Introduction
In the arena of fast-moving consumer goods, in which brands fashioned by advertising agencies are prominent, it is unbranded commodities that have long formed the universe, certainly in India and probably elsewhere too, against which modern brands claim their distinction. Too often, questions about the advertisement and its influence have been posed from within a context dominated if not saturated by branded consumer goods, and by extension, of advanced capitalist societies in the west. Some widely cited analyses of advertisements, e.g. Raymond Williams (1980) or Judith Williamson (1978), in fact pay little attention to historical analysis. Those that do tend to form their arguments based on specific historical contexts, e.g., Jackson Lears (1994) and Marchand (1985), without considering what comparative analysis might reveal. One could easily draw the conclusion that advertisements constitute abstractions from the complex entanglements of social relations and can be analysed on their own terms, as if capitalism itself were thereby briefly made legible. Such an assumption eliminates the distinction between the commodity and its image, or between commerce and communication, as if the one automatically implied the other. This assumption is certainly advanced by the advertising agency, which has sought to become, and arguably has become, the chief curator of the history of advertising.1
But advertisements can be produced in diverse historical contexts, and by a range of actors. Within consumer advertisements alone, there are those for branded goods sold by the modern corporation, and ads for products that may appear like brands but feature the names and images of animals, flowers, gods, or numbers that sometimes have only a tenuous relationship to what is being sold. Then there are announcements aimed at the sale of commodities and services from any of a variety of parties, and messages from governments and voluntary organisations that âsellâ ideas or instruction, not products for cash.
However, accounts produced by the advertising agency tend to treat the progression from the classified advertisement, which is a personal notice, to contemporary consumer brand promotion, as a natural evolution and as representing the development of the advertisement as such. The advertising agency has in fact sought to become the custodian of its own history, keeping larger issues of capitalismâs history constant, as fixtures adorning the evolution of the modern ad (Halve et al., 2011). A comparative approach however, leads us to reverse the direction of inquiry, to ask what we can learn about a given historical context by examining advertisements and debates accompanying their production. While modern manufacturers and bazaar merchants both used advertisements, they related to each other as signal to noise in advertising agency accounts: bazaar advertisements are treated as curiosities at best, while advertisements produced by the agency are treated as if destined to become dominant. I will argue that the competition between metropolitan capital and bazaar capital, or big and small business, is valuable in clarifying how the history of advertisements in India is distinct, while noting that this competition is itself partial and inconsistent.
The oldest profession?
An advertising executive has observed, âWe must ⌠accept the contention that advertising is as old as human civilisationâ (Banerjee 1982: 23).2 This impulse, to naturalise and indeed neutralise the distinction of the advertisement as a form of communication, coexisted with a rival impulse, namely to aggrandise its power and to persuade potential clients to engage the services of an advertising agency. The argument made usually depended on the audience.
The worldwide expansion of the advertising industry began in the interwar years, before the era of decolonisation. As challenges grew to colonial rule, the advertising industry, which became dominated by multinational agencies, learned to acknowledge nationalist sentiment and to avoid antagonising national governments. Professional expertise became their credo and the function of advertisers acquired a technocratic aura. If advertising and electricity had similar objectives, as James Webb Young suggested (in the epigraph above), the task of advertisers was then akin to a scientific task, helping economies grow by cultivating demand to meet supply. This meant playing a supporting role to the government in economic planning. Curiously, the advertising agenciesâ own accounts describe this involvement with the state as one of subjugation followed by emancipation from the state, the latter being thanks to economic liberalisation. Alongside, advertising agencies claim kinship and continuity between apparently primitive forms such as the cries of bazaar pedlars and the demonstrations of fairground hucksters with their own, implicitly more sophisticated appeals.
Thus, in an interview in the early 1990s, a former country head of Ogilvy & Mather in India and a legendary figure in his own right, S.R. âManiâ Ayer, described the situation of the advertising industry during the license-permit raj:
Ayerâs picture of the period prior to economic reforms is recognisable from many other such accounts of the era of strict state regulations. Consumer spending was an exercise in frustration, Ayer suggests, with the government limiting supplies, not only of essential commodities, but also of items that many soon regarded as basic necessities, such as two wheelers, cars, and telephones. The government treated the latter as âluxury goodsâ, and interested customers had to endure lengthy waiting periods before being able to buy what western counterparts assumed as their right. Advertising was a âfringe benefitâ and taxed, instead of being encouraged. Advertisers, in this account, were the unsung prophets of the Nehruvian era; they knew better than the government what Indians really wanted, but were ignored or punished instead of rewarded.
Ayerâs account characterises the agenciesâ view of advertising, as celebrating the pleasures of consumption, i.e., of a private vice with far-reaching virtues. It thereby stimulates demand and economic growth, and enhances consumer power as well as the general prosperity. When India was in the grip of Nehruvian socialism, owing to the well-meant but misguided assumptions of the first Prime Minister, the power of this beneficent form of communication was throttled. But its ubiquity and force thereafter confirmed that, had advertisers only been allowed to do as they believed was right, the nation would have benefited.
S.R. Ayerâs story about the industry suggests that it was not only future-oriented, but that the future it anticipated was more or less the one that finally materialised. In other words, the world changed, but advertisers, and advertising, in some fundamental sense, did not change because they did not need to change.
Until recently, historical accounts of advertising have tended to be biased towards the kind of story that those such as S.R. Ayer, who worked in large advertising agencies, chose to tell about their industry. Such accounts celebrate the vision of large agencies, and confirm the sense that however much artistry it might involve, advertising as a form of communication is essentially commonsensical and natural, and an expression of basic human tendencies. These accounts often locate their origins in face-to-face interaction, and in elemental forms of market exchange, as in a hawker peddling his or her wares, and calling out to customers in the bazaar. Likening it to the unaided endeavours of individual entrepreneurs, however, implies that a pre-existing environment mediates advertising. However, advertising as an aspect of the culture industry, posits a social environment that copywriters and visualisers strive to make plausible, in which consumption of the goods in question seems natural or necessary. This larger industrial effort at orchestration is obviously is lost from view in such accounts.
When the bazaar had a more extensive presence than it does today in India, however, advertising agencies could not hide the uphill character of the battle they were engaged in. Advertisers were keen to distinguish their own activity as modern and enlightened, in contrast to what they claimed as unsanitary and/or unsavoury bazaar practices (see, e.g. Burke 1996; McClintock 1995). Such assumptions not only pertained to the racial and cultural attributes of natives, they also extended to the potential contained in the native economy as symbolised by the bazaar. Such assumptions were not necessarily restricted to those who endorsed the benefits of colonial rule. For example, Clifford Geertz has written about the inherently limited nature of the bazaar economy, due to its reliance on kin and client networks and, consequently, on limited forms of information that made the bazaar involute rather than outward-looking and future-oriented (Geertz 1978: 28â32).
Stigmatising the bazaar did not prevent foreign manufacturers from utilising it to the hilt in promoting their wares, however. They had no option: the bazaar was the principal venue for selling goods. Thus, when large companies introduced products, they hired hawkers, itinerant vendors who often circulated in bazaars, thus relying on old ways to sell new kinds of merchandise. We know that Japanese manufacturers gained a foothold in Indian markets using such methods in the colonial period (Renshaw and Spofford 1925: 22). Large companies cultivated relationships with local âbig menâ, engaging them as stockists to supply bazaars with their products. Exposure to trading customs in the bazaar was the equivalent of fieldwork; it oriented company recruits with knowledge that ensured their professional expertise would yield value.
With deeply rooted trading networks that spanned the country long before the British arrived, there was inevitably the ambivalence of bazaar merchants towards branded goods, whose margins were lower than those on commodities. Although advertisements tended to present each branded product as sui generis, shoppers could purchase the brand piecemeal, as if it were a commodity. âMore often than not, products are asked for by their price â âGive me one rupeeâs worth of soapââ, according to one account, more than four decades after independence (Mukherjee and Jacob 1990: 1). A branded bar of soap would then be sold by the slice. The price sensitivity of the Indian market has remained, even as consumption has increased. Over time, however, the bazaarâs margins have been squeezed by the growing market for branded goods. A conversation with bazaar merchants can easily turn to a discussion on the predatory force of big firms, who demand that retailers invest more money in successful brands even while reducing margins. Meanwhile these merchants have less capital for trade in commodities, from which most of their revenue may derive (Rajagopal 2016: 88â98). Why then would they stock brands at all? Because when they are plentiful, the presence of branded goods suggests a prosperous business. Moreover, brands are acknowledged to have a certain pulling power in luring customers away from merchants merely stocking commodities. In other words, the impact of advertising branded goods as a whole outweighs that which results from individual brands and individual advertisements, which are often the focus of scholarly analysis.
Market extension into the bazaar, as well as the latterâs resistance to branding (and therefore to âfullâ or more intensive commodification) is part of the history of Indian advertising. In the view of advertisers, the bazaar confronts the self-styled modern market not as an encounter b...
