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Advertising Progress

American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing

Pamela Walker Laird author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Johns Hopkins University Press

Published:18th Feb '20

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Advertising Progress cover

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

Originally published in 1998. Drawing on both documentary and pictorial evidence, Pamela Walker Laird explores the modernization of American advertising to 1920. She links its rise and transformation to changes that affected American society and business alike, including the rise of professional specialization and the communications revolution that new technologies made possible. Laird finds a 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, Laird shows how and why—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.

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

ISBN: 9781421434179

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 662g

506 pages