We had just returned from a refreshing four days outside of the United States, communing with our brothers and sisters to the North. We spent the week in West Vancouver, "West Van" to the locals, where diversity is the byword and even stodgy bank branches have pride flags displayed in their windows. It is a neighborhood that is safe and comfortable for gay and lesbian couples to walk hand in hand down the street without a sideways glance from any of the other tourists. While I am sure not everything is as rosy as it appeared, it was four days without a hater in sight. Nice, that. And a good example for The Kid.
In our little suite of rooms, we had an enormous TV with 50 channels of nothing. One channel of nothing was constantly extolling the virtues of the program "Mad Men", which, as almost everyone but me knows, is about the funny shenanigans of ad men on Madison Avenue in the salad days of the new advertising. It is the early 1960's and the times, they are a changin', particularly when it comes to how the Mad Men are going to sell things to their fellow Americans.
Recalling my previous blog post, I listed the first of four eras of modern capitalism :
1) Post World War II -- The rise of modern Corporations until Eisenhower's farewell speech of 1961
A simpler time, the period between the end of The War and the advent of the Mad Men. Some would argue that this period is more accurately bracketed by the end of Korean Conflict on the earlier end but I vote for WW II. After the Big One, American industry quickly converted war production to post-war product production. The Baby Boom was on, Baby, and those that survived the war wanted washing machines, fully electric kitchens and suburban homes to put them in. Unlike England, with its years of post-war rationing, or Japan and Germany with their flattened metropolises, American was ready and able to flood the markets with new products for consumers.
In this simpler time, cigarettes did not kill you, modern life was going to get better and better, and the things you could buy were going to help that process along. All of those modern appliances were going to make life easier, cleaner and more elegant. Manufacturers hired ad men to sell their new products to the new consumers and the way they did that was to tout the benefits of the gizmo they were selling.
This was the era of the Brand "X" comparative ads. There was the happy housewife using the better product. Unlike modern ads which sell lifestyles, sex and health, almost without a product in sight, the advertisements of the 1950's pitched the thing itself. No proper house would use a Brand "X" gas range for cooking when the new Westinghouse electric range was so much better. The gleaming new whats-it was prominently featured with the smiling missus standing near by, eyes shining with wonder at the beauty of the new time-saver.
This was the era of the pitch, the idea that you should buy our stuff because its better stuff than the other stuff. Image was not the primary selling tool. While there is no doubt that the housewives using the good stuff were happier and prettier that the drudges stuck with the Brand "X" crap. the focus of the ad was still the product itself. The idea of selling an image or a lifestyle in and of itself, with product to follow, had not come to the fore yet.
The idea of image in sales was there. W. R. Hearst spoke the truth when he said "Show me a magazine cover with a pretty girl, a baby and a dog and I'll show you a magazine that sells," but fully incorporating that concept into selling a lifestyle would come later. It would be the advent of Madison Avenue in the early 1960's, coupled with a deeper understanding of the psychology of consumers, that would bring about the next era of advertising and capitalism, at least in the theory according to Crash.
Next: The deployment of Madison Avenue
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