We don’t know who the dashing young buck was who is pictured above –
we like to think of him as the dapper Don Draper of his time – an adman from the last decade of the 19th Century who had moved advertising into the new age of mass-marketing and the birth of a new era in commerce:
“Advertising which preceded the 1890s had consisted of little more than formal announcements, designed mainly to supply the seeker for goods with the name and address of the merchant who had them to sell, was now directed to inspiring in readers the wish to buy. Advertising became mass stimulation to buy. To provide forums in which it could function, newspapers expanded; periodicals increased in size, multiplied in circulation… Anyone who possessed in his personality the gift of persuasiveness found the richest market for his talent in the business of influencing men to buy goods. Eloquence, imagination, power of exhortation, magnetism of personality, all those endowments which give to the possessor of them ability to move other men, the talents which in previous ages would have been exercised primarily in the world of ideas and of the spirit, converting masses of men to accept new creeds or abandon old ones, persuading them to support one political party or oppose another – these talents were now dedicated to enticing men to buy more automobiles, more bathtubs, more phonographs, more hats, more shoes, more soap.”
Click here to read more about the history of advertising.
– two from Amazon:
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