The Business Of Progress: The Transformation of American Advertising, 1870-1920

Images with factories and billowing clouds of smoke and owners' portraits presiding over their wares flourished before 1900 and then faded almost entirely from evidence, going the way of crowded and heavily typeset newspaper and magazine advertisements. Consumer-oriented messages replaced these and other promotional styles common to the nineteenth century as advertising specialists began to wrest control of creative processes from the advertisers themselves, that is, from the business people who advertised. These changes in advertisements and their creation are readily observed, but they have not previously been explained for lack of adequately linking them to changes in business practices, needs, and personnel. Why did these changes occur? In brief, the explanations lie in the combined effects of: 1) the shift from owner-operation to corporate management in leading manufacturing and merchandising finns; 2) the growing recognition of the importance of controlling marketing channels by promoting trademarks directly to consumers; 3) the development of a national marketplace mediated by magazines and newspapers; and 4)the responses by advertising specialists to these changes with new perspectives on the functions of advertisements and their own functions as professionals. Within the owner-manager system that dominated United States business before 1890, the inclinations, abilities, and interests of individual entrepreneurs determined their finns' advertising policies and messages. They worked directly with job printers to create lithographed and typeset advertisements in the non-commissionable media such as posters, trade cards, calendars, and packaging. They also created their own messages for