We move rapidly onward. "Advances in technology meant consumer goods could be produced and packaged on a previously undreamed-of-scale," and suddenly producers had to find new and distant markets for their products. "To blaze the names and virtues of their products into the memories of consumers, they branded their goods - and began to advertise them." In Europe, posters, newspapers, and magazines took off, while in America patent medicines "were the first products 'to aim directly at the consumer with vivid, psychologically clever sales pitches, the first to show - for better or for worse - the latent power of advertising.'" Of course it took quite some time to shake off the negative image of quack doctors selling potions.
The bulk of the middle portion of the book, for those like myself more interested in the larger concepts behind advertising, can get somewhat dry and tedious, and is made more so by the absurd naming system already mentioned - it's very difficult, at times, to keep the various agencies apart. Much later - though I'm getting ahead of myself here - they quite literally couldn't be kept separate.
Most interesting in this section are the pioneers, the individuals who somehow stood apart to innovate, to change direction, to make conceptual leaps. Ironically, many of those original pioneers, like Albert Lasker, who is often touted as the "true father of modern advertising," had wanted to be something else, but ended up in advertising.
Perhaps most interesting and memorable are the leaps from newspapers to posters, to radio, to television, and now new media. Also very interesting, and perhaps more revealing than some would like, is how easily advertisers have historically been turned into propagandists during war. Leaps in advertising have also historically followed wars.
Often in separate chapters or sections, Tungate writes about the pioneers, the propagandists, the Madison Avenue aristocracy and the creative revolutionaries of the 1950s, giving the reader a feel for the larger developments. He jumps to British developments in advertising, with emphasis on the 60s, 70s, and 80s. A whole separate chapter is devoted to the extravagant 80s, "often regarded as the golden age of TV advertising," with the beginnings of cable television and MTV. And of course, we shouldn't forget '1984,' the IBM commercial that "established the National Football League's Super Bowl game not only as an essential sporting fixture, but as the annual showcase for the best TV advertising."
No history of advertising, or of just about any industry over the long term, can leave out the significant impacts of the dotcom boom and bust and the era of mergers and consolidations. These sections, while interesting in their own way, were perhaps the driest and the most dizzying. What I found amazing, and frankly disturbing, was the fact that globally most people in advertising today work for one of about six giant multinational corporations. This frighteningly parallels what has been happening with news corporations as well.
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