The Functions Of Advertising

It was in the advertisement columns of The Times, at a somewhat earlier date, that men were first invited to try a humble but now indispensable article of male attire, the “new invented gallowses or breeches suspensors, for keeping up the breeches without girthing them tight round the waist, but, on the contrary, keep them well up and loose’. Of course, advertising was no new thing, even a hundred years ago. Nearly a century before that, Dr. Johnson had ventured the opinion that “the trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement”.

Earlier still, in 1710, advertising was already so prominent as to merit an essay in The Taller by Dr. Addison himself. But a great growth came with the industrial revolution and the period of trade expansion which followed it, and the connection between the two series of events merits study. It helps to explain how and why the business of persuasion had become so closely interwoven with the production, distribution and consumption of goods in our early 20th century economy.

Many critics have drawn attention to the increasing disproportion between costs of distribution and costs of production in modern business enterprise. Whether or not advertising contributes to the high relative costs of distribution, it is not the fundamental cause, which is to be found in the inevitable separation of the producer from the consumer resulting from modern large-scale, highly specialised production.

Before the industrial revolution in the latter part of the eighteenth century, persuasive advertising on a large scale would have had no purpose, and the cost of distributing the ordinary necessities of life was negligible. The producer and the consumer lived side by side. Most articles were made to order and the producer had an assured though entirely local and limited market.

It is not without significance that the first important change in the old system of domestic industry came on the side of marketing, not of production.

The immunity of England from foreign invasion during the eighteenth century led to a steady increase in prosperity and to a growth of capital which was first exploited by entrepreneurs to expand the market for the products of domestic industries.

At first these “undertakers” sought out possible producers in their own homes, gave them orders to make the goods required, and themselves concentrated upon marketing the articles so produced over an ever wider and wider area. It was only by gradual stages that the undertaker became first the employer of the domestic producer, and then the organiser of production in a factory under his own control.

Once he had become a manufacturer he tended to devote himself to the problems of factory production and to leave the marketing of his goods to others. The enormous concentration upon production throughout the nineteenth century made the manufacturer the aristocrat of the industrial world.

Problems of marketing sank for a long time to a lower order of interest and importance. The manufacturer and the economist alike neglected them. But a time came when the problems of marketing forced their way back into the forefront and would no longer be ignored.

The enterprise and initiative first developed in the marketing field, then absorbed in the problems of production, had to turn again to marketing in order to find an adequate outlet for the products of the factories.

In the early days of factory production there was a ready sale for all the goods the factories could produce. The modern system of distribution arose and relieved the manufacturer of all anxiety about the disposal of his products. Wholesalers were eager to buy, and passed the goods on to the retailers who sold them to the public.

But as factory production grew, as wealth and investment increased, as new inventions multiplied and gave rise to the production of an ever increasing volume and variety of goods, the scales gradually shifted against the manufacturer.

He found himself faced with a whole new set of problems. He had invested his capital and his skill in factory plant that had enormously reduced the cost of production and enabled him to sell his goods to the wholesaler at an incredibly low price.

But the benefits of factory production were dependent upon a swift and assured outlet for the product of the machines, an outlet sufficient in scale to keep the machines working ail the time. And as production increased all round, the outlet for each individual producer became less and less assured.

The problem of overproduction, or, as we have now learnt to call it, under-consumption, began to make its appearance.

It is the existence of this problem, as Marshall has shown, that explains the increasing energy with which sellers push their goods on the notice of buyers. In particular, the rise of modern advertising is explained by the need of the manufacturer to assure himself of a steady and a profitable market in competition with an ever increasing variety of other mass-produced articles offered to the public.

In advertising the manufacturer discovered a technique which enabled him to regain control of his market by appealing directly to the ultimate consumer, and thus compelling wholesaler and retailer to stock his goods.

The Character of Advertising

Modern advertising is almost infinite in its variety. The notices of Births, Marriages and Deaths on the front page of The Times are advertisements; so is the announcement of a house to let, whether it appears in the classified columns of a newspaper or on an agent’s board planted in the front garden. These and a hundred similar examples represent advertising in its primary purpose of giving public information. Nobody questions either the propriety or the utility of advertising of this kind, unless indeed the information given is false or misleading, or the manner of giving it is so obtrusive or ugly as to cause offence. Then it may lead to questions of an ethical or social kind. But in general all the vast daily mass of advertising which can be regarded as strictly informative in character may be regarded as not only unobjectionable but plainly useful and necessary.

It is apparent, however, that a very large proportion of modern advertising is by no means limited to the purpose of giving useful information to the public. Its primary object is not to inform but to persuade. Sometimes the informative and persuasive functions of an advertisement are so closely linked that it is difficult to separate them. A publisher’s catalogue, or a list of steamship sailings, may be regarded as primarily informative. But the question will be one of degree. If, for example, the publisher takes a large space in one of the Sunday papers, decks it out attractively and quotes extracts from the more favourable reviews of his books; or if the steamship company adds to the bare notice of a forthcoming sailing some enticing descriptions of the places to be visited; then it is fairly safe, to assume that the main purpose is not to inform the public, but to persuade them to take some action which mil be of benefit to the advertiser; to buy the book or to register for the cruise in preference to spending their money in some other way.

Now this is the kind of advertising that gives rise to the main questions dealt with in this book. Advertising which is purely informative in its object can be ignored for our purpose. Very little observation or reflection is needed to jihow that it is a small proportion of the whole. Yet it is important to notice the distinction between the informative and the persuasive functions of advertising, since some writers have sought to use this distinction as a basis for their separation of the sheep from the goats.

Nearly all modern advertising is persuasive in intention. Some advertisements mingle much information with their persuasive appeal, some little, and some none at all. But for our purpose advertising may be regarded as a vast apparatus of persuasion, by which the eyes and ears of the public are constantly assailed with cunning inducement to do this, or to buy that, or to think favourably of the other. It cannot be rightly justified or condemned by its incidental effects, though some of these, to be considered in their place, are of very great importance. The information given by advertisements is generally only incidental to their main purpose, which is persuasion. Is this vast business of persuasion really necessary? Does it serve a useful social purpose? These are the main questions to be answered in judging modern advertising.

The Dawn of TV Advertising

Since the dawn of television, invented in 1922 by John Logie Baird, a dreamof many scientists for decades (Historic figures, BBC), it took a few years for thetechnology to be adapted. Eventually the BBC started broadcasting (under the name TheBBC Television Service) from Alexandra Palace via Marconi equipment.

It was not until the hostilities of war in 1939 that it was realized, by the Nazis, thattelevision can be ‘a tool to manipulate the masses’ (Inventions that changed the world,BBC). Goebbels, Hitlers propaganda minister, is quoted to have said ‘The NationalSocialist State considers it a first duty to infuse into art, new impulses which shall deepenpublic understanding of the greatness of the time (Sington and Weidenfeld, 1942). Thiswould lead us to assume that the Nazis considered that television would be a ‘newimpulse’, using the technology to infuse or ‘advertise’ the ‘greatness’ thus meaningHitler, of that time.

The power of television from that point was evident, convincing theGerman people that nothing out of place was happening around the country, that all of thepropaganda that the allies were spreading was false and that they were winning the war.

This showed that it was perfectly feasible to tell your audience anything and if it wasbeing shown on television then it must be right. We can consider the idea that the fantastic technology [television] was so new at the time that it would have been all themore believable to the audience who were used to listening to the radio or watchingnewsreels in the cinema.

These moving pictures on this small box in their living room must be showing wonderful and truthful things.