Abstract
In the premiere episode of the acclaimed AMC series Mad Men, a glamorous look at postwar Madison Avenue, senior advertising executive Donald Draper faces a crisis with one of his most lucrative accounts. For years he has relied on reassuring testimonials from doctors to promote Lucky Strike cigarettes and quell public concerns about the risks of tobacco addiction. Now pesky questions from the Federal Trade Commission and damning reports from Reader’s Digest on the relationship between smoking and cancer have effectively nullified the campaign. A continued reliance on these medical testimonials, Draper realizes, would be tantamount to professional suicide.1
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Notes
Stanley Resor, “Personalities and the Public: Some Aspects of Testimonial Advertising,” New Bulletin 138 (April 1929), 1.
See Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (New York: Picador, 2002).
See, for example, Thomas Hill, Hill’s Manual of Social and Business Forms (Chicago: Moses Warren and Co., 1878), vi
A New Letter Writer for the Use of Gentlemen, 59–60. See also Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Marking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 450–451
Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, A History of the Book in America: vol. 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
On the development of American business practices, see Boris Emmet and John E. Jeuck, Catalogues and Counters: A History of Sears, Roebuck and Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950)
David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)
William Leach, Land of Desire: From the Department Store to the Department of Commerce: The Rise of America’s Commercial Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993)
Timothy Spears, 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989)
Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997) 44
On the role of advertising and other forms of consumer culture in mediating experiences of modernity, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture: 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)
T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1810–1930,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, ed. T. J. Jackson Lears and Richard Wightman Fox (New York: Random House, 1983), 3–38
Warren I. Susman, “Personality and the Making of Twentieth Century Culture,” in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984 [1974]), 271–285
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985)
T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994)
Benjamin Singer, “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 72–99.
The following books include brief discussions of testimonial advertising: Robert Jay, The Trade Card in Nineteenth-Century America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987)
Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple, Advertising in America: The First 200 Years (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990)
Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995)
Douglas Holt, How Brands Became Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004)
Nancy Keohn, Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust from Wedgwood to Dell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2001)
Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
One notable, if rather questionable, exception is William M. Freeman’s 1957 book The Big Name, commissioned by Printers’ Ink Books primarily as a resource for advertising agents. William M. Freeman, The Big Name (New York: Printers’ Ink Books, 1957), 183.
See for example, Joshua Gamson, “The Negotiated Celebration,” 698–720; Rosemary Coombe, “Author(iz)ing the Celebrity: Engendering Alternative Identities,” 721–769; and Graeme Turner, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall, “Producing Celebrity,” in The Celebrity Culture Reader, ed. P. David Marshall (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 770–798
Rachel Moseley, ed. Fashioning Film Stars: Dress Culture er Identity (London: British Film Institute, 2005)
Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001)
Examples include Regina Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)
Elspeth Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)
Sally Clarke, Trust and Power: Consumers, the Modern Corporation, and the Making of the United States Automobile Market (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Catherine Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American landscape (New York: Routledge, 2004)
Marina Moskowitz, Standard of living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002)
Jim Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Doubleday, 2004)
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything [revised and expanded] (New York: William Morrow, 2006).
See, for example, Zoe Vania Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Suzette A. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s life-Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)
Leigh Gilmore, The limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
See William Leach, “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores,” The Journal of American History 71 (September 1984): 319–342
Roger Miller, “Selling Mrs. Consumer: Advertising and the Creation of Suburban Socio-Spatial Relations, 1910–1930,” Antipode 23.1 (1991): 263–301
On the gendering of consumption, see Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)
Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
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© 2009 Marlis Schweitzer and Marina Moskowitz
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Moskowitz, M., Schweitzer, M. (2009). Introduction: “The Spirit of Emulation”. In: Schweitzer, M., Moskowitz, M. (eds) Testimonial Advertising in the American Marketplace. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101715_1
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