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[Carrie McLaren <carrie AT stayfreemagazine.org>]

Hello, another item from the last issue is now online:
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/norris.html

Advertising History According to the Textbooks

[ by Vince Norris ]

Reprinted from the Journal of Advertising, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1980

Introduction by Carrie McLaren

A few months back, I was watching footage of chimps frolicking in 
Africa on the PBS documentary show Nature. This particular episode 
was about the origins of human sexuality. Evolution. So we had the 
chimps (including several females in estrus, with their ample pink 
bottoms) showing us what our anchesters looked like. Once the 
producers felt we had seen enough of that, the camera seemlesssly 
segued into another grassy scene: one with prehistoric, upright, 
hairy Homo habilis digging holes and groping for food, circa two 
million years ago.

Now, re-creations are staples of documentaries. But when the Nature 
chimps magically transformed into beastly, costumed actors, something 
else was going on. There were no titles or voiceovers to indicate the 
switch from live footage to a dramatization, nor any suggestion at 
all that these were not actual proto-humans. For many of us in the 
audience, that point was obvious: Television did not exist two 
million years ago. So this "obvious" fact went unstated.

This, ultimately, is the question that Vince Norris's article raises: 
What happens when the obvious stuff continually goes unmentioned? To 
point out the obvious interferes with the narrative and risks 
reproprobation. Call it the DUH factor. As in: cave men didn't have 
television-DUH! Or, in Norris's case, advertising aims to increase 
profits-DUH! Yet any anthropologist could tell you that this is 
largely how culture shapes its people: by turning certain ideas into 
unspoken assumptions. It is also how advertising shapes us. Few 
people, were they to stop and reflect, would say they believe ad 
claims; they would know that Nike products don't truly make a person 
cool, that Hilfiger is not the key to happiness, that Schwab doesn't 
cure anxiety. Just as most people, when they pause to think, would 
realize that cave men didn't have VCRs. And yet, the ceaseless 
barrage of ads and televisized images means that we don't even have 
to believe in them; through dominating the culture, they take on a 
reality of their own.

Vince Norris wrote his analysis of advertising textbooks over two 
decades ago, yet his observations are as relevant today as ever. 
Introductory advertising textbooks, Norris discovered, provide scant 
economic history, and what history they do provide is usually wrong. 
Of course, skipping history allows teachers to get on to the 
practical business of training future ad execs, but, more 
revealingly, it allows advertising to be defined as essentially 
beneficient. Again and again, textbooks discuss advertising as a tool 
for creating jobs, lowering prices, and boosting the economy-every 
effect but increasing the wealth of the advertiser (DUH!). Thus, the 
"obvious truth" of advertising's profit motive becomes eclipsed 
through repeated euphemistic bullshit. Just like the televised 
version of prehistoric man, advertising textbooks obscure the very 
subject they aim to reveal. --CM

-----------------------------------------------------------

Advertising History According to the Textbooks

Studying a subject without an appreciation of its antecedents is like 
seeing a picture in two dimensions-there is no depth. The study of 
history gives us depth as well as an understanding of why things are 
as they are." Thus Brink and Kelley introduce the history of 
promotion.

Seventeen introductory advertising texts published in the United 
States during the past 20 years were studied to discover whether 
their authors share Brink and Kelley's belief in the value of 
history. The research had its interesting moments but on the whole it 
was a depressing experience-especially if the texts are indicative of 
what advertising teachers know about the history of advertising, of 
what they think students should know, or even of what they conceive 
of as history itself. Of the 17 texts, most of which run to more than 
600 pages, six present no history at all. Only three present more 
than 20 pages of history. The longest chapter, written by Brink and 
Kelley, runs 33 pages in a relatively short book of 490 pages. There 
is even less history than these numbers suggest, since one-fourth to 
one-half of the space in a typical text is given over to 
reproductions of old advertisements.

More depressing than the small quantity of history is its poor 
quality. With only two exceptions, the so-called history chapters are 
not history at all. They are collections of interesting tales and 
sayings of such famous men as Dr. Johnson, Addison and Steele, 
Benjamin Franklin, and P.T. Barnum; there is almost nothing about the 
social, economic, and political environments in which those men lived 
and in which the advertisements appeared.

The lack of historical perspective in the texts results in a naïve 
and, indeed, incorrect view of the development and function of 
advertising. The most important weaknesses, which I deal with below, 
are the failures to recognize the existence of pre-market societies, 
the rise of capitalism, the Industrial Revolution's impact on 
society, the fundamental difference between retail and national 
advertising, and the nature of advertising as an economic institution.

ADVERTISING IN PRE-MARKET SOCIETIES

From most of the texts, students would infer that advertising is as 
old as mankind. In some cases, they are explicitly told that 
"advertisements in some shape or form have existed not only from time 
immemorial, but almost for all time," that it "flourished" three 
thousand years ago and "played an important role in the development 
of countless societies and cultures."

Inserted amid such nonsense is "proof" in the form of examples. One 
encounters the same examples in one text after another. The 
repetition suggests a good deal of inbreeding or, perhaps, despite 
the statements to the contrary, the true paucity of advertisements in 
the ancient world. Further, many of the examples were not 
advertisements at all. Some were mere on-premise identifying signs. 
Others were personal selling. One text even claims that the wall 
inscriptions on Hammurabi's temple in Uruk were early examples of 
corporate billboard advertising, and that the Rosetta Stone was an 
early poster.

Of course, one of the best ways to legitimatize anything is to say 
that it is as old as mankind-that, as Kleppner says of advertising, 
it is "human nature." An interesting variation on that theme is the 
inclusion of an out-of-context discussion of advertising in the 
Soviet Union-presumably to show that even communists can't get along 
without it.

Only one text explains that advertising is associated with market 
activity and even more so with market economies, and that until very 
recently there was very little of the former and none of the latter. 
The explanation is far too brief, however, to enable the beginning 
student, who has never known anything but capitalism, to understand 
the fundamental differences.

Every society, even a group of castaways, must cope with two basic 
economic problems: how to allocate scarce resources, and how to 
distribute output (wealth). By far, most of the "countless societies 
and cultures" humankind has developed during its time on this planet 
solved both of those problems according to principles of reciprocity, 
redistribution, and householding-types of economic organization in 
which there is no place for advertising.

Reciprocity, simply, is gift-giving, according to traditional, 
well-defined patterns, so that every member of the society knows his 
assigned tasks and receives his rightful share of the wealth. Neither 
giver nor receiver has any reason to advertise.

Redistribution is based on central authority, and functions much like 
the public sector of modern economies. The people, motivated by 
loyalty, respect, and ultimately by the threat of force, give some 
part of their produce to the leader as tribute or taxes. Some in turn 
is redistributed (hence the name) in the form of feasts, public 
works, and so forth. There is no need for advertising in this system, 
either.

Householding is economic self-sufficiency by families or other small 
groups who produce for their own consumption, engaging in little or 
no exchange. The absence of need or opportunity to advertise is 
obvious.

THE COMING OF ECONOMIC SOCIETY

Since virtually all the texts fail to point out that the economies of 
the ancient world and medieval Europe were fundamentally different 
from modern free-enterprise capitalism, it is not surprising that 
little is said about the arrival of capitalism in the western world a 
few centuries ago, or about the historical forces associated with its 
birth, or even about how a capitalist economy is supposed to function.

Although two texts mention the guilds in passing, not one mentions 
the Commercial Revolution. Nothing is said of the Reformation or of 
the Protestant Ethic and how it differed from the Catholic Church's 
view of commercial activity. The word "mercantilism" is not mentioned 
in a single text. Not one text mentions the Scientific Revolution or 
the Enlightenment, and only one discusses (too briefly) the classical 
liberal Weltanschau-ung and its important role in developing 
capitalism.

Neither do the texts explain that, even after the market assumed an 
important role in Western economies, householding remained the 
predominant feature of economic life for the majority of the 
population. Much is made of Benjamin Franklin as though he 
exemplified the Americans of his day. But in Franklin's time it 
required many farmers to produce a sufficient surplus beyond their 
own needs to feed and clothe a single city dweller. Prior to the 
Industrial Revolution, more than 90 percent of the population lived 
on farms, householding. They sold their small surplus and bought the 
few things they could not produce, but money played a tiny part in 
their lives. They did not earn a living, they made a living. One New 
England farmer, far more typical of his contemporaries than was 
Franklin, wrote in his diary:


My farm gave me and my whole family a good living on the produce. One 
year it left me with another $150 dollars, for I never spent more 
than ten dollars a year, which was for salt, nails and the like. 
Nothing to eat, drink, or wear was bought as my farm produced it all.


So, while it was possible for authors to reproduce advertisements 
from early newspapers, their importance in the lives of the general 
population is exaggerated unless the reader is told how little 
advertising and commerce there were. Even among merchants, 
advertising was of little importance. As Max Weber said, "the 
advertisement as a notice by the merchant, directed toward finding a 
market, first becomes an established phenomenon at the end of the 
eighteenth century." He was speaking of England, where the Industrial 
Revolution was well underway by that time.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL ADVERTISING

The Industrial Revolution not only made possible the quantity and 
forms of advertising we have today, it transformed every aspect of 
the economy and of life in general. From a society in which more than 
nine out of ten families lived substantially like the New England 
farmer quoted above, America became in only two lifetimes a society 
in which only one family in 25 lives on a farm. And that family, like 
those in towns and cities, earns rather than makes its living, 
selling virtually all its produce and buying virtually everything it 
consumes. Householding is now so rare as to be a curiosity, practiced 
only by those who have "dropped out" of society.

Most of the texts do not note these effects, characterizing the 
Industrial Revolution merely as a period of increased production. 
Neither do the texts show how the Revolution led to national 
advertising, nor even that national advertising is fundamentally 
different from retail advertising-a matter I will discuss later.

One book does mention the population growth of a few cities but fails 
to explain the significance of urbanization. Only at the end of the 
chapter does one find any reference to the most important changes of 
the Industrial Revolution, but merely in the form of a disconnected 
list of "Forces Behind the Facts." Thus the growth of the middle 
class is brushed off in a one-sentence afterthought, while P. T. 
Barnum receives two paragraphs. Most of the texts provide an even 
less satisfactory treatment of the Industrial Revolution.

Continued at:
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/norris.html



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