The Spinning of America
In “Madison Avenue, U.S.A.,” Martin Mayers’ 1958 portrait of the American advertising industry, James Webb Young, then doyen of the J. Walter Thompson creative department, recalled a visit from a Fortune “girl researcher.” “She wanted to know about all the changes in the advertising business in the last twenty-five years,” said Young, who began penning ads for a living in the teens and witnessed the emergence of radio and TV. “When I told her there hadn’t been any, she nearly fell off her chair. But it’s true.”
The ad men who taught Young the business already had in their arsenal virtually every weapon now used in the war to win and influence consumers: logos, spokescharacters, packaging, image ads, celebrity endorsements, contests, testimonials, staged events, word-of-mouth, licensing, cross-promotions, social causes, interactivity and consumer research. The essential principles and tools of selling national brands emerged whole with the brands themselves in the late 19th century. Since then, advertising and its media vehicles have wildly proliferated, and marketing has been forced to adapt to its own ubiquity. But, as three new histories of marketing show, it hasn’t developed. It just grows.
Edward L. Bernays grasped the basics of the marketing game his first time out in 1913. As befits a “double” nephew of Sigmund Freud (Freud married father Eli’s sister and Edward’s mother was Freud’s sister), the 22-year-old designed his first publicity hook in a campaign against sexual prurience. In a complicated stunt for a medical publishing venture into which the agricultural college graduate had stumbled, Bernays recruited the cream of New York society to raise money for a production of a controversial play on the taboo subject of syphilis. The donations poured in; the editorial pages opined; the play was a smash; and Bernays, intoxicated by his success, dropped out of publishing to pioneer the profession of “public relations counselor.”
As recounted by Larry Tye in “The Father of Spin,” for the next 50 years Bernays took the same ingredients--the yoking of a private interest to a public cause, the creation of high-toned committees and expert-stuffed front groups, the promotion of a mediagenic event--and served them up to clients again and again. In brainstorming meetings, Tye tells us, Bernays would scribble an idea on a piece of paper and then toss it to the floor. By meeting’s end, the floor was littered with white slips, “a trick,” one employee observed, “to demonstrate all the ideas he was generating.” But whether he was sending smoking debutantes down 5th Avenue on Easter for the American Tobacco Co. or creating the Middle America Information Bureau to promote the United Fruit Co.’s interests in Guatemala in the 1940s, the modus operandi was the same--and remains the same for the metastasizing corps of professional spinners that have followed in Bernays’ wake.
A biographer of Bernays faces a special challenge. The author can play Bernays as the man who “push[ed] people to buy products they don’t need” and “shap[ed] the very way they believed,” as the jacket blurb puts it--and thereby run the risk of being spun by one’s own subject. (Bernays lived to the age of 103, which gave him plenty of time to embellish his accomplishments.) Or he can debunk Bernays’ claims, clear the smoke and shatter the mirrors. But then if Bernays didn’t successfully manipulate the masses, why bother writing a book about him at all?
In “The Father of Spin,” Tye tries to solve this dilemma by doing both. He spends many pages weighing whether Bernays deserved all the credit he claimed, and the answer is always the same: No. At the same time, readers are expected to believe that while working for book publishers, Bernays “got” architects to design homes with built-in bookshelves. How he “got” them to do it and whether one more book was sold because of it is left unclear. In the end, the book’s title renders the verdict on Bernays; Eddie, as Tye persists in calling him, would have loved it.
What’s more, he probably deserves it. Bernays worked for corporations because that’s where the money was. But he was much less interested in his clients’ bottom line than in what Tye calls “Big Think”: circuitous, sometimes megalomaniacal schemes to sell not products but “whole ways of behaving.” Author of a dozen books, many of them retreads of his groundbreaking work from the ‘20s, Bernays sought a place among what he called “the relatively small number of persons . . . who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.” He furthered his cause by constantly flogging his relationship to his Uncle Sigi (Variety once labeled him a “professional nephew.”) Yet the social engineer and the doctor of the mind shared little more than one basic insight: Irrationality lies at the heart of human behavior. It happens that that is the very insight upon which the art of marketing is built.
Bernays, however, wasn’t the first to figure it out. Richard Ohmann’s “Selling Culture” places the discovery back in 1890s, with the simultaneous rise of national brands and national magazines.
Ohmann attempts much more, however, than documenting the early history of mass magazines. It is at once an analysis of how big capital turned to advertising to create market stability, a history of the early advertising business, an account of the rise of the suburbs and, finally, a close reading of the ads and editorial text that filled the pages of McClure’s, Munsey’s and other monthlies of the day. Ohmann, scrupulously if sometimes pedantically, recreates the nexus in which the professional managerial class, or PMC, “came to consciousness,” as the Marxists used to say. The ad-supported culture industry that first emerged in magazines, he claims, was created by and for the PMC, of which turn-of-the-century ad executives and magazine editors were charter members. The 19th class war was political and economic. The PMC opened a new front: the cultural struggle. We’ve been fighting it in our ads and our media ever since.
The emerging magazines’ ads, Ohmann persuasively argues, bore all the hallmarks of contemporary advertising, from direct address of “you” the consumer and the celebration of the “new” and “modern” to an emphasis on images over text. The editorial pages offered a mix of celebrity gossip, muckraking journalism, profiles of hero businessmen, portraits of faraway places, photo features of beautiful women, theater reviews and surveys of fads (and you thought postmodernism invented pastiche). The magazine, the author writes, was quite literally a magasin, a store stocked with information and products through which the PMC could enact its role as a historical double agent: respecter of tradition but champion of the new; critic of big capital but stalwart of capitalism; promoter of individualism but defender of cultural standards.
As Ohmann acknowledges, “Selling Culture” is in some ways an old-fashioned book with a “marxist” (the author’s own lower case) point of view. The cultural marketplace didn’t just emerge out of the industrial ooze. It was part of the “strategy” of the class that benefited from its creation: an old-fashioned argument but one that sheds a provocative light on the “digital revolution” 100 years later. Is the computer a means of mass empowerment? Or is it a tool of our own time’s rising class, the information class, hell-bent on making the Internet and other digital wonders fixtures in consumers’ lives, the better to sell them more stuff?
“Signs and Wonders,” a history of the giant electrical signs known as spectaculars, takes the more contemporary tack. Spectaculars are erected by corporations because--once again--that’s where the money is. But, Tama Starr and Edward Hayman tell us, they’re not about corporations. They’re about us, the viewers. “They create a sense of wonder. They make us feel alive. We know we are alive, not because reasoning tells us so (after all, computers can reason [sic!]), but because we have the capacity to feel. . . . A commercial landscape, like a newspaper’s editorial page, is an expression of the way people think things ought to be.” So much for class interests.
It’s no surprise that “Signs and Wonders” is so celebratory. Starr is the third generation in her family to run the Times Square sign company Artkraft Strauss. Times Square, the main focus of the book, “is my village,” she writes. And she loves it, betraying a rueful fondness even for the sleazy square of peep shows and porn shops that was the despair of city planners for 30 years. Relentlessly upbeat, she hasn’t a bad word to say about anybody, not even the Times Square Business Improvement District, which commandeered the task of dropping the lighted ball on New Year’s Eve from Artkraft Strauss in 1995 (and blew it three years running). At times, one almost wishes the authors made the big photo book they originally planned and spared readers some of the prefab historical generalizations and treacly cliches that populate this work.
Yet the story is fascinating. Twelve years after Edison invented the light bulb, the first electrically lit sign debuted in New York on the current site of the Flatiron Building; it was an advertisement for Manhattan Beach, one of those suburbs that Ohmann discusses. By the teens, the square was hung with animated light paintings that used thousands of hand-switched incandescent bulbs. Captured in black-and-white photos, they appear more magical to contemporary eyes than the crazy quilt of computer-generated photo billboards that dominate Times Square today. The history climaxes in the ‘80s, when the city fathers proposed to kill the derelict square and erect four Philip Johnson-designed office towers-cum-tombstones on its grave. Starr herself organized a pivotal “Save the Square” publicity stunt: a headline-grabbing blackout of the spectaculars that was vintage Eddie Bernays. It helped turn the tide, making Times Square safe for Disney in the ‘90s.
If these books show that advertising and marketing have not developed during the last century, they also offer evidence that they haven’t precisely remained the same either. The experts Bernays loved to trot out are now utterly useless in influencing consumers caught in the widening gyre of spin and cynicism. The tone of genteel neighborliness of a full-page ad in Munsey’s has utterly vanished from ads that now must appeal to practiced, savvy and increasingly desensitized consumers. Times Square was once a gallery of etchings against a black sky; today it offers a sensurround experience, the space itself an incandescent light source. But the real difference between then and now is quantitative, not qualitative. Marketing lauds the newest, the coolest, the most improved. But in 100 years, all it has offered is more of the same.