The subject of the typewriter should not be left without mention of the familiar arrange-
60 A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION
ment of its inefficient keyboard. rlypewrit- ers and the computer keyboards that fol- lowed use what is called the QWERTY arrangement of letters and numbers, named for the letters on the left side of the third row of keys. Many of the earlier key- boards were set up in alphabetical order to facilitate learning. Before the invention of the shift key, separate keys were needed for capital letters.
Inventor Christopher Sholes and his brother designed their keyboard to slow the arrival at the printing point of frequently used letter pairs. In 1873, the type bars pivoted upward and easily jammed. The QWERTY keyboard was arranged so that the bars holding the letters that often turn up in combinations (such as ie, ti, th) or appear frequently (such as the, of or, and) would come to the printing point from op-
posite directions. Further, this keyboard arrangement favors the left hand although most people are right handed; for example, the frequently used a must be struck by the weakest finger, the left pinky, while the seldom used j lies directly under the strong right forefinger.
Today, fast electric typewriters and elec- tronic computer keyboards obviate any ar- rangement that slows typing speed. More sensible organizations have been pro- posed, notably the Dvorak keyboard, but the public, accustomed to the existing lay- out, seems to be stuck with it.
The typewriter may be on its way out as a significant tool of communication, but in a number of meaningful ways its legacy will remain.
"If Anyone Desires..."
If ever a means of communication existed that enabled multitudes of people to send an infinite number of messages by a variety of means to even greater multitudes of other people, it has been advertising.
Among those messages are advertisements promoting the quality of candidates for po- litical office and the delights or perils of the controversial issues before the society.
Anyone who doubts its egalitarian thrust should imagine the opposite of what exists in free and open societies. Imagine a soci- ety in which very few people are allowed to advertise to a selected few a highly re- stricted number of goods and services, cer- tainly not including candidates competing for office or the political issues of the day.
Creating Demand
The Industrial Revolution, which brought an unimagined variety of goods to the working classes, needed more than mass production and mass distribution. The next step in the chain, mass marketing, required advertising not only to announce the avail- ability of goods, but to convince prospec- tive buyers to part with their money.
Advertising had to create demand.
Before advertising, which is mostly a means of moving mass produced goods, the uniqueness of an item was a distinct selling point, as exemplified by the cartoonish dis- may of a woman who discovered that an- other woman was wearing the same hat.
Now, several generations later, her great granddaughter and great grandson won't be caught dead in jeans or sneakers that don't carry the brand name all their friends wear.
Advertisers talk of brand loyalty.
The advertisement has displaced the sales agent, but the ad is more than a helper.
The primary argument of the salesman was personal and private: this hat is perfect for you (singular).... The primary argument of the advertisement was public and general:
this hat is perfect for you (plural)... The ad- vertisement succeeded when it discovered, defined, and persuaded a new community of consumers.34
The drummer with a battered case of wares represented a human element in the rela- tionship of buyer and seller that dissolved with the centrifugal force of the advertise- ment. In the early nineteenth century, ad-
MASS MEDIA 61
vertising lacked a human face. Instead, ag- ate lines of single column type explained what the prospective buyer needed to know. After the stereotyping process brought in display ads, some advertise- ments supplied a human dimension with sketches of happy consumers or the friendly Betty Crocker and Aunt Jemima. Ra- dio added a voice and television added a face plus a voice plus movement so the customer, shorn of direct communication, had a reference group, however distant or fictitious.
Origins of Advertising
As the old saying puts it, the more things change the more they stay the same. The first advertising was oral, delivered in an- cient times by barkers in the marketplace shouting the wares of merchants. Some of the latest advertising is similarly oral. Just tune in television at night to watch and hear barkers shouting the wares of automobile dealers.
Outdoor advertising can be traced to posted notices on papyrus in ancient Egypt for runaway slaves. Instead of something for sale, notices of runaway slaves and bond servants, with rewards offered, may have been the first written advertising.
Such notices were posted during all the centuries of slavery for the logical reason that these valuable pieces of property did not enjoy their life's condition, and pos- sessed both the brains and legs to do some- thing about it.
Testimony to the antiquity of advertis- ing were the public crier in ancient Greece, shouting his wares to a nonliterate public in an oral age, and the sandwich man who carried his picture message on the front and back of his shirt, possibly an invention in Carthage. Archaeologists at the ruins of Pompeii unearthed walls that may have been controlled by an early version of an ad agency, filled with notices of theatrical performances, sports events, and contests of gladiators.
Few references exist to advertising dur- ing the Dark Ages, when literacy was re- garded of little worth; in fact, to advertise a product might bring bandits as well as cus-
tomers to the door. The growth of mercan- tilism during the Middle Ages changed that attitude. Notices called siquis were posted in public places, the term coming from the Latin si quis ("if anyone") because so many began "If anyone knows..." or "If anyone desires..."
Shortly after the invention of movable type in Europe in the mid-fifteenth cen- tury, printed notices began to appear. News sheets of the sixteenth century sometimes carried advertising, such as an ad for a book extolling the medicinal virtues of a myste- rious herb. By the seventeenth century, tradesmen distributed handbills with not only printed words, but woodcut illustra- tions, hand lettering, and fancy borders.
A French Journal of Public Notices, a me- dium for want ads, was published in 1612;
now called Les Petites Affiches (Little No- tices), it is still published as a carrier of want ads and legal notices. It holds the distinc- tion of being the world's oldest, continuous periodical. In England, a series of advertis- ing newspapers called the City Mercury were distributed free.
Printed advertising at this time was often for the sale of books (printers, after all, printed not only the ads, but the books), auctions, houses for rent, spices for sale, and other merchandise just arrived by ship, plus rewards for runaway horses or run- away apprentices. Groceries at the con- sumer level, clothing, or household goods were generally not things to be advertised in print, although near miraculous cures might be. Requests for the return of lost articles were posted then as now.
The Word Is "Advertising"
The word advertisement began to show up in the latter half of the seventeenth cen- tury, replacing advices, which had replaced the older siquis. The word advertisement appears in the Bible and in the plays of Shakespeare in the sense of warning or notification.
From Roman signposts to eighteenth century English bill postings, the outdoor sign carried announcements of wants and offering, and identified places of business.
The first commercial billboard, known in
62 A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION
Britain as a hoarding, is credited (if that is the appropriate term) to a London clothing merchant in 1740.
The Industrial Revolution of the nine- teenth century led to a sharp increase in advertising as manufacturers sought out- lets for the goods produced by their facto- ries. Town criers had become less active, but now advertising bills were posted on walls everywhere, sometimes pasted up in the dead of night before police or property owners could stop them. No lamppost was safe. The sandwich man was back, side- walks were stenciled, and billboards went up, for it became essential to use the tools of communication to market the goods coming out of the factories.
Mass production and distribution cannot be completely controlled, however, without control of a third area of the economy:
demand and consumption...The mecha- nism for communicating information to a national audience of consumers developed with the first truly mass medium: power- driven, multiple-rotary printing and mass mailing by rail.35
The Civil War ended the practice by many American newspapers of placing advertis- ing on the front page. War news was too significant to be consigned to inside pages.
After the war the news-filled front page, its columns led by multiple-deck headlines, remained. Simply, it increased circulation.
For a time one or two front-page columns continued to contain ads, but in most news- papers, these eventually were relegated to the inside. Elsewhere in the world, front page advertising still continues, but the practice in the United States is sharply cur- tailed.
By the mid-nineteenth century, adver- tisers had found a new means of distribut- ing their circulars—the postal system, supported by that new revenue device, the postage stamp. This direct mail allowed advertisers to use large display type and woodcut illustrations, both still barred from most newspapers until the end of the nine- teenth century. Printers of circulars were not slow to take advantage of their oppor- tunity.
By the close of the nineteenth century, the magazine advertisement had become a principal national vehicle for the distribu- tion of the standardized goods. Selling the public on the bicycle as an ideal form of transportation was the first national ad campaign. Its success led to advertising for a new form of transportation, the automo- bile. The magazine publisher was now as much concerned with consumer groups as with editorial content.
The Advertising Agency
Another new facet of advertising in the late nineteenth century was the advertising agency, an American phenomenon which spread to Europe and then around the world. The agency concept began earlier in the century in France, where newspaper publishers regarded the acceptance of ads directly from advertisers as beneath their dignity. Instead, they sold space in bulk to contractors who retailed the space to those with goods to sell. Something like this con- cept was later adopted by American agen- cies. In the United States, the first version of the ad agency was the independent en- trepreneur or newsdealer who, as a side- line, accepted ads for newspapers. Except for brokering space, the first agencies of- fered no service.
The next step taken by these space bro- ker agencies was to offer lower rates to advertisers of nationally sold goods who agreed to buy space in dozens or hundreds of newspapers for each ad. The agency pointed out that by setting up a page of ads only once, a savings could be passed along to the advertiser. Agency owners empha- sized their own knowledge of the media they dealt with, especially the actual circu- lation, a figure that was not likely to agree with the publisher's inflated numbers.
Some magazine publishers refused ad- vertising; others accepted it reluctantly.
Most resented the intrusion of questions about their circulation figures. When one advertising agent, George Rowell, asked the executives at Harper's Weekly about their circulation, they responded by reject- ing his advertising.
MASS MEDIA 63
As time went on, agents offered other activities such as copy writing and cam- paign planning until the full-service adver- tising agency so well known today was in place. Lord & Thomas, N.W. Ayer & Son, and the J. Walter Thompson Company were among the pioneer agencies that of- fered more than just what the advertiser requested. Among the largest advertisers in this period were Sears, Roebuck; Quaker Oats; Eastman Kodak; H.L. Heinz; and the National Biscuit Company, all giants of in- dustry today.
A sharp rise in the number and circula- tion of magazines aided a phenomenal growth of advertising during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Halftone engrav- ing was a boon to advertisers. Many prod- ucts, identified in the public's mind by trademarks, were usually outline figures until the halftone photograph breathed life into them.
Advertising got into high gear only at the end of the last century, with the invention of photoengraving. Ads and pictures then became interchangeable and have contin- ued so... For both the pictorial ad or the pic- ture story provide large quantities of instant information and instant humans, such as are necessary for keeping abreast in our kind of culture.36
Catalogs and Patent Medicines
The direct-mail catalog provided another means of advertising goods. Montgomery Ward & Co. in 1872 issued the first mail- order catalog that was larger than a leaflet.
The Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog and oth- ers that followed were eagerly awaited in rural hamlets and hollows where they brought touches of comfort and civilization to lives that had little enough of these. They have become an important part of Amer- ica's collective memory.
Chances on lotteries and patent medi- cines were among items offered for sale, which helped to give advertising a reputa- tion for fraud, yet they did some good. Yale and Harvard, for example, owed construc- tion of some of their buildings to widely advertised lotteries.
As for patent medicines, it is question- able if any good beyond wealth for the purveyors and security for new periodicals came out of advertising for the vast number of fake nostrums that promised to grow hair or cure any and all of the ills known to humankind. The claims went unchal- lenged until federal government agencies were empowered to demand truth in adver- tising. A few newspapers acted inde- pendently to ban the worst of the medical quackery. A major effort at proscribing such advertising followed a decision by The Ladies' Home Journal in 1892 to print no more medical advertising of any kind. The Journal's editor, Edward W. Bok, took to printing chemical analyses of some of the more widely advertised preparations. A shocked public learned that many of the cures were laced with alcohol, cocaine, or morphine. Hundreds of thousands of moth- ers had been quieting their teething babies with a widely advertised soothing syrup containing morphine. The Federal Food and Drugs Act, passed in 1906, was a rem- edy for the quack ads.
Brand Names
There are people who can remember when few goods came pre-wrapped. Pickles and soap flakes came out of barrels. The drug- gist decanted soft-drink syrup and perfume from large bottles. Brand names, if they existed at all, hardly mattered until massive national advertising campaigns made household words of such products as Gold Medal flour, Pillsbury flour, Kellogg's corn- flakes, American lbbacco, Diamond matches, Borden and Carnation condensed milk, Campbell Soup, Heinz 57 foods, Quaker Oats, Wrigley's gum, Proctor and Gamble soap, and Kodak film.' When Campbell Soup paid for its first large scale ad campaign, the company secretary re- portedly said to the treasurer, "Well, we've kissed that money goodbye!"'
The National Biscuit Company, which began to advertise in 1898, created a small revolution in food packaging by emphasiz- ing through advertising the cleanliness, freshness, and convenience of crackers wrapped in wax paper inside a cardboard
64 A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION
box. In a short time, the campaign led to the removal of the familiar grocery store cracker barrel, around which, according to American lore, small town folks would gather. Open barrels and bins were re- placed by cans and cardboard. Grocers stopped scooping unlabeled butter from tubs. Soap was papered and branded with a colored label. Even farm families rode to town for wrapped and sealed food. Maga- zines did well by all this.
Philadelphia dry goods merchant John Wanamaker advertised fixed prices for his buttons and linens at a time when store- keepers charged whatever they thought a customer would pay. He hired John Pow- ers, the first notable copywriter, to write the ads. As business doubled, other mer- chants took notice.
More Advertising Tools
Outdoor advertising prospered. Rows of cards above the windows of streetcars, buses, and subway trains fixed the atten- tion of riders. No industrial city could be free of billboards, nor does evidence appear that any city wanted to. The first electrical sign went up in 1891 along Broadway, soon known as The Great White Way when the flashing lights of the huge Times Square advertising signs became a symbol not only of New York, but of America itself. Neon tubes came along in 1923 to display mes- sages in colored lights.
The advertising industry readily adapted to the new behavioral science of psychology early in the twentieth century.
Making salesmanship scientific had great appeal and no lack of success when the art of selling combined with psychology and statistics as marketing research.
The number of advertisers expanded as the nation grew. So did the volume of ad- vertising and total ad budgets. Between 1939 and 1956, the number of national ad- vertisers tripled and the number of brands they sold through ads nearly quadrupled.
Advertising introduced both the memo- rable slogan, such as Kodak's "You press the button. We do the rest," and the radio jingle, which followed the tradition of advertising
rhymes that had appeared in English peri- odicals a century earlier.
Radio Advertising
Radio became an advertising medium in 1922. That alone led to an explosive growth in the radio industry, but the idea of broad- casting commercials took a little selling.
Broadcasters worried about how the gov- ernment, which licensed them, would feel about what Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, referred to as being
"drowned in advertising chatter."39 Broad- casters and advertisers also worried about ads that went out over the airwaves (or
"ether") without anyone having any idea about who was getting the message and what effect it was having, or whether any- one at all was paying attention. A comfort- ing answer came when a commercial for Mineralava cosmetics offered a free photo of actress Marion Davies, who had spoken about "How I Make Up for the Movies."
Hundreds of requests poured in from lis- teners.
Albert Lasker, an important figure in the advertising industry during the first half of the twentieth century, led his agency, Lord
& Thomas, heavily into radio. His agency was responsible for many of the early radio shows including the most popular of all, Amos 'n' Andy. The 1920s saw the start of the rapid growth of radio as a means of free home entertainment, the only cost—after the initial purchase of a radio set—being having to hear such advertising as the jin- gle. To a population suffering the economic effects of the Depression, that was no cost at all. Prices were not mentioned in radio ads until 1932. Catchy tunes like "Pepsi Cola hits the spot, twelve full ounces, that's a lot..." spun around in people's heads as often as any song on the "Hit Parade." Jin- gles even appeared in outdoor advertise- ments, such as the famous Burma Shave signs that motorists read, line after line, as they sped along the American highways.
Televising Advertising
Jingles typified an effort to be creative, to make an ad something more than the noti-