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PREFACE
helping to create the idea of urban 'lifestyles'. We see it historically as an innovation in the way the individual arranges, perceives and understands the world, a new way of attaching a specific sense to words and things. Advertising creates new principles of signification and is hence always already 'representation' in the cultural studies sense. In the age of electronic, visually dominated media, advertising functions as a central coordinating point for organizing perceptions. Images used or reused for advertising have turned into a global code of 'visual culture'. In the context of urban history, advertising is the metaphor for the making of an urban identity in a new competitive world and in the history of advertising, where transferring messages from one culture to another is one of advertising's goals, a perfect stage for comparative urban research.
Advertising and the European City: Historical Perspectives had its origins in a session entitled 'Advertising and Urban Culture' at the Third International Conference on Urban History in Budapest in August 1996. The participants in that session, many of whom are represented in this volume, were largely unknown to one another before they met at the conference, but found that they had similar ideas about how one could approach advertising historically. The conference received its impetus from Peter Clark and was organized by Vera Bacsksai. We wish to thank both for their encouragement, and Richard Rodger and Jean Luc-Pignol for their warm invitation to publish in their series on urban history. Support from the University of Minister, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, from Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and from several friends, students and colleagues helped to make this volume a reality. The editors wish to thank Regine Wieder for translating an essay from German, Jennifer Tobias for her help in securing illustrations, Alison Cook-Sather for help with editing several essays, and Maria Sturm for her help with German and French translations and the overall editing of the volume. Two students from the University of Miinster and four at Bryn Mawr College provided editorial assistance: Dagmar Lach, Anja Ingenbleek, Srijana Chettri, Marlee Leveille and Sam Foster helped throughout this project; Elizabeth S. Hill was crucial to the completion of the volume and the editors wish to thank her especially for her work.
Elliott Shore and Clemens Wischermann Bryn Mawr and Konstanz
CHAPTER ONE
Placing Advertising in the Modern Cultural History of the City
Clemens Wischermann
The beginnings of advertising
Most commentators believe, based on such evidence as inscriptions on the walls of Pompeii or the traditional signs of pubs, that advertising has existed since the dawn of human history.1 However, in a pre-industrial world, before the establishment of a modern market economy, advertising could be understood as little more than a means of providing the public with information necessary to find certain people or places, for example a particular craftsman or pub, in keeping with the moral underpinnings of most European economies, which posited that an 'honourable' artisan or merchant did not strive to maximize his profit, but rather to earn a reasonable living in keeping with his station. Thus the rules that governed behaviour in a pre-industrial economy did not tolerate such practices as enticing customers, poaching on the territory of others and open competition. Poaching was thought to be especially unchristian and even immoral. The height of commercial indiscretion would have been to claim that one had set prices lower than those of one's competitors. For example, in 1745, the editors of the fifth edition of the Complete English Tradesman noted that 'This underselling practise is grown to such a shameful height, that particular persons publicly advertise that they undersell the rest of the trade.' To some extent the situation was comparable with that of eighteenth-century France, where we find in a 1761 ordinance that such manipulation of the market seemed to signal an act of despair by an unreliable tradesman. The ordinance emphatically forbade all retail tradesmen, merchants and shopkeepers, in both Paris and its suburbs, to undercut one another in order to corner a market for their commodities and particularly prohibited the distribution of advertising leaflets to promote their wares.2
But during this same period, strictures aside, commercial advertisements were being published, perhaps as an indirect effect of the rising influence of the middle class. Bourgeois society was a child of the Enlightenment. Its most important means of communication was the
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3
press. Beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we find advertisements in newspapers and journals, but they are usually restricted to advertisements for books and patent medicines. Just as the Feuilles du bureau d'adresse followed the French model of state organization, advertising was also officially controlled and a state monopoly. It was 'an attempt of mercantile politics to realize institutionalization of market rules in branches where the corporate economic sector was not dominant, to establish means of communication to improve economic exchange and at the same time to maintain control by the government'.3 State control of advertising in Europe continued well into the nineteenth century. In the case of Germany, Homburg argues 'that the transition to a market economy and the controversies accompanying advertising in Germany since the late nineteenth century cannot be properly understood without taking into account its long pre-history and the complex learning process involved in the formation of a domestic market and related commercial practices'. In a case study of Leipzig she demonstrates that the 'practice of, pioneers in, and promoters of commercial advertising in the Leipziger Zeitung between 1750 and 1850 and the subsequent responses of members of traditional retail establishments, as well as municipal and state authorities, to the innovative methods of marketing and competition were at odds with the traditional guild system and established patterns of supply and demand'.4 The older European economy - with its tradition-bound morality and its state-controlled media of communication - was reformed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in an era of radical changes in economic thought. A liberal market economy, along with its notions of competition, arose. The crucial question for us is how modern advertising was established.
The relationship between new forms of advertising and consumption was formed in the great European capitals. It has usually been assumed that modern advertising began in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, but Natacha Coquery and Claire Walsh draw our attention back almost one hundred years to the second half of the eighteenth century. London was then the hub of the world economy, and Paris its cultural centre. To find the origins of economic change in the distribution sector we must first go to London, where Walsh finds them among the shopkeepers of the eighteenth-century city. She locates advertisements placed by shopkeepers in the city but does not find any evidence for a 'consumer revolution', the existence of which older research had inferred from these same newspaper announcements:
Newspaper advertising increased steadily from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, rather than peaking in a revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. At the same time, however,
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newspaper advertising had very little importance for the sale of domestic products, and hence cannot be held as an indicator of a consumer revolution ... In the retailing context of the eighteenth century, where non-standardized goods were selected by the consumer based on verbal, tactile and visual information, there was little point in using newspaper advertisements to try to lure distant customers.5
In Paris, the centre of urban culture of the eighteenth century, certain forms of luxury consumption had political repercussions. The life of French court society was centred on the king, who resided at Versailles. Access to the sovereign was a form of power, but that access did not guarantee a role in policy-making, so, yo gain an extra advantage, the society of the court constantly flaunted its connections to power. Court society tried to replace openly displayed political and economic power with prestige and taste as indicators of influence. A complicated system of social distinctions came into being at the French court, especially manifest in styles of clothing. It was not the fabric itself, but its social value that was decisive: the parties concerned had a need to invent new visible signs of prestige at every turn to keep imitators at bay. This produced an incredible demand for novelty which made Paris into the magasin universel du royaume. Coquery believes this to be the beginning of consumer society in the original sense of the word: the tradesmen were the contemporary consommateurs.
What exactly did the tradesmen do? They seized the opportunity provided by the specific demands of consumers for novelty and reacted to the needs of these consumers in a dynamic relationship, both causing and caused by changing fashions. The tradesmen reinvented the notion of publicity, and modern advertising was born. The great tradesmen of the Palais Royal, the centre of luxury consumption in the capital, were the first to develop invoices, letter-heads and brochures, and, after 1750, fashion magazines which were filled with praise for the nouveaute. But the tradesmen did not only fulfil wishes. They became purveyors, and even inventors, of particular necessities, for they too designed styles and created fashions. It is difficult to separate cause and effect here, the needs of the aristocracy and the existence of shops with changing fashions: who was influencing whom? The shopkeepers were the producers of both public taste and advertising:
Far from being confined to the role of passive agents between manufacturers and consumers, merchants of the eighteenth century became designers of their products, revealing themselves as active influences in the changing tastes of the times. Very skilful in detecting and sparking trends, they were instigators of the new, accelerating the evolution of style through the subtle changes that they imprinted upon their wares. Powerfully challenged by their
1.2   An architectural view of a contemporary store front in mid-nineteenth century Paris
Source:   M. Viollet-Le-Duc, Entretiens sur L'Architecture. Atlas (Paris- A Morel, 1863), plate 36
6 ADVERTISING AND THE EUROPEAN CITY
1.3 The 'Bon Marche', the prototype for the store in Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames. This view is of the Paris store in 1874, a copperplate by Ch. Fichot
Source:   Grands magazins oder Die Geburt des Warenkauses im Paris des 19.
Jahrhundert. Photographs by Dieter Sawatzki, with an introduction by Siegfried Gerlach (Dortmund, 1989), 25
clientele's requirements, they created the fashions of the times and were the inventors of commercial advertising.6
Some decades later, a young and simple country maid, Denise Baudu, the heroine of Zola's novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise), arrived in Paris. In great detail, Zola tries to describe both the overwhelming quantity and variety of the merchandise available and the girl's reactions upon seeing this commercial cornucopia for the first time (Figure 1.3):
The high plate-glass door, facing the Place Gaillon, reached the mezzanine floor and was surrounded by elaborate decorations covered with gilding. Two allegorical figures, two laughing women with bare breasts thrust forward, were unrolling a scroll bearing the inscription The Ladies' Paradise. The shop windows stretched along the Rue de la Michodiere and the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, where, apart from the corner house, they occupied four other houses which had recently been bought and converted, two on the left and two on the right. With its series of perspectives, with the display on the ground floor and the plate-glass windows of the mezzanine floor, behind which could be seen all the intimate life of the various departments, the spectacle seemed to Denise to be endless ... There, outside in the street, on the pavement itself, was
PLACING ADVERTISING IN THE CITY 7
a mountain of cheap goods, placed at the entrance as a bait, bargains which stopped women as they passed by. It all cascaded down: pieces of woollen material and fabric, merino, cheviot, flannelette, were falling from the mezzanine floor, flapping like flags, their neutral tones - slate grey, navy blue, olive green - broken up by the white of the price cards. Close by, framing the doorway, strips of fur were hanging down, straight bands for dress trimmings, the fine ash of squirrel, the pure snow of swansdown, imitation ermine and imitation sable made of rabbit. And below this, on racks and tables, in the middle of a pile of remnants, there was a profusion of knitted goods being sold for a song, gloves and woollen scarves, hooded capes, cardigans, a whole winter display of many colours, mottled, dyed, striped, with bleeding stains of red ... It was a giant fairground display, as if the shop were bursting and throwing its surplus stock into the street.7
Nothing embodied the new world of advertising better than the department stores of Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century.8 These stores divided their shopfloors into discrete areas, each devoted to a particular type of merchandise; the prototype for this arrangement came from the clusters of specialized shops lining the streets of eighteenth-century London:
Growth in the number of shops and increased expenditure on shop fronts and elaborate window displays changed the profile of the street. Shopping became an activity which could be carried out every weekday rather than just on market days, and the street, with its array of shops, replaced the street market as the mental focus of consumers ... London had always been a thriving commercial centre with a rich supply of goods, but by the early eighteenth century shopping had become a much more pleasant experience as pavements were laid, street lighting introduced, streets cleared of hawkers and foul-smelling wastes, and semi-permanent 'bulks', or makeshift wooden shops, removed. In some places markets were even relocated so that the more refined activity of shopping in shops would not be hindered. Shopping in fixed retail shops was associated with the cleaner, healthier and wealthier lifestyle of new developments in city centres. Permanent shops became part of the urban identity; in London, fast becoming the commercial capital of Europe, they were a potent symbol of economic stability and fashionability that in tourist accounts clearly rivalled Paris by mid-century.9
We do not need to decide which of these commercial rivals - Paris or London - was ahead at a given time. Our interest here lies in the fundamental changes to the shop and the urban environment that London and Paris helped bring into being.
In pre-industrial cities the majority of consumer goods were, if not made on site, purchased locally. The integrity of the proprietor determined the product range of the manufacturers. The quality of the
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9
jjta—■..............t, ,------.----------.......--------- ■ -,---4V.
1.4   Litfaßsäule (advertising pillar) in Berlin, 1855
Source:   Walter von zur Westen, Reklamekunst aus zwei Jahrtausenden (Berlin, 1925), 243
available goods depended on their place of origin and the season, and their price had always been negotiated directly with the merchant based on the visual and tactile appeal of the product. In this world of consumption, standardized goods assumed more importance in the rise of industrial production methods designed for an anonymous market. With the introduction of new and formerly unknown goods into the market a need arose for advertising which provided the customer with information about the product, not just where it could be found. The increasing competitiveness of the economy mandated a new type of business advertisement. Early advertising served primarily to give information about a product's characteristics such as quantity, quality, price and so on. The invention of fashion and the standardization of clothing production combined to produce standardized fashion for a large group of urban buyers. This synthesis became especially apparent both at the ready-made clothier's and in the fashion journals of the big cities where, in the first half of the century, changing collections were already being
1.5   An English building wall from 1830 covered with advertising
Source:   United States Patent Office, The Growth of Industrial Art (Washington: Goverment Printing Office, 1892), 41
described. Ready-made clothing, itself a new idea, first appeared in Berlin based on a Parisian model, the so-called pret-a-porter.
The growth of the urban, regional and national markets in the middle of the nineteenth century was linked both to the expansion of the bourgeois realm and to the 'communications revolution' of the nineteenth century. A greater demand for 'public-ness' and the economic situation in general required new ways of disseminating information. Advertising, therefore, came increasingly to the fore from the middle of the century and its standard form became the column in the newspaper. The decades from the 1850s until the 1880s were a breakthrough period for advertising as a force in competition and consumption throughout Europe while, at the same time, industrial mass production of consumer goods became much more common. One innovation quickly succeeded another, and these had to be made public as rapidly as possible to as wide an audience as possible, usually by means of advertisements. Almost anything seemed possible; the atmosphere was exuberant: the more sensational an advertisement, the greater its effect
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was expected to be.10 "Within a few years, economic considerations induced the bourgeois daily press to print advertisements, although it had previously carried few or none. In addition to the cultural influences exerted upon it, advertising changed as art and science became an integral part of it, ensuring that some portions of society would adamantly reject modern advertising. In the late nineteenth century, this process was accelerated (in terms of quantity as well as quality) not least by the urbanization of society, because the manifestations of and innovations in advertising were concentrated in th/cities (posters, shop windows, illuminated advertisements and so on).11
Until 1835 or so, the display window was a means of presentation for only a few shops with luxury goods; between then and the 1870s, it caught on everywhere in the larger cities of the German Empire. Subsequently, the display window and its decoration changed fundamentally. 'Glass palaces' and window display art peaked and reached a turning-point at the start of the twentieth century. Finally, advertising extended into the shop and has now become emblematic of how merchandise is generally presented.12
There it catered to the needs of a growing middle class increasingly oriented towards consumption. The location of the synthesis of strictly commercial space with the more abstract perception of commerce and marketing (and of course advertising) was doubtless the department store:13
Architecture became subordinate to advertising ... The first visible sign of this development was the department store ... Architecture and city planning lost their independence: these ceased to be autonomous arts, and thus buildings became more nearly purely functional, subordinate to the needs of advertising and selling. Department stores and display windows were only the first step in the process of the takeover of the whole city by advertising.14
Let us go back to Paris. Half a century later, what had become of the young girl in Paris whom we met in Zola's novel? The French capital city
became a sort of pilot plant of mass consumption. The period of its most rapid change was just beginning when Denise Baudu is supposed to have disembarked there. By the time she reached middle age, a quarter of a century later, she would have seen the transmutation of Paris from the cramped city of Victor Hugo to a modern capital of consumption, a city of boulevards, cafes, electric lights, apartments, advertising posters, the Metro, cinemas, restaurants, and parks, with production largely exiled to an outer belt while the heart of the city was devoted to commerce. If the North of England is the landscape that symbolizes the industrial revolution, the lie de France can well claim to serve as the emblem of the consumer revolution.
1.6   The latest craze from America: a display window fitted out with an electric reflecting device, patented in the USA in 1884
Source:   As for Figure 1.5.
French initiative in creating the new style of mass consumption was crowned by the Paris expositions of 1889 and 1900. There was revealed for the first time a planned environment of mass consumption; there thoughtful observers realized, in a confused and uneasy way, that they were immersed in a strange new world of consumer behaviour. They saw crowds milling around displays of luxurious automobiles and around glass cages displaying couturier-clothed mannequins; taking imaginary voyages via cinematic techniques to the floor of the sea or the craters of the moon; and, at night, staring at displays of lighted fountains or at voluptuous belly dancers wriggling in a reproduction of a Cairo nightspot. The expositions and similar environments (such as department stores and automobile trade shows) displayed a novel and crucial juxtaposition of imagination and merchandise, of dreams and commerce, of collective consciousness and economic fact.1-5
The fascinating world of goods and advertising has influenced our mental image of everyday life since the laté nineteenth century, but this key point has not received attention in the literature on the increase of
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consumption in society.16 'Although the concept of a consumer revolution is far less familiar than that of the industrial revolution, they are really two facets of a single upheaval that decisively altered the material basis of human life.'17
A hundred years of debating advertising in Europe
At the turn of the twentieth century advertising suddenly became prominent in European cities. It became a symbol of modernity, linked in the minds of its opponents to the urban growth18 which seemed to sprawl unplanned throughout the German-speaking world.15 The traditional European city was filled with houses and buildings which lacked space for advertising in their small windows and narrow house gables. This need for advertising space spurred the changes wrought by modern architecture as well as the rapid expansion of 'landscape advertising' or 'billboard advertising' alongside roads, rivers, lakes and railways. The driving force behind the debate over the 'defacing' of Europe's cities and towns was prominent representatives of the bourgeoisie, who thought it their duty to take an interest in the protection of the landscape and the preservation of monuments and townscapes in an admixture of incipient environmental awareness and anti-modern hostility to the city.
Out of this intellectual movement grew contemporary advertising criticism. One of its more prominent exponents was Werner Sombart, who, with his old-fashioned refusal to regard advertising as anything more than an abomination, defined an advertisement as a manifestation of modern culture, which he found intrinsically objectionable.20 He pointedly expressed the belief that 'culture' and advertising should not share the same social space. Elliott Shore demonstrates in this volume the fundamental elements in the thoughts of opponents of advertising in Central Europe with a special emphasis on Lassalle and Sombart: 'Two of them are explicit: that advertising is a foreign implant, "unnatural" in the German context, and that the inspiration for it is simultaneously American and Jewish. A third argument, which is implicit in the language all three critics use, is a very thinly disguised rejection of advertising as a manipulative and indulgent practice.'21 A rather different development, which Aaron Segal describes in this volume, occurred in France where, during the tenure of the famous Jules Cheret, one particular poster became a part of the national memory:
French officials in a number of cities sought to regulate and quarantine public advertising as part of a broader campaign of republican social and political landscaping ... By the First World War, posters had been incorporated into the national cultural patrimony...The
national tapestry manufacture at Gobelins converted a Cheret poster into a tapestry ... Those policies coincided with a movement to preserve landmarks, monuments and cityscapes as artistic treasures, embodiments of a national heritage and models of taste and culture.22
Despite a distinct hostility to cities in Germany, those opponents of advertising who were also cultural critics were to be found throughout Europe. Whether we consider Esther eleven's article on the Netherlands,23 or the ongoing French intellectual debate about the advantages and disadvantages of advertising and its links to civilization,24 or the fluidity of the boundaries between art and advertising in the United States,25 differences in perceptions of culture are always at the heart of the matter. The classic nineteenth-century conception of culture turned on the freedom with which it was able to pursue its own ends. Lysinski, a leading theorist of advertising of the 1920s, extended this to the criterion of differentiation: the most basic contrast between advertising and art is simply one of aim and purpose. In his opinion, commercial ends are integral to advertising. Advertisement is for use in the market. Art, by contrast, is an end in itself.26 This distinction precisely articulates the general understanding of advertising in the twentieth century.
A clear establishment of the relationships among advertising, social structure and the concept of culture is therefore necessary. Pierre Bourdieu theorizes a distinction between 'official' culture (culture legitime) and mass culture (culture populaire),27 which I would like to attempt to historicize. According to Bourdieu, 'official' culture usually develops against the background of the educated classes (Bildungsburgertum). It is a culture which is recognized and given weight to by experts and supported by academics and professional aesthetes. It presupposes a long learning process, which is ideally rooted in socialization, developed against a familial background of material affluence and tends towards cultural aestheticism in the second generation. Its central ideas are art for art's sake and the purity of form. This 'official' culture often corresponded with the concept of culture predominant in the nineteenth century,28 which continued to be a popular measure of 'good taste' well into the twentieth century.29
Bourdieu distinguishes this from mass culture. Pre-industrial mass culture was a mixture of regional traditions and the characteristic features of class difference. From the last third of the nineteenth century, however, this mass culture changed to fit the new economic and commercial patterns of life brought on by industrialization and mass production. In the wake of these developments, the aesthetics of advertising spread further and further. This new mentality first gained a firm hold - and became ever-increasingly entrenched - in the consciousness
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»Itliotr (Erfüll.
$(cr UBamwrl Ijt |mffin! Hm ba* ttinimilntlb ttlputtu, hot it J( »Mi in bl. Slob! lomm. urn bi: lh»|I»,u|Un»iin j» film -
»i bil «Milttilf - «Itfallflfel illnlirt.
1.7 'Cheap Substitution': Mr Wamperl is sly! When his relatives came from the country to the city to see the art exhibit, he directed them to the closest wall of advertisements - in order to avoid spending money on admission tickets!
Source:   Fliegende Blätter 98 (1893), 79
of the newly established and consumption-oriented middle class. After several interruptions due to wars and economic crises, it finally established itself in all but the very poorest levels of society.
This new mass culture was consistently rejected by the cultural elite. A framework for this position had already been established in the intellectual critique of culture, which was common in these circles and which had always criticized mass culture. The condemnation of the 'industry of entertainment and consciousness' also indicted advertising. Critics could not discover elements of their own 'official' culture in it, and thus 'mass culture' came to be equated with 'bad taste'.
According to Bourdieu, the 'official' critics, began with their own cultural backgrounds and assumptions and, as these had never been questioned, misjudged mass culture, which had its own social patterns and rules. Relating Bourdieu's theses to the socio-historical and historical-economic background of the twentieth century, it becomes obvious
that the mass culture of the new consumer society was still a culture dominated by scarcity. The primary concerns of consumer society - and of those who study it - are standards of living and patterns of consumption. Most people only sacrificed aesthetics of content for aesthetics of form if conformity and social proximity to the existing standards of everyday life were preserved. Not diverse styles, but similarity was desired. In the twentieth century, advertising and the world of goods managed to fulfil these demands over a long period of time, creating a true culture of the masses.
Social science and advertising: one hundred years of consumer manipulation
The debate over advertising has always been both a social and a scholarly phenomenon. And the social aspects of the debate depend not least oh which scholarly paradigm is currently in favour. The basis of an academic explanation of advertising that was put forward in the years around the First World War reflected the change from 'product orientation' to 'market orientation' in the advertisement of consumer goods. This became more apparent as behaviourism penetrated from the United States to Europe. Advertising has often been defined as applied psychology, which means that
early advertising psychology was mainly interested in empirical, experimental and simple behaviouristic notions ... The basic be-haviouristic conception of a flexible human nature was a very broad idea indeed. But because there was no way to look inside the heads of consumers, so to speak, it must have seemed better to cling to visible human behaviour ... The advertising practitioners themselves had come up with what can be called a technical solution to getting closer to the consumer.30
Market surveys were helpful to the 'advertising artists'. Advertising campaigns developed by early advertising agencies were replaced by the development of professional advertising departments in the businesses which had fixed advertising budgets and their own notions of how to spend them. It was the heyday of scientific theories of advertising, all of which paid close attention to the actions and reactions of the consumers and which were heavily influenced by the vogue of behaviourism and its interest in the notion of 'stimulus-response'. Advertising tried to use behavioural theories to justify not only current practice but also the historical development of the field. In what follows, I would like to outline the most important concepts of the social and academic debate on advertising.
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'Hidden persuaders'
Vance Packard gave an entire area of motivation research a head start with his 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders.31 The premise of the book is the idea that human beings must obey the inexplicable demands of their subconscious. Therefore, if structures and mechanisms of the unconscious were completely understood, it would be possible to control human beings entirely. Perhaps the most famous examples of an application of this 'brainwashing' hypothesis were the short, imperceptible advertising sequences inserted into films, which were designed to condition the observer to exhibit a desired behaviour with increasing frequency. The public latched onto the idea that in the future greater psychological manipulation would be possible and refused to relinquish the notion for some time, despite an increasing body of data which refuted the theory. As a matter of fact, the assumptions made by motivation researchers in these years could never be confirmed and were fundamentally psychologically incorrect. However, because they were popular they gave advertising a bad image, which bordered on comparisons with totalitarian political propaganda, and which stuck for a long time.
In the United States the 1950s saw the birth of various theories of manipulation. The theses developed by David Riesman, Renel Denney and Nathan Glazer in their famous study, The Lonely Crowd,32 had great influence. Although the subtitle of the work was A Study of the Changing American Character, the models of political behaviour these researchers developed were soon applied to all modernizing societies. Riesman et al. distinguished between three ideal types of society, each of which was characterized by a different style of behaviour, which they believed to have succeeded each other historically.
The society of high growth potential develops in its typical members a social character whose conformity is ensured by their tendency to follow tradition ... [these are] tradition-directed people and the society in which they live a society dependent on tradition-direction.
The society of transitional population growth develops in its typical members a social character whose conformity is insured by their tendency to acquire early in life an internalized set of goals ... [these are] inner-directed people and the society in which they live a society dependent on inner-direction.
Finally, the society of incipient population decline develops in its typical members a social character whose conformity is insured by their tendency to be sensitized to the expectations and preferences of others ... [these are] other-directed people and the society in which they live one dependent on other-direction?1
The first of these models is typical, according to these researchers, of a pre-industrial society. It was followed by the 'inner-directed' model,
which was based on the internalization of abstract ideas and developed fully during industrialization. Riesman et al. saw in the 1920s the societal advance of a new approach, the 'other-directed' people, which elevated public opinion to the highest authority governing individual action.
' The idea that the subconscious guided human orientation peaked in the 1960s and early 1970s. This thesis is mainly associated with the names Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno,34 whose ideas were celebrated in these years as they never had been before and never would be again. Their critique claimed, in few words and without regard for the finer distinctions among types of advertising,35 that advertising's manipulative capacity is great, if not unlimited. Advertising was thought to contribute to the alienation of people from social reality and particularly to diminish awareness of 'real' in favour of 'false' needs. Advertising was considered to have an anti-progressive and myth-making effect. Later scholarly criticism of these positions emphasizes that it is impossible to determine 'real' and 'false' needs without investing some outside authority with the power to define what is real and what is not. Consequently, the cultural imperatives of mass society quickly became associated with the phenomenon of robbing the individual of his individuality.
The philosophical critics of advertising attracted the interest of and swayed public opinion with this message until the mid-1970s. The critique also deeply influenced most modern historians through one of its basic assumptions, that 'advertising always lies', that is, that advertising always presents a distorted image of social reality and social necessities. What self-respecting scholar would be willing to work with sources which 'tell lies' from the outset, considering also that semiologi-cal and visual analyses had hardly been a part of the tool-chest of historians? Therefore it is not surprising that the world of advertising had to remain a largely theoretical realm rather than one informed by a historical understanding of reality. In the 1980s and 1990s the history of advertising has been re-examined from a new angle, primarily by English and American historians, who were the first to accept the usefulness of the newer theoretical models from the field of communication.36
Communications models
The surprisingly sudden fall from prominence of the intellectual criticism of advertising was brought about mainly by the efforts of communication theorists and behavioural scientists to reformulate their refutation of the theory of manipulation, which had until then been
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dominant. For a long time the dominant communications model was that of stimulus-response. In the simple, well-known, traditional model of communication (transmitter, message, channel, receiver) the transmitter was considered the most important single element. The primary interest, then, was vested in the syntax and the intensity of the impulse, because it was that impulse which would determine the behaviour of the recipient. Such ideas in communication shaped not only how advertising was conceived of and used, but also the distinctive criticism of advertising in the 1950s and 1960s. However much individual advertisers or advertising firms might disagree, they agreed that there were no limits to advertising's ability to manipulate its defenceless recipients and that they abused this power by creating artificial needs instead of satisfying true ones.
In the 1970s the orientation of behavioural research, which had been based on communication theories, changed entirely and with it advertising changed as well. The reason for the shift was the growing popularity of testing the idea of the power of the 'hidden persuaders' with experimental social scientific studies. These works emphasized the interaction between message and the construction and perception of needs inherent in a process of communication and accorded a lesser importance to the influence of this interaction on the reinforcement of existing behavioural tendencies.37 In a socio-psychological assessment of previous experiments, Horst Brand drew the following conclusion, noting that it particularly pertained to the well-known effects of subliminal advertising discussed by Packard: 'On balance our result is as sobering as it is simple: subliminal advertising is ineffective advertising, which does not lead to commercial success, wherever it is practised. The assumption ... that Vance Packard is the only person who has nevertheless gained commercial benefits from the possibilities of subliminal advertising is definitely consistent with our findings.'38 Such studies did not denote an acceptance of advertising by the social sciences, but they freed advertising from the odium of the assumption of its nearly unlimited ability to manipulate. This new freedom, however, also paved the way for the social sciences to re-examine advertising. For advertising it meant that even beyond the social rehabilitation which was now possible, the dispositions and behaviours of the consumers were set at the centre of attention and the question became how an advertising message was received and interpreted by the consumer.
Communication-centred models thus replaced manipulation theories in the late 1970s. The 'big manipulator' with his tricks, endless repetitions and refinements has been almost completely discredited35 as researchers have acknowledged the ability and willingness of the recipients of messages to interpret transmissions selectively. The possibility of
influencing behaviour has now been reduced to a mere reinforcement of existing tendencies. The consequence of these findings for communications theory was the abandonment of an exclusive focus on the transmitter as a part of the stimulus-response model in favour of new models of communication which were based on an interaction of message and recipient in the construction of needs. Such communicative acts also played a role in advertising, where the recipient or consumer now occupied a central position and is generally considered to have a wide range of choices, given the number of different and competing advertising messages. The view of the communication process changed as advertising was incorporated into the known 'cognitive paradigm'. In his seminal work Konsumentenverhalten, Werner Kroeber-Riel, an expert on German advertising, defined this term as follows: psychological tendencies - like perception, attitude and behaviour - were seen as a result of the cognitive assimilation of information. In this case the cognitive assimilation of information can be seen as an individually directed process, but one which is susceptible to a number of external influences. Kroeber-Riel sees an active process which prevented behaviour from being reduced to a mere matter of cause and effect.40
Late twentieth-century marketing concepts and textbooks work with a comparable communication-based theory. Direct manipulation by the advertising industry is no longer conceivable; an understanding of advertising based on the theory of communication underlies all contemporary concepts of marketing. This ideological shift relieved advertising as a whole of so much social responsibility that some scholars talk about 'advertising apologia'.41 Schmidt, Sinofzik and Spieß explain that until the middle of the 1970s the model of adjustment dominated the economy: theories of marketing advanced in order to keep abreast of trends in the market. Today businesses practise an increasingly active and deliberate communication policy. It is a combination of a sensitive understanding of the transformation of modern society, a marketing concept which is grounded in this understanding, and a strategy of non-product-oriented initiatives for each individual enterprise. The enterprises play an active and growing role in socio-cultural developments - they try to change the environment itself to position the product or the industry better.42
What then makes advertising an effective means of communication between seller and buyer? The classic response is that advertising imparts information. With the abolition of older economic institutions and the development of an anonymous and growing market, advertising became necessary to disseminate information about the offers to the consumers. Advertising made the market comprehensible. If one accepts this notion, then advertising expenses cannot be seen as faux frais, as
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false, artificial, or superfluous costs to the national economy. Economic theory at the turn of the century frequently cited advertising for needless consumption of a nation's economic resources: advertising was considered as an unrecoverable expense. Only gradually was the central economic task of advertising recognized as providing information on the market, which had by then lost its clear structure. The New Institutional Economics of the late twentieth century is regarded as both an impetus for examining the economic role of advertising from a historical point of view as well as a theoretical extension of that role.43 The new theory assumes that the mechanisms of markets and prices are not free but that transaction costs result from their use. These consist primarily of the expenses for information, and secondarily for contracts. A historical examination of advertising from an institutional point of view is therefore eminently desirable and urgently needed.
'Hidden myths'
Although this theory also concerned itself with the secret powers of advertising, it is unlike Packard's model in that it is not concerned with techniques of subtle or subconscious influence but with reinforcing the underlying organizations and structures of human life. These basic organizations and structures characterize the orientation of life and are interpreted and used by advertising as an act of self-expression. The success of this method is contingent upon the secret wishes of the customer. The French philosopher Baudrillard expresses this fundamental idea:
Neither [advertising's] rhetoric nor even the informational aspect of its discourse has a decisive effect on the buyer. What the individual does respond to, on the other hand, is advertising's underlying leitmotiv of protection and gratification, the intimation that its solicitations and attempts to persuade are the sign, indecipherable at the conscious level, that somewhere there is an agency (a social agency in the event, but one that refers ditectly to the image of the mother) which has taken it upon itself to inform him of his own desires, and to foresee and rationalize these desires to his own satisfaction. He thus no more 'believes' in advertising than the child believes in Father Christmas, but this in no way impedes his capacity to embrace an internalized infantile situation, and to act accordingly. Herein lies the very real effectiveness of advertising, founded on its obedience to a logic which, though not that of the conditioned reflex, is nonetheless very rigorous: a logic of belief and regression.44
Varda Langholz-Leymore has methodically transposed Baudrillard's theory, with specific application to French structuralism. Her study refers primarily to Levi-Strauss, but also treats Jacques Lacan. She
borrows from them the structuralist theory that there exists an inborn universal subconscious of mankind, the content of which is not defined or predetermined, but which is thought to be a form following inherent psychological structures which are - according to Lacan - reflected in the language. Langholz-Leymore considers her analysis of advertising, which she summarizes as follows, a contribution to the discovery of these inherent structures:
The analysed product and not-product categories are signified by the following binary pairs: war/peace, new/old, life/death, in/out (or endogenous/exogenous), body/soul, good/evil, normal/abnormal, sacred time/profane time, happiness/misery, knowledge/ ignorance, culture/nature, and hot/cold. Already in this list a certain repetition is apparent.45
In Langholz-Eeymore's view, advertising continually falls back upon the same unchanging elements of human nature:
I have striven to show that symbolic elements of a certain type are bound together in a specified network. This endeavour would have been utterly impossible if it was not for the supposition that a certain classificatory predisposition of the mind has existed a priori. What I did is simply to unveil, in a specific system of appearances, a general tendency which has always been there.46
Advertising is not an innovative force, but one which renews and reinforces 'hidden myths':
As such, myth is precisely like advertising, a conservative force. It is not concerned with revolutionising the existing order of things but with preserving it. Advertising advocates consumption of new products, or reinforces consumption of old products, but both are done using accepted themes and well-established symbols of happiness, health and success. Far from changing values, it very much adheres to and upholds existing ones. Above and beyond this, advertising (like myth) acts as an anxiety-reducing mechanism. This is done first by re-stating, on the deep level, the basic dilemmas of the human condition; and second by offering a solution to them. It reiterates the essential dichotomies of life - good and evil, life and death, happiness and misery, etc. - and simultaneously solves them. To the constant anxieties of life, advertising gives a simple answer. In consuming certain products, one buys not only a 'thing' but also an image, one which invokes - and evokes - belief in and hope of having the good rather than the bad, happiness rather than misery, success rather than failure, life rather than death.47
Langholz-Leymore develops a new perspective on advertising, placing the interaction of advertising with basic life questions at the centre of our attention. This interaction is not intended to enlighten anyone or to spur critical thinking, but it reinforces fundamental innate structures.
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On this point, the notion of the 'hidden myths' differs significantly from the competing 'signification theory' of advertising. This latter theory postulates that advertising responds very quickly to social shifts. Advertising is not only not an expression of the unchanging; it is rather a seismograph for social changes.
The signifying power of advertising
This theory maintains that advertising does not exist only to reinforce or promote common factors of economic, social, or natural developments, but that it is an independent power in modern society: advertising, since the second half of the nineteenth century, has not been some tangible expression of a long-existing phenomenon, but represents something entirely new. Advertising is regarded as having its own epistemology, as an 'order of the things' of the modern age. To use a term which originated in France and has become increasingly popular in English and German research, advertising stands for a new age of 'representation'. It is seen as a previously unknown way of arranging our perception and understanding of the world and of attaching a specific sense to certain words and things. This theory considers advertising to have created a new principle of signification. Advertising as a new form of 'representation' is described by terms like 'commodity culture', that is, a culture based on material products and/or the exchange of these by sale or barter.
An explicit formulation and application of this theory can be found in the recent work of Thomas Richards, who regards 'commodity culture' as a phenomenon specific to capitalism. Its establishment was connected to the construction of a representational system in the world of commerce, which subsequently occupied the world in a semiotic way as well. The wares themselves, which Adam Smith had considered lifeless, were now - according to Richards - provided with life by means of advertising. The things are therefore considered to speak for themselves and in a language of their own, one which has invented and continues to invent many new terms and names.48 Let us return, to Zola and his description of the first Parisian department stores in The Ladies' Paradise:
Groups of women were crushing each other in front of [the display windows], a real mob, made brutal by covetousness. And these passions in the street were giving life to the materials: the laces shivered, then drooped again, concealing the depths of the shop with an exciting air of mystery; even the lengths of cloth, thick and square, were breathing, exuding a tempting odour, while the overcoats were throwing back their shoulders still more on the dummies,
1.8 Photograph, taken in 1851, of the west end of building for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, 1851. The term 'Crystal Palace' was first applied by Punch in 1850 and it immediately became the popular name of the building
Source: C. H. Gibbs-Smith, The Great Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1950, reprint 1964), 51
which were acquiring souls, and the huge velvet coat was billowing out, supple and warm, as if on shoulders of flesh and blood, with a heaving breast and quivering hips.49
'Advertising as signification' was born between approximately 1850 and 1890. For England, the beginning of this new era in advertising thought was symbolized by the famous 1851 London "World's Fair50 and most of all, by the Crystal Palace, the industrial glass of which looked 'like crystal' (Figures 1.8 and 1.9). Richards regards the appearance of the 'industrial world', which was concentrated there for the first time, as the beginning of the commercial world's general process of becoming independent. The next four decades saw the development of a specific representational order of advertising, which was completed by about 1890. Advertising's primary focus had shifted from the representation of goods and products to the representation of the modern world and culture. The new aesthetics of the consumer society was in place even before there was a consumer society to speak of. Only slowly did economic development begin to catch up with this new aesthetic.51
Advertising appears as an expression of a fundamentally new representation of society, designated by the term 'visual culture', a culture in which images have become the primary means of communication. According to Stefan Haas, advertising, as a new development of the visual culture of the modern age, aims at the cultural environment, unlike
34
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1.9   The transept of the Crystal Palace, looking North with the Fountain of Glass in the middle
Source:   As for Figure 1.8
This fountain inspired a poem, excerpted below from a children's toy book.
This is the Fountain, whose beautiful rays, Reflected by crystal and water, amaze; I'm sure you'll admit that they sparkle as fair As the great Koh-i-nor, the Mountain of Light, Which some people say does not look half so bright As a piece of cut glass, etc.*
*   The Fine Crystal Palace the Prince Built (London, 1851/52, reprint Oxford 1975), 3
early advertisements which tried to draw attention directly to the product. Modern advertising plays with all of the loose associations of meaning that we make in the world of things. Advertising, itself immaterial, can thus turn into pure meaning, pure connotation. And it is the visualizing power of the structure of human consciousness that has enabled advertising to establish for itself an emotional meaning beyond the mere transmission of information about a product or a service.52 From the signifying power of advertising, Haas draws sweeping conclusions concerning the relation between advertising and the modern city:
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The modern city works like a system of signs; its individual elements are symbols that refer to meanings. The modern person is accustomed to reading and interpreting these signs without difficulty, and easily finds a way through the world ... The first generation of advertisers, who still regarded themselves as artists, converted the city into one big art exhibition. They brought art into the streets and freed it from the chains of the nineteenth-century tendency to immure art in a museum. Thus, they expanded the role of art in everyday life, a change which was to become significant in the twentieth century.
The next generation, who regarded themselves as psychologists, continued to build on this base. To them, the world appeared as a jungle of images, through which each individual had to find a way, and their aim was to erect guideposts through this jungle. They altered the city, the true field of orientation of a modern person, so that it became a signifier, loaded with symbolic meaning.53
The thesis put forward here posits that the style and culture of a consumer society had been developed and represented in advertising even before the beginning of the transformation of the economy into a consumer society based on popular culture. Richards, citing England as an example, emphasizes that the range of expressions used in advertising was fully developed by approximately 1890.54 The new aesthetics of the consumer society were complete by the time consumer society began to establish itself. It continues to develop along with the economic prosperity it fosters.
The view from the twenty-first century
In the 1950s, European advertising entered a phase of 'Americanization' - defined as the 'substitution of local values, behaviours, procedures, symbols, standards and institutions by those common in the USA'.55 It is true that in the 1920s a first craze of Americanization arose; at that time, American advertising agencies were establishing branches in European cities and European advertising, in consequence, adopted many concepts of 'scientific' advertising. But beginning in the 1950s, American influence increased and led to a change in perceptions of the market, and in the 1970s 'marketing' came into its own, resulting in a 'continuous increase' in the level and intensity of advertising in Europe and the American influence on it.56 This shift can be illustrated by the 1971 repositioning of the Marlboro advertisement. The famous cowboy with the slogan 'Marlboro - the taste of freedom and adventure' replaced the previous 'Modern people - modern life. Marlboro belongs to it' image of people smoking this brand in a 'typical' German living-room of the 1950s or 1960s. The cowboy image had become synonymous with this
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brand of cigarettes much earlier in the USA. Its transfer - in this case to Germany - brought about a profound change in the message conveyed by Marlboro advertisements showing a confidence in, at least in the view of people involved in advertising, 'representation' whose associations were to be recombined with whatever it was that the American West might mean to the more recently affluent smokers of West Germany.57
The latest phase of Americanization began with this transition which, in economically advanced European countries, took place around 1970, by which time, according to a widely accepted periodization, the 'postwar hunger' of the population had long been relieved and could belatedly be properly addressed and satisfied. The indicators of prosperity exceeded all the previous levels and the younger generation now initiated rapid social change. Questions of material needs faded in favour of concepts of lifestyle. For the most part, advertising turned to strategies of emotional positioning and sold experiences along with goods. The consumer's basic needs were considered satisfied, and therefore his or her decisions were no longer expected to be motivated by scarcity or necessity. Those who live in abundance need to be persuaded to buy, and this is accomplished less by means of information than by emotional positioning.58 The theoretical attributes of a number of products and services are more attractive than their functional properties. Such characteristics include the ability to mediate emotional experiences and to make a contribution to the non-material quality of life.59 The 'age of advertising', which began in the big cities, had entered a new stage. The conflict between mass culture and official culture, between aesthetics of content and aesthetics of form, had reached a new level. It was not simply based on the victory of the official taste over that of the masses or vice versa, or on the abandonment of an elitist middle-class view of art in favour of a mass commercial culture. The conflict between an aesthetics of content versus an aesthetics of form dissolved into an aesthetic of the experience of a new mass culture. Sociologists were probably the first to label this change, which Gerhard Schulze described in his book Die Erlebnisgesellschaft (The 'Experience' Society): 'Every aspect of life has become a project of experience (Das Leben schlechthin ist zum Erlebnisprojekt geworden).'60 In the age of visually dominated electronic media, advertising functions as a central coordinating point. What is really advertised is more and more often recognizable only by the insider and is placed within an associative world of images which help the consumer to place the product.
Images used for advertising, in film and especially on television, become part of a universal code accompanying the entry into the modern 'visual culture'. It is obvious that advertising theorists continually
ask themselves what demands intercultural advertising must meet.61 Even if there is only a faint possibility that worldwide standardization and homogenization will become a reality, advertising today reaches an ever-widening circle and is 'not doubted' throughout most of Europe. The city of the nineteenth century has expanded to fill the entire globe, both physically and metaphysically, with advertising making a fundamental contribution to the development of the mental model of the modern city in which we have almost all come to live, that is, the city is a text, 'a world that is created by the combination of elements of the different possible meanings of the visual discourse. To orient ourselves in a constantly changing world we must perpetually combine these anew. The passive flaneur of the nineteenth century has become an active patchworker.'62
Notes
1. Cf. for example Hanns Buchli, 6000 Jahre Werbung: Geschichte der Wirtschaftswerbung und der Propaganda, 3 vols (Berlin: 1962-66).
2. Cf. Werner Sombart, Der Bourgeois: Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen (Munich and Leipzig: 1920), 203-5.
3. Cf. Dirk Reinhardt, Von der Reklame zum Marketing: Geschichte der Wirtschaftswerbung in Deutschland (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 176.
4. Heidrun Homburg, 'Werbung - "eine Kunst, die gelernt sein will". Aufbrüche in eine neue Warenwelt 1750-1850', Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1 (1997), 11.
5. Claire Walsh, 'The Advertising and Marketing of Consumer Goods in Eighteenth Century London', Chapter 4 in this volume.
6. Natacha Coquery, 'French Court Society and Advertising Art: The Reputation of Parisian Merchants at the End of the Eighteenth Century', Chapter 5 in this volume.
7. Emile Zola, The Ladies' Paradise, translated by Brian Nelson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4-5. Concerning advertising in literature, cf. Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement and Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); the best-known example is James Joyce's Ulysses, with his hero, Leopold Bloom, the advertising salesman.
8. Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
9. Walsh, Chapter 4 in this volume.
10. Reinhardt, Von der Reklame zum Marketing, 434f.
11. Silke Brune, '"Lichter der Großstadt": Werbung als Signum einer Urbanen Welt', in Bilderwelt des Alltags: Werbung in der Konsumgesellschaft des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Peter Borscheid and Clemens Wischermann (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995), 90-115.
12. Uwe Spiekermann, 'Display Windows and Window Displays in German Cities of the Nineteenth Century: Towards the History of a Commercial Breakthrough', Chapter 7 in this volume.
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13. Ibid.
14. Stefan Haas, 'Visual Discourse and the Metropolis: the Importance of Mental Models of Cities for the Emergence of Commercial Advertising', Chapter 3 in this volume.
15. Rosalind H. Williams, Dream "Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 11-12.
16. Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
17. Williams, Dream Worlds, 9.
18. Uwe Spiekermann, 'Elitenkampf um die Werbung: Staat, Heimatschutz und Reklameindustrie im frühen 20. Jahrhundert', in Bilderwelt des Alltags: Werbung in der Konsumgesellschaft des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 126-49.
19. Elliott Shore, 'Advertising as Kulturkampf in Berlin and Vienna', Chapter 2 in this volume.
20. Werner Sombart, 'Die Reklame', Morgen: Wochenschrift für deutsche Kultur 6 (March, 1908), 284.
21. Shore, Chapter 2 in this volume.
22. Aaron J. Segal, 'Commercial Immanence: the Poster and Urban Territory in Nineteenth-Century France', Chapter 6 in this volume.
23. Esther Cleven, 'Surrounding the Consumer: Persuasive Campaigns and Dutch Advertising Theory of the 1920s and 1930s', Chapter 8 in this volume.
24. Williams, Dream Worlds, 213ff.
25. Michele H. Bogart, Advertising, Artists and the Borders of Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
26. E. Lysinski, Psychologie des Betriebes (1923), lOf.
27. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
28. For the historical establishment of a 'pure' autonomy of aesthetics in Germany in the nineteenth century see Aleida Assmann, Arbeit am nationalen Gedächtnis: Line kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee (Frankfurt a.M., New York and Paris: Campus, 1993), 57ff.
29. Attempts to combine economy and the arts in a synthesis in order to improve the tastes of the masses were made in several countries. In Germany the arts and crafts movement was the leading force: 'Since 1907 members of the arts and crafts movement had been striving for its reform by making advertising a means of elevating taste {Geschmacksbildung). Artistically designed advertising was meant to educate the aesthetic perception of the masses while simultaneously providing new consumption patterns for them. The discussion had been triggered by the 'Deutscher Werkbund'. Thus a variety of groups pursued the idea of Geschmacksbildung via exhibitions, public lectures, and by founding a technical college.' Christiane Lamberty, '"Die Kunst im Leben des Buttergeschäfts": Geschmacksbildung und Reklame in Deutschland vor 1914', Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1 (1997), 53. In France, we find similar tendencies in the form of an 'art social' designed to uplift class tastes. See Segal, Chapter 6 in this volume.
30. Cleven, 'Surrounding the Consumer', Chapter 8 in this volume.
31. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Pocket Books, 1957).
32. David Riesman, Renel Denney and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).
33. Ibid., 9.
34. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947), cit. following the edition Frankfurt a.M., 1986, esp. Kulturindustrie, Aufklärung als Massenindüstrie, 128-76.
35. A somewhat different view is expressed in Walter Benjamin, 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit', Gesammelte Schriften 7, no.l (1989), 350-84; Herbert Marcuse, One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
36. Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impacts on American Society (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920-15'40 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); Philip Gold, Advertising, Politics and American Culture: From Salesmanship to Therapy (New York: Paragon House, 1987); William Leiss, Steven Kline and Sut Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products and Images of Weil-Being (Toronto and New York: Methuen, 1986); James D. Norris, Advertising and the Transformation of American Society, 1865-1920 (New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1990).
37. Horst W. Brand, Die Legende von den 'geheimen Verführern': Kritische Analysen zur unterschwelligen Wahrnehmung und Beeinflussung (Weinheim and Basel: Bletz, 1978).
38. Horst W. Brand, 'Unterschwellige Werbung: Nicht sehen, doch glauben?' Jahrbuch der Absatz- und Verbrauchsforschung 26 (1980), 387. For a more detailed account, see Brand, Die Legende von den 'geheimen Verführern'.
39. Neil Postman's views, however, which clung to and prolonged the older assumptions and anxieties about manipulation, were still decidedly present in the media even in the late twentieth century. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, he combines George Orwell's and Aldous Huxley's visions of the future to illustrate his own. According to Postman, society is controlled by means similar to those used in Orwell's 1984, in which pictures and independent thought are forbidden, but towards an end more similar to that of Huxley's Brave New World, in which control of society was achieved by creating a world of diversion. In this latter work, it is books, rather than pictures, that are prohibited, but here again independent thought is taboo. And this, according to Postman, is exactly our fate. Postman's arguments against the 'conversion of a culture determined by words into a culture determined by images' are characterized by a surprisingly rigid insistence on a working society of written culture (schriftkulturelle Arbeitsgesellschaft). His explicit hostility to images, which he himself bases on a reference to the Ten Commandments, reveals his constant fear of 'secret seducers'. However, it is worth noting that Postman's reference to Huxley omits something critical: in Huxley's work manipulation is ultimately successful not simply via amusement but only with the help of 'pills of happiness'. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to
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40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking Press, 1985).
Werner Kroeber-Riel, Konsumentenverhalten, 4th edition (Munich: Vahlen, 1990), 19.
Reinhardt, Von der Reklame zum Marketing, 11.
Siegfried J. Schmidt, Detlef Sinofzik and Brigitte Spieß, 'Wo lassen Sie leben? Kulturfaktor Werbung - Entwicklungen und Trends der 80er Jahre', in Aufbruch in die Neunziger, edited by Christian W. Thomsen (Cologne: DuMont, 1991), 150.
Eirik G. Furubotn and Rudolf Richter, Institutions and Economic Theory: An Introduction to and Assessment of the New Institutional Economics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, translated by James Benedict (New York: Verso, 1996), 167. Originally published as Le systéme des objets in 1968.
Varda Langholz-Leymore, Hidden Myth: Structure and Symbolism in Advertising (London: Heinemann Educational, 1975), 141. Ibid., 149. Ibid., ixf.
'In the first half of the nineteenth century the commodity was a trivial thing, like one of Adam Smith's pins. In the second half it had a world-historical role to play in a global industrial economy.' Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising as Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University, 1990), 1. Zola, The Ladies' Paradise, 16.
Utz Haltern, Die Londoner Weltausstellung von 1851 (Münster, Aschendorff, 1971). The author would like to thank Utz Haltern for his help.
Stefan Haas, 'Die neue Welt der Bilder: Werbung und visuelle Kultur der Moderne', in Bilderwelt des Alltags: Werbung in der Konsumgesellschaft des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 64-77. Ibid., 70.
Haas, 'Visual Discourse and the Metropolis: The Importance of Mental Models of Cities for the Emergence of Commercial Advertising', Chapter 3 in this volume.
Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 8.
Harm G. Schröter, 'Die Amerikanisierung der Werbung in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland', Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte (1997),
93-115.
Ingo Böbel, 'Advertising and Economic Development: The West German Experience during the 1970s', Journal of Advertising (1982), 237-52. This example also illustrates the complexities of transnational advertising campaigns. The advertisements running for a generation in German cinemas, which had for the German viewer a 'typical' American feel, had been banned from television in the USA, and the USA itself has no tradition of showing advertising films at the movies. Thus, this 'American' cultural icon was alive and present in this form only outside the USA. Inside the mother country of the image, the death of the 'real' Marlboro man from lung cancer was the image that the cowboy projected, as he became a poster boy for an intensified anti-smoking campaign. Dieter Ronte and Holger Bonus, Werbung (Münster: 1993), 6.
59    K.toebtx-'K.id, Konsumentenverhalten, 68.
60.   Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart
(Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Campus, 1993), 13. 61    Wendelin G. Müller, Interkulturelle Werbung (Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag
Rudolf Liebing, 1997). 62.   Haas, 'Visual Discourse', Chapter 3 in this volume.
Historical Urban Studies Series editors: Richard Rodger and Jean-Luc Pinol
Titles in this series include:
Capital Cities and their Hinterlands in Early Modern Europe edited by Peter Clark and Bernard Lepetit
Power, Profit and Urban Land: Landowner ship in Medieval and Early Modern Northern European Towns edited by Finn-Einar Eliassen and Geir Atle Ersland
Water and European Cities from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century edited by Jean-Luc Pinol and Dennis Menjeot
The Built Form of Colonial Cities Manuel Texeira
Advertising and the European City edited by Clemens Wischermann and Elliott Shore
Cathedrals of Urban Modernity: The First Museums of Contemporary Art, 1800-1930 J. Pedro Lorente
Body and City: A Cultural History of Urban Public Health edited by Helen Power and Sally Sheard
The Artisan and the European Town, 1500-1900 edited by Geoffrey Crossick
Urban Fortunes: Property and Inheritance in the Town, 1700-1900 edited by Jon Stobart and Alastair Owens
Advertising and the European City:
Historical Perspectives
Edited by
CLEMENS WISCHERMANN and ELLIOTT SHORE
Ashgate
Aldershot • Burlington USA • Singapore • Sydney