Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940

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Author

Roland Marchand, 1933 to 1997, American historian and professor at the University of California, Davis. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985, xxii + 448 pages. ISBN 0-520-05253-6, first paperback printing 1986.[1]

His later book, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business, was published posthumously in 1998.[2]

Description

Marchand's subject is the two decades in which American advertising acquired the form it still largely holds. His sources are the trade press, agency records, and the advertisements themselves, and his central methodological claim is that an advertisement is a distorted mirror. It does not show how people lived. It shows what advertisers believed people wanted to see, which is a different and more useful piece of evidence.

The book's organizing insight is that advertising men understood themselves as apostles of modernity, translating an unfamiliar new order to a public they characterized as resistant to it.[1] Marchand takes this self-understanding seriously rather than treating it as cover for manipulation.

Two analytic terms carry most of the argument.

The social tableau. An advertisement depicting an idealized group scene, the family at table, the office, the party. Marchand reads these as evidence of what advertisers assumed about class, gender, and social aspiration, and notes that the tableaux compensate for tensions the period did not resolve.[1] His chapters here cover the modern woman as businesswoman, leisure, the businessman as generic man, and social class within the tableau.[1]

The great parables. Four recurring narrative structures in advertising copy.[1]

  • The Parable of the First Impression. A single unnoticed flaw, in breath, complexion, or linen, costs the protagonist a job or a marriage. The product prevents a judgment the person cannot see being made about them.
  • The Parable of the Democracy of Goods. Mass production has made luxury universally available, so the ordinary consumer enjoys what was once reserved for the wealthy. Marchand notes this parable's particular prominence during the Depression, when its promise of equal access to goods substituted for equal access to income.[2]
  • The Parable of Civilization Redeemed. Modern life produces new afflictions, and modern science supplies the remedy. Technology cures what technology caused.
  • The Parable of the Captivated Child. Parenting shifts from coercion to enticement, with mothers guiding children through appealing products rather than discipline, reflecting the child psychology of the decade.[3]

Marchand also tracks the visual and stylistic history: the color explosion, the mystique of the ensemble, the arrival of photography as a marker of sincerity, the borrowing of modern art's dynamics, and the doctrine of progressive obsolescence.[1] A separate chapter covers radio's transition from sponsorship as cultural uplift to the interwoven commercial, and the shift in crooners and commercials from intrusion to intimacy.[1]

His chapter on Depression-era advertising, "Advertising in Overalls," argues that the period produced a distinct visual identity, loud, cluttered, undignified, and direct, in contrast with the sleekness of the boom years, and that candid conversational formats on radio and comic-strip layouts in print became common.[2]

Relevance

The distorted mirror argument is the useful part for anyone reading interfaces rather than advertisements. An interface is likewise not a record of how people behave. It is a record of what its makers assumed about how people behave, which makes it evidence about the makers.

The Parable of the First Impression also names a mechanism still in wide use. It works by supplying the reader with a form of social judgment they were previously unable to perceive, then selling the remedy. Quantified self applications, engagement metrics, and profile completeness scores all operate on that structure, creating the deficiency in the act of measuring it.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Advertising the American Dream, Internet Archive.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Consumer Advertising During the Great Depression: A Resource Guide, Library of Congress.
  3. ↑ Advertising the American Dream chapter summary, Bookey.
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