Guest editorial

Citation

Branchik, B.J. and Hawkins, R. (2020), "Guest editorial", Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 1-3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHRM-02-2020-082

The World of advertising: International perspectives on advertising history

The modern advertising industry began as a national phenomenon in the nineteenth century with the exception of imperial countries such as Britain, France and Austria-Hungary where some companies advertised across the whole of their respective empires. The English language historiography has tended to focus on the United Kingdom and United States notwithstanding some recent monographs on the advertising histories of Australia and Germany. This is perplexing, given that virtually all countries and cultures around the world have relied on advertising to communicate messages about products and services to targeted buyers. The Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing (CHARM) Association organizes biennial international conferences which in recent years have encouraged historians from outside the United States and United Kingdom to add to the English language historiography by exploring their own nations’ advertising history. Blaine Branchik has served in various CHARM senior executive roles and Richard Hawkins is currently vice-president of the association. This special issue of the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, “The World of Advertising: International Perspectives on Advertising History,” draws upon papers first presented at the Liverpool CHARM in 2017 and other scholarship. The eight articles in this special issue span the globe from Europe to Asia to Oceania, thereby presenting new perspectives on advertising history.

The articles have been arranged in rough chronological order covering the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. In the first article, “Exploring the success of Thai advertising: historical perspective,” Marissa Chantamas and Bun-ga Chaisuwan explore the evolution of their country’s adverting industry from its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. They suggest that the industry was initially modelled on its counterparts in the United Kingdom and the United States. However, over time the Thai industry has increasingly integrated unique local elements.

In the second article, “For quiet nerves and steady poise: a historical analysis of advertising to New Zealand nurses in The Kai Tiaki Journal 1908-1929,” Jayne Krisjanous and Pamela Wood explore advertising in a professional journal, Kai Tiaki: The Journal of Nurses of New Zealand, in the early part of the twentieth century. Krisjanous and Wood note that what few studies have been previously undertaken have focused on British and American journals and have therefore not considered journals outside of the United States or away from the British imperial metropolis. Their research suggests that advertising in the journal initially had a metropolitan focus reflecting the strength of the ties of the British settlers to their “mother country.” Krisjanous and Wood note that it was not until the late 1920s that a specific New Zealand focus was portrayed in the advertisements in Kai Tiaki reflecting the emergence of an autonomous settler identity in the periphery of the British Empire.

In the third article, Alexander Zakharov, Elena Leontyeva and Alexander Leontyev examine common and unique features found in advertisements from the local newspapers in the provincial Russian town of Tsaritsyn (modern-day Volgograd and previously known as Stalingrad) from 1911 to 1915 in their article “Advertisements in Russian Provincial Press at the Beginning of the First World War.” The authors analyze the impact of the war on Tsaritsyn newspaper advertising. They find that it took on a much more patriotic focus. The article raises questions about how representative the newspapers were of local society given Tsaritsyn was about to be engulfed by revolution and subsequently civil war.

In the fourth article, “Nuclear energy promotion using collectable cards aimed at children,” Maria Elena Aramendia-Muneta, traces how Spain promoted its implementation of the Atoms for Peace Program launched in 1953 by American President Dwight Eisenhower by the innovative use of collectable cards. Advertising in Spain under the military dictatorship of General Francisco Franco was heavily influenced by the socio-economic objectives of the regime. However, as Aramendia-Muneta shows in her study of the use of collectible cards this did not prevent innovation in Spanish advertising. While collectible picture cards were first used as a marketing device by the Parisian department store, Au Bon Marche, in the mid-nineteenth century, Spanish chocolate manufacturers were probably the first to use collectible cards to both advertise their products to children and to promote a dictatorship’s policy of engaging with modernity and technologies of the future.

In the fifth article, Damian Hesse and Katja Lurie review the development of the German advertising industry from 1950 to 2018 in “The German Advertising Industry – From 1950 to Today: Between American Influence and German Specific Development” drawing upon 27 semi-structured interviews with current and former experts from the German and American advertising industry. Unlike Spain in the 1950s, the German advertising industry had just experienced the downfall of a dictatorship. As the dominant occupying power in the western zones of post-war Germany, the United States exerted a powerful influence over the reconstruction of the West German economy and society. Hesse and Lurie focus on the juxtaposition of American influence on business and popular culture in the Federal Republic of Germany with the country’s ongoing post-war economic development.

In the sixth article, Nazife Karamullaoglu and Ozlem Sandikci examine “Western influences in Turkish advertising: disseminating the ideals of home, family and femininity in the 1950s and 1960s.” They focus on print advertisements targeted at women to explore how American and west European influences shaped the advertising images and representations of women in Turkey. Karamullaoglu and Sandikci also provide a brief history of the Turkish advertising industry up to the 1950s. As in Aramendia-Muneta and Hesse and Lurie’s articles, Karamullaoglu and Sandikci demonstrate the powerful influence American culture had on advertising elsewhere in the world in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the seventh article, “Culture and the multinational advertising agency: the rise and fall of Mojo-MDA, 1964-1991,” Robert Crawford chronicles the growth of Australia’s Mojo-MDA in the mid-twentieth century to a multinational communications firms to its decline during the 1970s and 1980s. Although the founders of Mojo-MDA were heavily influenced by American and British advertising practice they successfully created a distinctively Australian advertising agency. However, the assumption that Mojo’s approach to advertising and style of advertising could be easily exported to other markets globally did not prove to be correct.

The eighth and final article, “J. Walter Thompson: the origin and development of account planning,” Cristina Sánchez-Blanco describes how J. Walter Thompson imposed its account planning methodology around the world out of its London headquarters in the early to mid-twentieth century.

This special issue suggests the potential for research on the history of the global dissemination of American and British advertising practice alongside the evolution of distinctively national advertising cultures around the world. It further suggests the potential value of globalizing the focus of the English language research literature on advertising history.

We hope you will find these articles interesting, enlightening and broadening. Further, we encourage you to explore the broader world of advertising history.