Public Service Advertising and the Use of Advertising in Propaganda
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This article examines the impact of the First World War on the newly established advertising industry in the United States. For the first time, many large-scale advertisers were engaged in wartime production and were not producing for the consumer market. How would the advertising industry respond to this lack of demand for its services? The answer was institutional advertising that made use of war themes to assist in the propaganda war. Concurrently, these ads kept brand names fresh in consumers’ minds and linked them with the successful and popular war effort. The industry also benefited when the federal government, though the Committee on Public Information, established a Division of Advertising to harness the power of advertising for the sale of war bonds, recruitment, and other wartime tasks. This legitimization, added to increasing rather than decreasing agency billings, made World War I a profitable time for advertisers, enhanced their standing in the American economy, and provided a useful model that would emerge as the War Advertising Council in 1942. By war’s end, according to Pope, advertising had clearly affixed itself to “the American Way” and became a key component of the working of democratic capitalism.
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Rabe, Robert A. “Fighting to the Finish: The War Advertising Council, the ‘Beat Japan’ Campaigns, and American Public Opinion at the End of World War II.” MA thesis, University of Wisconsin, 2001.
This thesis looks at the role played by the WAC during the final year of World War II. The WAC was formed to a large degree to promote the advertising industry as a good corporate citizen, doing its part in the war effort, and to forestall unfavorable tax policies or government oversight of advertising. WAC worked directly with the Office of War Information, the US military, and other government agencies to plan and execute large-scale advertising campaigns for government programs, volunteer recruitment, conservation, and other things. Its goal was “a war message in every ad.” As 1944 came to a close, many Americans anticipated the coming end of the war and many advertisers began to place ads for postwar products that would begin to meet the pent up demand caused by war shortages and rationing. The WAC, although also anxious to direct postwar markets, promote consumption and influence the debate over reconversion, was aware as a PR front that the industry had to be careful not to jump the gun. A core group in the WAC, including Thomas D’Arcy Brophy of Kenyon & Eckhardt, urged a widespread campaign to refocus the nation’s attention on the war effort, which he believed was lagging, and turn people’s thoughts to the coming battles in the Pacific against Japan. Working with the OWI and the military, the WAC crafted a whole series of print and non-print ads, many based on guilt or scare tactics, that were placed in American newspapers and magazines and other visible places during 1945. The paper argues that the strong message of guilt and constant warnings about the difficulties and sacrifices of the Pacific war contained in these ads played a role in making Americans more likely to accept any means, including weapons of mass destruction and indiscriminant bombing of civilians, to end the war with the least possible cost. Research for this thesis was conducted at the Advertising Council archive at the University of Illinois and the J. Walter Thompson collection at Duke University.
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Zieger, Robert H. “The Paradox of Plenty: The Advertising Council and Post-Sputnik Crisis.” Advertising & Society Review 4:1 (2003).
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