Advertising: The Art of Persuasion

Newspapers: The First Mass Medium

Newspapers were the mass medium of American advertising in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For the first time, sellers could blast a single message to multiple people simultaneously. The first newspaper ads were barely embellished text-only accounts of everything the seller had in stock.

Advertisers struck a polite tone and tended to be rather wordy. Sellers wrote their own ads. They wanted to give buyers all the information needed to decide to buy.

Before the mid-nineteenth century, sellers advertised generic products. The whole concept of brands hadn't been invented for most products yet. Ads for patent medicines, however, touted specific tonics and detailed all the supposed benefits.

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Selling a Brand

The concept of branding changed advertising. Branded products expanded from patent medicines to everything else with the invention of pre-packaging. Before 1860, you brought your own bin for the grocer to fill up with flour or coffee or whatever. By 1920, grocers stocked their shelves with pre-packed boxes advertising competing brands.

Now the seller's game was to convince you to switch to their particular version of a product. Advertising became more about attracting attention than providing information.

Catching the eye became a "bigger is better" proposition in some cases:

By 1900, many sellers no longer wrote their own ad copy. Instead they hired professional advertising agencies to write ads for them. Advertising psychology favored short, snappy, imperative slogans.

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Reason-Why vs. Appealing to Feelings

Claude Hopkins coined the "reason-why" advertising philosophy. Give the buyer a reason to choose your product over the competition. Reasons varied from product to product, seller to seller, day to day.

The First National Bank mass-mailed these color line block postcards monthly to potential customers. The cards gave different reasons for opening a savings account. This one uses the strategy of selling the middle-class dream. An excerpt from the front message:

"Thrift & Economy will enable you to take the vacation you have been promising your family and yourself for so long past. Perhaps you missed it entirely this year. If so commence at once to save for a good happy time away from all business cares next year. . . . But there are other things besides vacations! Are you providing for the proper education of your children so that they can earn more & enjoy more of life than you have?"

These Alton Evening Telegraph advertisements each give a separate reason to buy Noll Bakery's Butter-Krust Bread. In the first ad, the bakery differentiates itself from the competition with their newly perfected mixing process. In the second ad, the bakery reminds the buyer that homemade bread sometimes doesn't turn out great. Why risk failure when you can buy fresh bread at Noll's?

An alternative advertising philosophy concentrated on creating a receptive mood in the buyer. Strategies included using humor, tapping into nostalgia, or fostering relatability through personification of the brand.

In an advertising psychology that skillfully blends "reason-why" and appealing to feelings, some sellers made up a pretend problem, convinced consumers to worry about it, and then sold the solution.

So here is the problem: your neck is getting old. Never mind that everyone's neck gets old, you don't want that happening to you. Just wear this contraption fifteen minutes a day for "gratifying results."

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Conclusions and Sources

So what do the textual-visual advertisements in this exhibition tell us about Madison County history? We'd love to hear what you think.

In the early twentieth century, some print advertising sought to create a receptive mood in the buyer. That strategy is alive and well today, but television/video does it more efficiently. Other ham-handed techniques used during the same period—"We Want Your Business," a giant catsup bottle—seem unsophisticated today.

But the informative ad, later morphing into the "reason-why" proposition, persisted from the early 1800s through to the more recent textual-visual advertisements in the exhibition. As a society we expect textual communication to be rational, and in the end advertising seeks to meet rather than challenge our expectations.

Sources

Sources consulted for this exhibition:

• Beard, Fred. "One Hundred Years of Humor in American Advertising." Journal of Macromarketing 25, no. 1 (June 2005). doi:10.1177/0276146705274965.
• Niedringhaus, Lee I. National Enameling & Stamping Company: The Early Years 1899-1928. New York: Lee I Niedringhaus, 2005. Available at the Madison County Archival Library.
• O'Barr, William M. "A Brief History of Advertising in America." Advertising & Society Review 6, no. 3 (2005) doi:10.1353/asr.2006.0006.
• O'Barr, William M. "What Is Advertising?" Advertising & Society Review 6, no. 3 (2005) doi:10.1353/asr.2006.0005.
• Schlueter, Roger. "Answer Man: Stag beer once flowed out of St. Louis, too." Belleville News-Democrat, February 19, 2015. bnd.com
• Schwarzkopf, Stevan. "What Was Advertising? The Invention, Rise, Demise, and Disappearance of Advertising Concepts in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe and America." Business and Economic History On-Line 7 (2009).
• Sell & Spin: A History of Advertising. Aired October 15, 1999. youtu.be
• Sivulka, Juliann. Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising. 2nd ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011.

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