This document summarizes changes in American advertising over time through examples from 1860 to 1965. Early advertisements from 1860 focused on listing product information and claims due to skepticism of less objective advertising. By 1900, advertisements began including pictures and addressing readers directly while offering product add-ons. As the 20th century progressed, advertisements emphasized branding and a product's personality rather than just features. By the 1960s, advertisements borrowed from counterculture styles and implied that products could make consumers cool and youthful.

1. Advertising in America: A Mini-
Exhibit
Emma Brandt, December 2011

2. Harper’s Weekly Advertising Page, 1860
This dense, text-filled page of ads is typical of pre-1900 advertising, which tended to
be informational rather than relational. Claims that did more than list the product’s
characteristics were looked on with suspicion, as they were associated with the
dubious “patent-medicine” industry. Advertisements tended to stick to emphatically
worded facts and basic information on where to buy the products advertised.

3. Malta-Vita Advertisement, 1900
The family breakfast scene depicted here showcases the use of pictures in full-page ads, a
new development at the turn of the century. The copy addresses the reader, offering putatively
medical reasons to buy the product while offering a “72 Dainty Dishes” recipe book—
premiums, mail-in gifts, and other product add-ons were popular at the time. While advertisers
still felt they had to include lots of reasons for customers to buy the product, they were
beginning to take a more aesthetic sensibility towards advertising.

4. Lucky Strike Advertisement, 1915
The powerful office scene photographically depicted in this 1915 ad places emphasis
on the modernity of the cigarettes it promotes. Similarly, the copy uses slangy
business talk to convince the reader that Lucky Strike possesses up-to-the-minute
business sense. As advertisers moved into the early decades of the 20th century, they
began to realize that a focus on the product’s “brand personality” instead of objective
features could help differentiate them from nearly identical competititors.

5. Kellogg’s Advertisement, 1934
Playing on women’s anxieties both about being “modern” and about properly feeding their
children, this 1934 scene playfully casts the child in the position of authority. Taking a
warm, mildly scolding tone, it subtly slips in consumer education about the new concept of
eating mass-produced, branded cereal for breakfast—all out of the mouths of babes. While
advertising had always, by necessity, been one of the biggest advocates for
“modernity”, images of children and families were especially powerful during the Great
Depression.

6. Lux Advertisement, 1940
Beautiful, glamorous film star Rita Hayworth appears in this ad in a sexually
suggestive but still-just-demure pose, showing off her radiant skin. This skin
and beauty, the ad suggests, can be achieved by using Lux Soap--less
obvious is the implicit threat that men may not pay attention if you don’t. Ads of
this period encouraged consumers to be distinctive through buying products.

7. Chrysler Advertisement, 1951
The dramatically posed scientists in this Chrysler ad exemplify what early 50s
advertising was all about—facts, logic, and good solid American innovation. Ads of
this period often took a “hard sell” tactic, juxtaposing pictures with surprisingly dense
copy that was later to be mocked by the innovators of advertising’s Creative
Revolution. The stereotypical “man in the gray flannel suit” viewed advertising as a
noble art whose purpose was to give consumers as much information as possible.

8. Volkswagen Advertisement, 1959
The shocking juxtaposition of the tiny, stark Volkswagen car with the blank space of
the rest of the page, combined with the seemingly self-deprecating copy, was what
made Bill Bernbach, leader of advertising’s Creative Revolution famous. The style of
advertising that predominated in the 1960s attempted to mirror countercultural
sentiments by using surprisingly uncoventional images and jokes, as well as
sometimes taking potshots at advertising itself.

9. Pepsi Advertisement, 1965
Close-up photography, “naturally” beautiful young women, a sense of sunny
optimism—welcome to the advertising of the 60s, which sought to make “hippie”
culture marketable to a broad audience. By borrowing from psychedelic art styles and
typefaces and appealing to “youthful” values like joy and energy, advertisers like
Pepsi implied that their products would make their customers not only cool, but
young.