Advertising in a Consumer Age

Just as American business changed dramatically from the 1880s to the 1920s, so, too, did advertising. Businesses in the New Era continued to promote their products, of course, but they sought to attract customers in very different ways. Here are two images that illustrate the changes.

Look at the Estey Organ Co. advertisement from 1885. First and foremost, the ad features the company's huge industrial complex — two red brick kilns with smoke belching from their chimneys, surrounded by lumberyards and milling, woodworking, metalworking, and varnishing shops. Indeed, Estey was the world's largest organ manufacturer, selling 1,800 organs a year around the globe. Why do you think the size of the factory was featured so prominently in the ad? How might customers in 1885 have responded to such an ad?

The men who presided over Estey's impressive manufacturing operation — founder Jason Estey; his son, Julius; and his son-in-law, Levi Fuller — appear in the lower right corner. What is the purpose of including the company founder and managers in the advertisement? In the other corner, the ad imagines an Estey organ in the parlor of a well-to-do family that gathers to hear one of its accomplished daughters play. How might this image influence potential customers?

Based on this advertisement, what did the Estey Organ Co. believe was its most important selling factor? What other factors were important?

By the 1920s, companies employed advertising specialists who created ads that would appeal to the consumer's anxieties and personal needs. The ads were even designed to stimulate needs that didn't yet exist. As a result, advertisements changed dramatically.

In this 1929 advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes, the factory and its owners are nowhere to be found. Instead, it offers a woman in a bathing suit. What does she have to do with cigarettes? Millions of Americans smoked billions of cigarettes in the 1920s. In countless tobacco advertisements, smoking promised instant maturity, sophistication, and worldliness. What is this ad's promise to smokers? To whom is it appealing?

Look at the various elements of the ad — the headline, the pictures, the quoted slogans, the text, and the footnote. What health claims are made? Does the ad's small print undermine the main message?

Before the 1920s, advertising often focused on production. Even small businesses presented themselves as powerful and efficient producers of consumer goods such as organs, furniture, and stoves. In the consumer society of the 1920s, companies sought to teach Americans to judge themselves and others by what they bought, rather than by what they produced. How might an ad for Lucky Strike have looked if it had been done in 1885? What might an Estey Organ Co. ad have looked like in the 1920s?

SOURCE: Organ ad: Collection of Norman Pease; Lucky Strike ad: Picture Research Consultants & Archives.

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How did the rise of mass production translate into the rise of mass consumption and mass culture?