“Product Not Available in Pre-War Quantities – but Quality Remains the Same”: Remarks on Advertisements as Historical Sources (original) (raw)

A Gaze Through the Mirror: Advertising and History

Historians constantly struggle with the difficulties of decoding the signs of the times according to which certain segments of history are recognised, become specific and distinct from others. Driven by the desire to quench their intellectual curiosity and the need to find out the truth, they are forced to add, select, group, reject and doubt documents and facts, searching for fragments from which they will attempt to piece together the picture of a past time. This picture is always a more or less pale copy of the "original"-of a past reality, once consisting of an uncountable multitude of threads which linked the moments of each individual life, of a network which it is impossible to connect again in the same shape due to its unique complexity. The obsessive devotion to studying political, military or diplomatic history and the pyrotechnic effects which have always accompanied wrangles over land, power and riches still cause a sort of "night blindness" in members of the sect of worshippers of the muse Clio, preventing them from seeing all those "ordinary", transient phenomena which much less noticeably, but still persistently and strongly influence the forming of everyday human existence. The despised (past) "quotidian life" is much harder for the historian to get to, also because it appears in countless hard-to-grasp forms; to study it, a new heuristics, a new methodology and different thinking about the past are needed in order to "resuscitate" some slice of the erased quotidian life. Sources for this reconstruction and analysis cannot always be subjected to criticism in the way that the strict old rules made for reading and understanding classical sources demand. They are also more numerous and varied, they require adaptability in the researcher and count on the awakening of his inventiveness and imagination. Also, most "testimony" about past quotidian life is very flimsy: the nature of their function was not to last long and testify. Their short-lived utility, like some self-destructing "genetic code", determined in advance the fate of these sources chosen at the historian's will. All this certainly applies to advertising (of goods and services), too, as it can be seen as an interesting additional historical source for studying economic and social history. What made this "Champollionic" problem into the nightmare of researchers of the modern era is the selection and reading of these "codes" from the enormous quantity of new textual and visual material which multiplied daily at increasing speed. The explosion of media in this short century (whose fuse was carelessly lit by Guttenberg) brought down the dams which had held the flow of information at a perceptually more bearable level. Conversion of most of the world into consumers of goods and information was supported in an organised fashion since the beginning of the 19th century by the introduction of a discipline which would with its special language, iconography and rules of application influence the creation of a "sign system" according to which periods would be recognised. Advertising and advertisements would become a special kind of communication typical to modern societies. This universality and readability-put in the service of selling goods and ideas-influenced the shaping of quotidian life, but also the creation of a Utopian image, in our country, too, of the "wide world" from which all wonders come. Here, too, the establishing of advertising was connected to the creation of the modern bourgeoise as a sepsocial stratum capable of accepting (wether selectively or unselectively ia

CONSUMER CULTURE UNDER CONSTRUCTION, A REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN PRINTED ADVERTISEMENTS (1900‒1940

SUMMARY: In the context of mass production of media images, the early occurrence of illustrations in the popular structure of advertisements is an extremely precious indicator of a revolutionary shift of attention— from words to the image — which occurred in Serbian print media at the end of the 19th century. The crucial role in the shaping of both visual and textual plains in mass printed media was played by the occurrence of clothing industry around 1900, the majority of which was intended for women, both in European countries and in Serbia. The industrial production of ready-made clothing was accompanied by new shops and department stores as well as illustrated printed advertisements. It can be said that the industrial creation of products was closely followed by the mass production of images. In the 19 th century, the information about fairs, bazaars, dinner dances in the civil casinos, educational books, and even cigars for teeth, against toothache [Janc 1978] could be found in advertisements as well. Chaotic and heterogeneous pages with cultural programs and advertisements are offered to generations of readers, as optional and kind of form of relaxation, only after all important events, which means in the end of the newspaper and magazine [Peković 2004]. Once established hierarchy in informative contents of print media functions more or less the same nowadays. But no matter how exciting and various contents of those messages about historical advertisements were, their visual form has been preserved by the frozen façade of framed and scanty textual information. The graphic designer's uniformity regarding advertisement design have not changed for decades in most of newspapers and magazines that were published in the Serbian language during the nineteenth century. Therefore, it is easy to conclude that the message of advertisement was articulated almost exclusively in the text of the advertisement, while the visual surface in communication with readers was of secondary significance. Rarely, decorative frames and symbolic graphic signs appeared, and among them the best known is reversed hand with middle finger extended. Clichés that have already been created and downloaded from the graphic catalogues were the only source of scanty visual presentations in printed advertising messages during the 19 th century. The typified visual forms, which were multiplied without any apparent connection to the products, built a consistent relationship with the clichés in the textual surface of advertisement. The whole phrases in advertisements have been monotonously repeated on pages of various newspapers, as it is the case today, that even a quick glance was more than enough to find relevant information. A drowsy attention of readers of Serbian press caused by old and worn out clichés was broken in the last decade of the 19 th century when the first advertisements with illustrations

Selling the crisis: British and German advertising industry during the 1970s

2013

Within Western Europe, the 1970s are usually perceived as a decade of uncertainty and decline, marking a turning point towards 'post-industrial' societies. Economic difficulties and political instability gave rise to a climate of constant crisis. However, this was not the case for the advertising industry. Although it also suffered from cuts in advertising expenditure, the amount of money spent on advertising actually increased throughout the decade. Indeed, it even doubled in Germany. This thesis seeks to show how advertising industries in Germany and Great Britain managed to overcome economic difficulties, changes in consumption patterns and criticism thanks to a burgeoning consumerist movement. By focusing on how advertisers perceived the commercial environment and attempted to influence consumption in the interests of their clients, it becomes clear that advertising is more than just business expenditure. Rather, advertising illustrates how attitudes towards consumption ...

Advertising as Social Institution: Charles Wilp and German Television, 1950-1970

Bo Florin, Patrick Vonderau and Yvonne Zimmermann, Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Culture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), 2019

Advertising is regularly described as a central institution of society. But the term is often merely used as a placeholder to avoid a more detailed historical account of the way advertising practices are organized. Based on a thorough examination of the Charles Wilp Collection at Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin, the chapter provides an historical account of Wilp’s (1932-2005) work in German advertising during the 1960s and 70s. It also proposes a definition of screen advertising and an analytical heuristics for describing moving image advertisements.