Hard sell

Advertising, affluence and transatlantic relations, c. 1951–69

Sean Nixon

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526111166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historiographie

This is an impressive piece of sustained research that brings much to the field. It offers real depth in rethinking the post-war boom and there can be little doubt that this will have a real impact across modern British history, consumer history and cultural studies.' Jeremy Black, Professor of History, University of Exeter Focusing on advertising's relationship to the mass market housewife, Hard sell shows how advertising promoted new standards of material comfort in the selling of a range of everyday consumer goods and, in the process, generalised a cross-class image of the 'modern housewife' across the new medium of television. Nixon shows how the practices through which advertising understood and represented the 'modern housewife' and domestic consumption were influenced by American advertising and commercial culture. In doing so, he challenges the way critics and historians have often understood Anglo-American relations, and shows how American influences across a range of areas of advertising practice were not only a source of inspiration, but were also adapted and reworked to speak more effectively to the British consumer. Hard sell offers a major new analysis of the techniques of advertising in the decades of post-war affluence and advertising's relationship to the social changes associated with growing prosperity.

The advertising industry in the age of affluence

When London Life, the fashionable magazine edited by Mark Boxer, the founding editor of the Sunday Times colour section, threw a party to mark the opening of the GPO tower in central London in May 1966, it invited a number of advertising people among a guest list that included the fashion photographer Terence Donovan, the designer Ossie Clarke, the pop artists Peter Blake and David Hockney, the model/actress Una Stubbs and the musician Georgie Fame.¹ The inclusion of advertising people in this gathering of the great and the good of fashionable London was not unique. Advertising men and women regularly figured in London Life’s pages, including its feature ‘What People Are Wearing’, where they were shown as contemporary leaders in fashion and style alongside pop singers, actors, designers and boutique owners.² Elsewhere in the magazine advertising people surfaced in coverage of London’s club scene, in a feature on the new breed of young Cambridge undergraduates who were being drawn to the worlds of publishing and advertising and in occasional commentary upon advertising campaigns.³ In depicting advertising practitioners as part of what journalist Christopher Booker called ‘the glamorous world of communication’ in his study of the making of 1960s London, London Life echoed a broader fascination with and desire to mythologize London’s new cultural and commercial elites, including advertising people. Th is was the same pantheon of creative talent captured in one of the most celebrated depictions of the new breed of celebrity associated with ‘Swinging London’: David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups. Designed by Mark Boxer and with a text by Queen and Sunday Times’ journalist Francis Wyndham, the book showcased the work of David Bailey, the most famous of the group of ‘new wave’ fashion photographers. Described by Booker as ‘virtually a Debretts guide to the New Aristocracy’, David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups included two actors, eight pop singers, one interior decorator, four photographers, two managers of pop groups, one film producer, three models, one dress designer, one milliner, one discotheque manager, two East End criminals and one creative advertising man.⁴

While this depiction of advertising people registered their increasing cultural and commercial salience in sixties London, it was not entirely new. Evening Standard journalist Douglas Sutherland suggested that the ‘ad executive’ had been the most emblematic figure of the changes that saw London emerging from the gloom of the immediate post-war years. In ‘a dark grey suit armed with his lavish expenses account … [he] commanded the best tables in the most expensive and exclusive restaurants’. For Sutherland these advertising practitioners were the ‘most symbolic figures’ of the ‘new air of buoyancy’ in London’s expanding consumer economy of the mid-1950s.⁵ At around the same time, in mid-1950s Chelsea, Mary Quant, the fashion designer and key shaper of the ‘fashion revolution’ at the heart of what became ‘Swinging London’ in the mid-1960s, identified advertising men as among the ‘go-ahead’ types who shaped the social milieu in which her first boutique, Bazaar, flourished. For Quant, her ‘co-revolutionaries’ and future clientele in the Kings Road were ‘painters, photographers, architects, writers, socialites, actors, con-men and superior tarts. There were racing drivers, gamblers, TV producers and advertising men.’⁶

The placing of advertising practitioners at the heart of the commercial and cultural renaissance of the capital city during this period by magazines like London Life and commentators like Sutherland and Quant registered important changes in London’s post-war economy. Employment in manufacturing and the docks fell sharply between 1961 and 1973. At the same time employment in sectors like fashion, design, magazine publishing and advertising brought nearly a quarter of a million jobs to London in the 1960s. These employment trends consolidated the already dominant position of service work in London. In 1951, 50% of the daytime labour force was engaged in service occupations. This compared to 31% in manufacturing and just fewer than 20% in building, public utilities, transport and communications. These employment patterns were given a further boost by the relaxation of planning laws and the rise of property speculation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This produced a surge in new office building and contributed to the growth in London of relatively high-skilled service employment, including advertising.⁷

The association between the advertising industry and the commercial geography of the capital city was not a new phenomenon of the post-war years. The geographical concentration of the industry in London’s West End and the lanes around Fleet Street towards the east of the city was well established and dated back to the establishment of the first recognizably modern service advertising agencies in the late nineteenth century.⁸ While there were advertising agencies in Britain’s other big cities, including regional offices of the big agencies, London was the unchallenged centre of advertising in the UK. This relationship was strengthened from the late 1950s as the industry underwent sustained growth on the back of rising advertising expenditure. This led to not only to an increase in advertising employment in the capital, but also to the arrival in London of a swathe of US-owned advertising agencies which established subsidiary offices in the city. Like the British agencies, these US-owned advertising agencies located their offices in the tightly packed spaces of London’s business districts, close to not only the headquarters of the consumer goods manufacturers in central London, but also within touching distance of the national newspapers, TV production companies, film businesses, the studios of photographers, designers and the West End theatre. Advertising’s post-war growth, while it had a broader national significance, was generated from within the specific spaces of London’s commercial geography.

In this chapter, I explore some of the institutional developments within the advertising industry in the 1950s and 1960s and consider the shape of the agency sector that emerged from within a buoyant national advertising market and a booming cultural economy in London. This was a dynamic period of growth for the advertising industry and I reflect, in particular, on the key players who dominated the industry as it underwent expansion and on the social make-up of the individuals who shaped advertising during this period. Responding to growing domestic demand was not the only imperative for advertising agencies. Between 1958 and 1968, there was a massive expansion in the trade in industrial products between the developed capitalist economies. The US economy dominated its trading partners in this expansion and US firms exported, in particular, a host of consumer products to Europe. These included cars, kitchen appliances, washing machines, radio and TV sets, cameras and film, cosmetics, detergents, breakfast cereals, canned food, frozen food and cake mixes.⁹ Advertising agencies responded to these developments in international trade by internationalizing their own operations. Alongside the quantitative expansion of the industry in Britain, it was the growing international reach of advertising agencies, including the growing presence of US agencies in London, which emerged as a further key feature of this period of institutional change and expansion.

The buoyancy of the London-based advertising industry was profoundly influenced by the spending decisions of the big advertisers in the consumer goods industries, including American-owned companies. Before turning to the institutional structure of the London-based advertising industry, I reflect in some detail on the advertising decisions of these advertisers and the overall pattern of advertising expenditure. Central to both was the way advertising was distributed across different advertising media. One of the key factors that influenced this distribution was the arrival of television advertising in 1955 with the creation of ITV. While it took a number of years for ITV to establish itself as a national service and for television to become a viable medium for targeting mass consumers, the arrival of ITV quickly transformed the market for advertising. By the early 1960s, faith in the power of the new medium had helped to elevate it to a central position in the business of commercial communication.

The market for advertising services

The recovery of domestic consumer markets and with them advertising expenditure was a notable feature of the British economy in the late 1950s and 1960s. Overall consumer expenditure returned to its pre-war level by 1950, though spending on key sectors like clothing and furniture remained below 1938 levels until 1953 when consumer expenditure across the board increased rapidly. By 1960 it was 27% higher than it had been a decade before.¹⁰ Advertising expenditure broadly mirrored this growth in popular consumption. In the early 1950s, with austerity controls continuing to limit private-sector consumption, total advertising expenditure stood at about 1.4% of national income, considerably lower than the immediate pre-war level of 2.1%.¹¹ Expenditure on advertising, however, began to grow steadily from 1953 onwards and underwent a major expansion between 1956 and 1960. In fact, in the four years from 1956 it increased by nearly 50%.¹² By 1960 total advertising expenditure stood at 2.2% of the UK’s national income, overtaking the levels seen before the war (Fig. 1).¹³

Advertising expenditure was dominated in this period by the manufacturers of mass-market consumer goods, especially groceries. In 1960, for example, the top twenty advertisers were made up of the manufacturers of detergents, washing powders, toiletries and confectionery, with cigarette manufacturers and oil and petrol companies also represented.¹⁴ When these figures are broken down further into commodity groups, food advertising emerged as the biggest sector. Thus, just over 50% of all advertising expenditure went on food, with the largest percentage of this, just over 6%, going on chocolate advertising. Advertising for soaps, detergents, cleaners and scourers accounted for just over 29% of total advertising expenditur...