Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising

As someone who teaches advertising concepts I found this book a very good intro to understanding advertising and having students see how it is not separate from the culture.

Written in a very readable style, I recco the book to anyone teaching advertising to creatives or to anyone interested in American culture.
March 23, 2002

The history of American advertising is as packed with dates, places, people and events as any other slice of American history, and in "Soap, Sex and Cigarettes" Juliann Sivulka has done an exhaustive job of outlining these very things. With chapters going from 1492-1800, beginning with the colonization of the States, through the Roaring 20's and ending with "1990s and Beyond: The Media Revolution", this book should be required reading for any marketing/advertising undergrad. Indeed, considering the density of the material-- as thorough as any text on the Revolutionary War-- I imagine it IS required collegiate reading for students entering these professions.

The book is packed with various illustrations of real ads from the time periods, and one could easily get an overview of American advertising by simply leafing through the pages and looking at the ads and how they evolve from a 1608 London woodcut pamphlet advertising the New World ("Excellent fruites by Planting in Virginia") to the modern "Just Do It" and "Got Milk?" high glossy ad campaigns. The text is ordered and well written and can be read both as collegiate material and as casual reading (though there are a LOT of dates, places, times and events for the casual reader). The author frequently includes common ad slogans throughout the book that have become staples of American advertising: "His masters voice", "I'd walk a mile for a Camel", "Remember: only YOU can prevent forest fires" and "melts in your mouth, not in your hand" to name just a VERY few. There are also brief timelines of some of the highlights of product inventions that advertising impacted, such as Twinkies introduction in 1930 (originally filled with banana creme), pet rocks in 1975 and the new age of advertising begun in 1989 by Nissan's Infiniti where the actual product was never shown.

The book is subtitled "A Cultural History of American Advertising", but it is here where it falls short. It's an excellent resource for the history of advertising, but it's not so great at demonstrating how advertising has influenced our society. There are short parts demonstrating the stereotype of people of color and women, for example African-American people portrayed as grinning Sambos who are thrilled to ecstasy that Gold Dust washing powder makes your pots n' pans sparkle; Asian people with long pigtails and coolie hats in outlandish dress; women typically in household roles advertising everything from soap to washing machines (while trying to appear sexy at the same time: "You'd think I'm a flapper, but I CAN keep house"-- S.O.S. Pads, 1927). However, this aspect is not nearly as well fleshed-out as I would have expected from the title. I was expecting something more along the lines of cultural anthropology or Noam Chomsky-- explaining how advertising not only reflected society but INFLUENCED it-- and found little to be had.

No one would argue the fact that sex and celebrity status are constantly being used to sell everything from cars to toothpaste, and the unspoken meaning of most ads is something like "Drink Figgy-Fiz Cola and you'll have to beat the beautiful babes away with a lug wrench!" Most people ignore advertisements or complain about them and generally pay little or no attention to them at all. Still, the amount of advertising is only INCREASING as time goes on and the ads do influence our culture substantially. Should you doubt me, ask yourself why were children murdering other children for Nike shoes during the late 80's? No one was attacking me for my black Keds, and God help you if you wore Buster Browns after the age of 4. Why? Because the ads told us there were certain products to value above others (and therefore we could justify paying 120% more for those products as well) and we believed them. THIS sort of "cultural history" and analysis was missing from this book, which is a shame because Ms. Sivulka could have shed quite a lot of light onto this still-dark corner of our society. Perhaps she didn't because the more we know about advertising and how it works, the less power it holds over us.

In closing, "Soap, Sex and Cigarettes" is a great resource both for the professional marketer/advertiser and a fascinating read for the casual thinker of pop/modern culture. It's a bit expensive (though college texts always are), but it's exhaustively researched and very well written. Highly recommended!
June 22, 2001