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  • From: Carrie McLaren <carrie AT stayfreemagazine.org>
  • To: stayfree AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Stay Free! | 3 May 2002
  • Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 23:34:30 -0500

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

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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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  • Stay Free! | 3 May 2002, Carrie McLaren, 05/02/2002

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