This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The Rise of Mass Advertising is a first cultural legal history of advertising in Britain, tracing the rise of mass advertising c.1840-1914 and its legal shaping. The emergence of this new system disrupted the perceived foundations of modernity. The idea that culture was organized by identifiable fields of knowledge, experience, and authority came under strain as advertisers claimed to share values with the era's most prominent fields, including news, art, science, and religiously inflected morality. While cultural boundaries grew blurry, the assumption that the world was becoming progressively disenchanted was undermined, as enchanted experiences multiplied with the transformation of everyday environments by advertising. Magical thinking, a dwelling in mysteries, searches for transfiguration, affective connection between humans and things, and powerful fantasy disrupted assumptions that the capitalist economy was a victory of reason. The Rise of Mass Advertising examines how contemporaries came to terms with the disruptive impact by mobilizing legal processes, powers, and concepts. Law was implicated in performing boundary work that preserved the modern sense of field distinctions. Advertising's cultural meanings and its organization were shaped dialectically vis-à-vis other fields in a process that mainstreamed and legitimized it with legal means, but also construed it as an inferior simulation of the values of a progressive modernity, exhibiting epistemological shortfalls and aesthetic compromises that marked it apart from adjacent fields. The dual treatment meanwhile disavowed the central role of enchantment, in what amounted to a normative enterprise of disenchantment. One of the ironies of this enterprise was that it ultimately drove professional advertisers to embrace enchantment as their peculiar expertise. The analysis draws on an extensive archive that bridges disciplinary divides. It offers a novel methodological approach to the study of advertising, which brings together the history of capitalism, the history of knowledge, and the history of modern disenchantment, and yields a new account of advertising's significance for modernity.

In this unique work of scholarship, Edd Applegate surveys the key figures and events that transformed the American business landscape from its colonial beginnings to that Mad Men moment when advertising “went professional.” In The Rise of Advertising in the United States: A History of Innovation to 1960, Applegate traces how the explosion of newspapers in the American colonies laid the groundwork for the first advertising agents, leading to America’s first class of professional marketers. This entrepreneurial class of new white-collar professionals thrived on innovation in the quest for more publicity, larger clients, and greater sales. Some of the thought-leaders in what remained a novel, ever-changing form of communication include: • P. T. Barnum, master of the advertising “gimmick” • Lydia Pinkham, queen of the patent medicine cure • John Wanamaker, progenitor of modern retail advertising • Albert Lasker, the formulator of “reason why” advertising • Stanley Resor, the consummate market researcher • Elliott White Springs, the groundbreaking purveyor of the sexual innuendo Applegate records the achievements of these individuals and others up until 1960, when advertising underwent a remarkable change, becoming a post-war subject of study and scholarship in America’s colleges and universities. Written for those interested in learning about a select group of movers and shakers in this key area of American business, The Rise of Advertising in the United States should appeal to anyone interested in American business history.

This book provides new insights into the changes in interpretation of marketing and the evolution of marketing strategies during the twentieth century. The focus is on the development of mass marketing in the United States and the way in which more flexible and adaptable forms of marketing have increasingly been taking over. This highly international volume draws contributors from the USA, Europe and Japan, and from a variety of academic disciplines, including marketing, economics and business history. Chapters provide detailed analysis of the marketing of a range of products including cars, washing machines, food retailing, Scotch whisky, computers, financial services and wheat.

The Rise of Mass Advertising is the first cultural legal history of mass advertising in Britain c. 1840-1914 and its legal shaping; drawing together the history of capitalism, the history of fields of knowledge, and the history of modern disenchantment to present a new account of advertising's significance for modernity.

World of Warcrafters, LARPers, Settlers of Catan? Weird. Beliebers, Swifties, Directioners? Weirder. Paleos, vegans, carb loaders, ovolactovegetarians? Pretty weird. Mets fans, Yankees fans, Bears fans? Definitely weird. Face it. We’re all weird. So why are companies still trying to build products for the masses? Why are we still acting like the masses even exist? Weird is the new normal. And only companies that figure that out have any chance of survival. This book shows you how.

Mass communication theories were largely built when we had mass media audiences. The number of television, print, film or other forms of media audiences were largely finite, concentrating people on many of the same core content offerings, whether that be the nightly news or a popular television show. What happens when those audiences splinter? The Rise and Fall of Mass Communication surveys the aftermath of exactly that, noting that very few modern media products have audiences above 1-2% of the population at any one time. Advancing a new media balkanization theory, Benoit and Billings neither lament nor embrace the new media landscape, opting instead to pinpoint how we must consider mass communication theories and applications in an era of ubiquitous choice.

Looks at advertising during the 1960s, focusing on the relationship between the counterculture movement and commerce.

Through examples and case studies, this book demonstrates how to adopt the methods, technology and techniques pioneered in direct marketing and apply them in the broader context of integrated marketing.

Captains of Consciousness offers a historical look at the origins of the advertising industry and consumer society at the turn of the twentieth century. For this new edition Stuart Ewen, one of our foremost interpreters of popular culture, has written a new preface that considers the continuing influence of advertising and commercialism in contemporary life. Not limiting his critique strictly to consumers and the advertising culture that serves them, he provides a fascinating history of the ways in which business has refined its search for new consumers by ingratiating itself into Americans' everyday lives. A timely and still-fascinating critique of life in a consumer culture.

In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became synonymous with patriotism, social equality, and the American Dream. Material goods came to embody the promise of America, and the power of consumers to purchase everything from vacuum cleaners to convertibles gave rise to the power of citizens to purchase political influence and effect social change. Yet despite undeniable successes and unprecedented affluence, mass consumption also fostered economic inequality and the fracturing of society along gender, class, and racial lines. In charting the complex legacy of our “Consumers’ Republic” Lizabeth Cohen has written a bold, encompassing, and profoundly influential book.