Advertising Progress:
American Business and the
Rise of Consumer Marketing
Pamela Walker Laird
The Johns Hopkins University Press
“Advertisements are the most public, and in many ways the most evocative, components of today's Western marketing process .”
Drawing on both documentary and pictorial evidence, Advertising Progress explores the modernization of American advertising to 1920. Its rise and transformation resulted from changes that affected American society and business alike, including the rise of professional specialization and the communications revolution that new technologies made possible. Advertising Progress shows the 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—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.
Sample 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