The Early Advertising Scene

Few of us realize how many of our modern comforts we owe to advertising. This fascinating volume provides a history of early American advertising, in a pre-regulation age when all manner of schemes thrived in an advertising free-for-all. As well as examining advertising techniques at the turn of the twentieth century the book also discusses practices and conditions in the fields of advertising, newspaper and magazine publishing, manufacturing and merchandising.

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This anthology is the students’ outcome of English Phrase and Clause Structure course taught in the 1st semester. This project is developed so that the students not only apply what they have learned in this grammar course but also express their thoughts about advertising.

The post war history of public health and the role of smoking within that history epitomises the tensions which surround taking health to the public. Public health history has largely concentrated on the nineteenth century sanitary period or on the years before the Second World War, often focussing on the environmental advances, or on the professional and occupational history of public health as an activity. This book has a different focus: it deals with the change in the outlook of public health post war. From a focus on services, vaccination, and dealing with health issues at the local level, public health had developed new discourse. Centring on chronic disease, it became concerned with the concept of 'risk' and targeted individual behaviour. The mass media and centralised campaigning directed at the whole population replaced local campaigns, and politicians changed their mind about speaking directly to the public on health matters. Their early worries about the 'nanny state' gave place to a desire to inculcate new norms of behaviour, and it was debated how change was to be achieved. Identifying debates between those believing in 'systematic gradualism' and those who advocated a more coercive approach, Virginia Berridge uses smoking as a model. Such debates brought into play tensions over the relationships between public health and industrial interests. Health campaigning by new style pressure groups like ASH, which were part state funded, was an important motive force behind the change. In the 1980s and 1990s, public health changed again. Passive smoking and HIV/AIDS brought environmental concerns back into public health, which had disappeared after the 1950s. The 'rise of addiction' for smoking demonstrated the power of pharmaceutical interests to define a new 'pharmaceutical public health' in which treatment and 'magic bullets' were also tactics for prevention. In the early 21st century, public health was play to complex tensions and conflicting impetuses. This book shows that those tensions were nothing new and outlines their development over the last half century.

Modern advertising was created in the US between 1870 and 1920 when advertisers and the increasingly specialized advertising industry that served them crafted means of reliable access to and knowledge of audiences. This highly original and accessible book re-centers the story of the invention of modern advertising on the question of how access to audiences was streamlined and standardized. Drawing from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century materials, especially from the advertising industry’s professional journals and the business press, chapters on the development of print media, billboard, and direct mail advertising illustrate the struggles amongst advertisers, intermediaries, audience-sellers, and often-resistant audiences themselves. Over time, the maturing advertising industry transformed the haphazard business of getting advertisements before the eyes of the public into a market in which audience attention could be traded as a commodity. This book applies economic theory with historical narrative to explain market participants’ ongoing quests to expand the reach of the market and to increase the efficiency of attention harvesting operations. It will be of interest to scholars of contemporary American advertising, the history of advertising more generally, and also of economic history and theory.