play on our anxieties and to promise solace for the masses. This book describes how advertisers manipulated modern art and photography to promote an enduring "consumption ethic."
Print Book, English, ©1985
University of California Press, Berkeley, ©1985
History
xxii, 448 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 26 cm
9780520052536, 9780520058859, 0520052536, 0520058852
11574067
1. Apostles of modernity
Picking up the tempo
Practical heroics and versatility
Erasing the Barnum image
The advertisement becomes "modern"
Side by side with the consumer
Three legends in the making
Selling satisfactions
2. Men of the people : the new professionals
Two routes to professionalism
Ambassadors of the consumer
Atypical men, and women
The agency subculture : courtiers and creators
Competition, craftsmanship, and cynicism
Benign deceptions
3. Keeping the audience in focus
Keys to the consumer mind : confessions and tabloids
The matinee crowd
The limits of consumer citizenship
Sizing up the constituency : the feminine masses
"Oh, what do the simple folk like?"
"Getting to know them"
In search of the typical consumer
Feedback from secondary audiences
Folk wisdom, uplift, and the irresponsible public. 4. Abandoning the great genteel hope : from sponsored radio to the funny papers
Sponsorship only : radio as cultural uplift
Super-advertising and the specter of saturation
Interweaving the commercial
Crooners and commercials : from intrusion to intimacy
Entertainment triumphs : the descent into the funny papers
5. The consumption ethic : strategies of art and style
Advertising and the color explosion
Uplifted tastes and borrowed atmospheres
The mystique of the ensemble
Modern art and advertising dynamics
Photography as sincerity
Art and the consumption ethic
Progressive obsolescence
The gospel of the full cereal bowl. 6. Advertisements as social tableaux
The concept of a social tableau
Modern woman as businesswoman : "the little woman, G.P.A."
Leisure, for what?
Grotesque moderne
Anticipations of superwoman : finessing the contradictions of modernity
The businessman as generic man
Supporting players
Social class in advertising tableaux
Modern maids and atavistic ambitions
7. The great parables
The parable of the first impression
The parable of the democracy of goods
The parable of civilization redeemed
The parable of the captivated child
Guideposts to a modern "logic of living"
8. Visual clichés : fantasies and icons
Fantasies of domain : the office window and the family circle
Fantasies of dimension : the future and the eternal village
Visual clichés as icons. 9. Advertising in overalls : parables and visual clichés of the depression
Retrenchment and morale boosting
The depression as sales argument : some parables revisited
Parables of the depression : unraised hands and skinny kids
Depression advertising as a shift in style
Upstart agencies with that depression touch
Ballyhoo, organized consumers, and the New Deal
Medicine man tactics and self-esteem
Success, advertising men, and the courage quotient
Economic sunbeams : reassurance and inspiration
Clenched fists
10. The therapeutics of advertising
Urbanity and complexity : the problem of scale
Proliferating choices and the vacuum of advice
Advertising advice and added values
Toward a new incompetence
The "re- personalization" of American life
Finessing the complexities of scale