Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.
Cargando... Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (1985)por Roland Marchand
Ninguno Cargando...
Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
It has become impossible to imagine our culture without advertising. But how and why did advertising become a determiner of our self-image? Advertising the American Dream looks carefully at the two decades when advertising discovered striking new ways to play on our anxieties and to promise solace for the masses. As American society became more urban, more complex, and more dominated by massive bureaucracies, the old American Dream seemed threatened. Advertisers may only have dimly perceived the profound transformations America was experiencing. However, the advertising they created is a wonderfully graphic record of the underlying assumptions and changing values in American culture. With extensive reference to the popular media--radio broadcasts, confession magazines, and tabloid newspapers--Professor Marchand describes how advertisers manipulated modern art and photography to promote an enduring "consumption ethic." No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Debates activosNinguno
Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)659.10973Technology Management and auxiliary services Advertising And Public Relations Advertising Biography And History North AmericaClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
¿Eres tú?Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing. |
Describing the role of advertising in modernization, Marchand writes, “As it came to accept the paradox of its role as both apostle of modernity and buffer against the effects of modern impersonalities of scale, and as it developed strategies for accommodating the public to modern complexities, American advertising in the 1920s and 1930s took on what we now recognize as a distinctly modern cast” (pg. 9). Admen developed advertisements with the goal of forming a relationship with the consumer. According to Marchand, “Thus what made advertising ‘modern’ was, ironically, the discovery by these ‘apostles of modernity’ of techniques for empathizing with the public’s imperfect acceptance of modernity, with its resistance to the perfect rationalization and bureaucratization of life” (pg. 13). In doing so, the admen created those clichés that they sought to reflect.
Advertising defined consumer’s roles within society. Marchand describes an analogy to voting, in which admen focused on “one dollar, one vote” (pg. 64). This, however, served to limit their focus. Marchand writes, “Those whose income fell below the effective equivalent of ‘one dollar’ in the marketplace were disenfranchised. Thus the first basic distinction lay not between class and mass buyers, who at least were buyers at the minimum one-dollar level, but between buyers and those who economically did not qualify as ‘citizens’ at all” (pg. 64). Similar to their delineation of class, admen defined women as symbols for modernity. Marchand writes, “…Never did advertising artists distort and reshape men’s bodies as they did when they transformed women into Art Deco figurines. Women in the tableaux, as symbols of modernity, sometimes added more than a foot to their everyday heights and stretched their elongated eyes, fingers, legs, arms, and necks to grotesque proportions” (pg. 181-182). Admen used women as objects to evoke class, with exaggerated physiques suggesting the higher class of some women over those with more realistic features. Marchand summarizes, “Women took on the contours and angles of their modern art backdrops more decisively than men, suggesting their pliability in the service of art” (pg. 185) and reinforcing their objectification.
Marchand draws upon the archives of the J. Walter Thompson Company, N.W. Ayer, BBDO, E.R. Squibb and Sons, Inc., and more. He has extensive research not only about the materials advertising agencies created for clients, but also from their own trade press, Printer’s Ink, which demonstrates how contributors viewed their work and what messages they hoped to convey to their fellows in the business. ( )