Advertising in Perspective

Ninety years ago, Mr. Otis Pease tells us, national advertising scarcely existed. The country store and the wholesaler dominated the market, while powerful merchants could control a manufacturer’s entire output, even dictating price and design. Except for patent medicines, advertising was largely in retailers’ hands, and up to the end of the century the most striking sales copy was usually that sponsored by the big department stores and the mail order firms.

But with the spread of communications, advertising, with copy prepared by experts and placed in national media, took over an influential position in the American market place. The subject offers many aspects for scholarly research, and the one selected by Mr. Pease, a history professor at Stanford, is indicated by the title of his careful study, The Responsibilities of American Advertising (Yale, $5.00). Mr. Pease does not question the economic value of advertising as a tool by which producers develop and maintain markets. What he is after, and he puts it down in well-documented detail, is the story of how American advertisers attempted to set up professional codes to guard against overselling, phony testimonials, misbranding, and other sharp practices. By 1941, he shows the leading spokesmen of the industry had outlawed all these deplorable tactics on a voluntary basis.

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Ninety years ago, Mr. Otis Pease tells us, national advertising scarcely existed. The country store and the wholesaler dominated the market, while powerful merchants could control a manufacturer’s entire output, even dictating price and design. Except for patent medicines, advertising was largely in retailers’ hands, and up to the end of the century the most striking sales copy was usually that sponsored by the big department stores and the mail order firms.

But with the spread of communications, advertising, with copy prepared by experts and placed in national media, took over an influential position in the American market place. The subject offers many aspects for scholarly research, and the one selected by Mr. Pease, a history professor at Stanford, is indicated by the title of his careful study, The Responsibilities of American Advertising (Yale, $5.00). Mr. Pease does not question the economic value of advertising as a tool by which producers develop and maintain markets. What he is after, and he puts it down in well-documented detail, is the story of how American advertisers attempted to set up professional codes to guard against overselling, phony testimonials, misbranding, and other sharp practices. By 1941, he shows the leading spokesmen of the industry had outlawed all these deplorable tactics on a voluntary basis.