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This chapter examines the primary factors that shaped market culture in Yugoslavia, with particular emphasis on the role played by specialists in advertising, retailing, and marketing, and by media institutions such as television and the popular press. Beginning in the mid-1950s, advertising specialists gradually turned Yugoslavia into something without parallel in the world of state socialism: a place where, on a regular basis, ordinary citizens were bombarded with advertising messages. This chapter traces the rise of a domestic advertising industry amid socialist Yugoslavia's surprising and rapid transformation into a consumer society between 1950 and 1980. It also discusses the end of the Yugoslav Dream during the period 1980–1991, triggered in large part by country's economic decline.

This chapter traces the development of the modern advertising industry. The advertising industry structured itself—forming agencies and a system of compensation by commission—to mediate among print media publishers and advertisers. By establishing itself as a key mediator, the advertising industry would, in time, shape the development of emerging media, and affect the fortunes of its clients—the advertisers. Two schools of thought influenced advertising strategies during the first half of the twentieth century: the hard sell and the soft sell. The hard sell emphasizes on rational appeals, using reason and facts to persuade. Soft sell strategies focused on users, specifically on how they thought of themselves, and how they felt or might want to feel.

This chapter analyzes industry strategies for “educating the public” to a view of advertising as socially and economically useful. More specifically, it shows the use of institutional advertising for this purpose and discusses how industry leaders worked behind the scenes to prepare a solid defense of advertising. The chapter explores the challenges faced by the advertising community in the period leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor and immediately thereafter, including how the industry dealt with new forms of criticism and how it viewed its role in the war economy. The chapter concludes with the establishment of the Advertising Council, Inc., an organization that would come to define the advertising industry’s public relations efforts during World War II and beyond.

This chapter considers the debate over payment for the government’s home front promotions, which pitted the media’s desire for increased advertising revenues against concerns about government intrusion on the First Amendment. The government’s decision to rely on the advertising industry’s volunteer contributions through the Advertising Council was clearly a vote of approval for the organization, but it also imposed a huge responsibility on the business community, demanding a large and well-orchestrated effort. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how internal struggles within the Office of War Information helped to further solidify the advertising industry’s role in the war effort, which led the Council to change its name to the War Advertising Council.

This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of the role of the advertising industry in the “golden age” of radio. The majority of nationally broadcast sponsored programs on network radio during the late 1920s until the late 1940s were created, produced, written and/or managed by advertising agencies. A few examples of these programs are J. Walter Thompson's Kraft Music Hall; Benton and Bowles' Maxwell House Show Boat; Young & Rubicam's Town Hall Tonight for Bristol-Myers; and Blackett-Sample-Hummert's soap operas for Procter & Gamble. The advertising industry became deeply involved in broadcast programming because advertising agencies addressed the needs of broadcasters and advertisers. This book challenges conventional views about the role of advertising in culture, the integration of media industries, and the role of commercialism in broadcast history.

This chapter looks at the strategizing and planning efforts that went into the Advertising Council. It outlines the Council’s organizational setup and its working relationship with the government’s Office of War Information (OWI) during its first year of existence. It also presents the Council’s criteria for accepting the government’s domestic information campaigns and how individual campaigns were prepared and implemented in actual advertisements. By providing their services to the government through the Council at no charge, advertisers hoped to impress upon the American people that theirs was a patriotic institution helping the war effort. The chapter concludes with a discourse regarding the advertisers’ victory in the battle to keep advertising a tax-deductible expense for business.

This chapter examines how the economic crisis of the Great Depression stimulated advertisers' interest in “hard sell” advertising. The massive contraction in production and consumption in the 1930s led to a drop in advertising revenues. To combat the decrease in consumption, many advertisers turned to hard sell. Top hard sell proponents, such as Frank Hummert, became well-known as advertisers hoped that the repetitive, reason-why, rational appeals of the hard sell would stimulate sales. The hard sell strategy became particularly prominent on radio where Hummert's agency—Blackett-Sample-Hummert (B-S-H)—dominated daytime programming, especially serial dramas aimed at housewives.

This chapter examines the significance to advertising of the Temporary National Economic Committee’s (TNEC) investigations, and discusses the ongoing government investigations into advertising’s economic role. It considers the shift from a consumer to a defense economy and how the changes affected the advertising industry’s raison d’être. A series of bills were proposed in Congress that would have effectively halted advertising during World War II, leaving advertisers to fear that the public might not be eager to return to an advertising-laden society once the fighting was over. Increasing demands for advertising restrictions, combined with renewed government interest in consumer conditions, propelled industry leaders into a state of high defense.

This chapter focuses on the origins of commercial broadcasting. Commercial broadcasting originated from a number of political decisions and economic incentives that developed throughout the 1920s. These include the decision to pay for broadcasting with advertising rather than taxes, the decision to regulate it weakly or not at all, the incentives among radio patent holders competing for revenues, and the potential profitability of linking chains of stations into national networks. Hiring members of the advertising industry to reach out to the advertising and business worlds developed appeals to promote the new commercial medium effectively. By 1933, advertisers in the food, drug, and personal products industries, along with tobacco companies, had become “the backbone of American broadcast advertising.”

This chapter studies how the advertising and commercial radio industries responded to World War II and participated in the war economy. World War II provided the advertising and commercial radio industries with the opportunity to expand audiences, contribute to the war effort, and demonstrate their focus on American culture and business. During the war, government agencies coordinated with business interests to help disseminate war information not just as propaganda programs, but also as specific themes integrated throughout commercial radio entertainment. William B. Lewis, adman and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) executive, integrated propaganda and entertainment in order to reach audiences, mobilizing Americans for total war.

This introductory chapter traces the ongoing tensions between advertisers, regulators, and consumer activists during the war, and chronicles how advertisers turned a situation—that by all rational accounts should have worked to their disadvantage—into a priceless opportunity to cement their place in a postwar society defined by advertising and the consumer products it promoted. A successful campaign included a significant public relations component, which was aimed at defining advertising as quintessentially democratic and American. The book aims to uncover the significant political and economic forces that shaped the industry, or what Frank W. Fox has termed “the ad behind the ad,” the use of advertising to bolster the corporate system behind the products.

Just like the advent of television in the 1920s and 1930s, the advent of digital media in the twenty-first century created another shift in the advertising industry. This chapter concludes that the streaming of digital media over the Internet undermines traditional business models as viewers seek to avoid both advertising and the paying of subscription fees. Because of this, advertisers once again seek new strategies for locating and engaging audiences. The advertising industry is reconsidering advertising media as “owned,” “paid,” or “earned.” Owning media is similar to sponsorship, wherein the advertiser owns the content, the platform, and the site, and so controls the advertising and its context. Paid media is the traditional form of advertising media, in which advertisers buy airtime or page space in order to reach audiences. In earned media, the advertiser's message is usually spread by social media.

This chapter follows the Council through the last months of the war and into the reconversion period, when it worked diligently with leaders of the advertising industry, business, and government to determine its role in postwar America. It discusses the nature of these deliberations and analyzes the newly elevated role of advertising as a public relations tool for the business community at large. No longer satisfied with taking directives from the government, the postwar council—once again called the Advertising Council—assumed a more independent role in regard to campaign selections. Its campaigns over the next few years included programs that were more explicitly designed to educate the public about the superiority of the American system of free enterprise and the virtues of corporate capitalism.

This chapter discusses the discovery of the youth market and its culture in the 1960s. It describes the strategies employed by the advertising industry for selling commodities to the youth market. Advertisers appeal to the youth market by using popular music in commercials as part of what Thomas Frank has called the “conquest of cool,” a strategy of locating the hip and the cool in popular culture in order to harness these properties for advertising and marketing.

This concluding chapter discusses the impact of wartime events on advertising and consumer activism after World War II, and examines their reverse trajectories in the 1950s. With a few notable exceptions, it was not until the later 1960s that advertising came under new scrutiny by a nascent consumer movement. The key factor in the transformation of advertising’s image was the (War) Advertising Council’s tireless work on behalf of the advertising community. Displaying an excellent sense of timing and direction, the WAC coached and chastised individual advertisers, pleading for their compliance in what it believed to be a fantastic public relations opportunity. The war experience had shown that just as advertisers were capable of providing the keys to social success, they were equally adept at guiding the public through issues of political magnitude.