Five thousand years ago, the Babylonians hung symbols over their shop doors depicting what kind of trade went on inside and, voila, the first advertisements were born (this practice still exists today; you might have noticed the white and red twisted poles outside some barber shops, for example). From ancient Egyptian engravings on the walls of desert canyons, to the traditional medieval European town-crier, to the pop-up ads that appear every time you log on to your computer, people have always found ways to attract other people’s attention to a product or service for sale. Advertising may have become more prevalent over the years, but wherever communities and commerce exit, so too does advertising.

In this section, you’ll learn a short history of one of the most pervasive forms of language: the advert. The industrial revolution and the increased prevalence of available goods woke manufacturers up to their ability to make people want particular products or services; increased competition intensified the need for professional advertisers; the proliferation of radio and television expanded their reach; the explosion of the American economy after world war two cemented advertising’s ‘Golden Years’; the advent of the digital age cheapened the production of ads and speeded their dissemination to a wider and wider market. To flesh out this story somewhat, and to begin your study of advertising texts, read one or two of the following articles:

• The History and Evolution of Advertising (by Antonio Gallegos writing for Tint)
• Advertising (interactive timeline by History of Information)
• The Entire History of Advertising (Softcube blog)
• 10 Classic Images from the Golden Age of Advertising (article by WebUrbanist)
• The Art of Golden Age Advertising (blogpost)

Reading Challenge

This is a longer and more challenging text, but spending time on this piece, and discussing it with your teacher, will help you master this topic:

• Advertising (from Planet Word by Stephen Fry)

Area of Exploration Conceptual Guiding Question

No text is read or written in a vacuum and that is as true for advertisements as it is for major literary works. Both the historical time and the geographical or cultural space a text is written in has an enormous influence on its content and delivery. Similarly, no text is interpreted outside of these factors either. In this section, you will learn about the contexts of production and reception. This resource begins and ends with a consideration of advertising texts, how advertising conventions have changed over time, and how the same text might be read and interpreted differently by different readers.

• How important is the cultural or historical context to the production and reception of a text?

Class Activity: then and now

Research a product or brand from the ‘Golden Age of Advertising’. Find an advert from this time period and present it side-by-side with a modern day advert for the same product. Annotate the two images with your ideas and explainers, or write a comparison to accompany the images.

Discussion Points

After you’ve got your head around the material in this section, pair up, pick a question, spend five minutes thinking and noting down your thoughts – then discuss your ideas with a friend and report back to the class.

1. What is ‘success’? How is success depicted in advertising? Who gets to be successful in advertising? Does advertising offer an alternative vision of success to the mass media, or does it replicate messages you see elsewhere? What other definitions of success might there be that you do not see in advertising?
2. How many adverts do you think you see in a day? Do you think there are too many adverts in today’s world? Does being surrounded by advertising affect people in negative ways? Do you think the number of adverts people are exposed to should be regulated more strictly?
3. What does it mean to be a citizen, a consumer and a conscious consumer? How does advertising encourage or discourage you to be one or more of these things? How does advertising create or erode a sense of community?

Learner Portfolio: The Golden Age of Advertising

Create a blogpost about the history of advertising. You could summarise the history of advertising, or focus on a particular period, place or product (eg ‘The Golden Age of Advertising’; ‘A History of Chocolate Ads’; and so on). Look at one or two of the blogposts in this section to find a model or style guide. Ensure you include a nice range of visuals that you’ve researched yourself.

Paper 1 Text Type Focus: historical adverts

Advertising is a wide and varied genre, ranging from print ads that you might find in a magazine to huge billboards overlooking a busy road, to posters on the sides of buildings, to webpages… and more. While ‘historical adverts’ is not necessarily a text type, conventions of advertising have changed over time, and you might want to practice with texts that are not necessarily modern or familiar. Therefore, the adverts in this section have been deliberately chosen because they are old-fashioned in style. Use these practice texts to familiarise yourself with these less-commonly-seen advertisements and add them to your Learner Portfolio; you will want to revise text types thoroughly before your Paper 1 exam. You can find more information – including text type features and sample Paper 1 analysis – by visiting 20/20. Read through one or two of the exemplars, then choose a new paper and have a go at writing your own Paper 1 analysis response:

• The Incredible Shrinking Man (Past Paper)
• Chevrolet 1947 (Past Paper)

Body of Work: Lucky Strike Cigarette ad campaigns

Up until 1929, it had been illegal for women to smoke in public. One man changed that: Edward Bernays, the ‘father of public relations.’ He organised a ‘Torches of Freedom’ march on Easter Day in New York. On cue , his secretary and all her friends lit cigarettes and smoked them – right in front of gathered photographers and reporters positioned in advance by Bernays to catch the moment. Lucky Strike – the tobacco company that had hired Bernays as public relations consultant – saw their potential market double overnight! From this moment, Bernays ran adverts with pictures of women holding cigarettes and women began to feel confident about smoking in public. A legendary ad campaign was born.

This collection of adverts includes examples of all Lucky Strike’s major campaigns from the 1910s through to The Golden Age of Advertising (1950s). Through studying these texts you will see how an advertising campaign changes and evolves through time, both in terms of how the adverts appealed to readers and in the sophistication of the advertising techniques used to sell what is, essentially, a harmful product that has limited benefits for the consumer.

There are plenty of resources that you can turn to for wider reading and context about this topic. Several documentaries have been made charting the rise and fall of cigarette advertising and Edward Bernays’ impact on the history of advertising, as well as the key role he played in the Lucky Strike campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s.

Towards Assessment: Individual Oral

Supported by an extract from one non-literary text and one from a literary work, students will offer a prepared response of 10 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of questions by the teacher, to the following prompt: Examine the ways in which the global issue of your choice is presented through the content and form of two of the texts that you have studied. (40 marks)

An advert from this collection would be a good choice to bring into your Individual Oral. The named author would be the ‘British American Tobacco Group’ or ‘Lucky Strike.’ Here are two suggestions as to how you might use this Body of Work to create a Global Issue. You can use one of these ideas, or develop your own. You should always be mindful of your own ideas and class discussions and follow the direction of your own thoughts, discussions and programme of study when devising your assessment tasks.

Possible Literary pAirings

• Ismail Kadare’s Broken April – to what extent does Gjorg trick himself into believing the tenets of the kanun? Is his wandering an attempt to escape reality or come to terms with his fate? How do the administrators of the kanun use various methods to mislead the people who live on the High Plateau? Whatever approach you take, this could be an ideal pairing.
• John Keats’ Selected Poetry – Keats’ odes and his longer poem La Belle Dame sans Merci are poems with something to say about the ways in which we try avoid the unpleasant sides of life by escaping into fantasy worlds – with dangerous consequences.
• Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber – if you’re interested in the alluring power of celebrity, you can compare the images of people in parts of the Lucky Strike campaign with the Marquis’ dazzling seduction of the narrator in Carter’s title story, The Bloody Chamber.
• George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion – the archetypal ‘Cinderella story’ is an example of the way audiences like to escape from mundane reality; the fantasy of becoming a princess, marrying a Prince Charming and living happily-ever-after is a powerful one. But Shaw doesn’t like the way people expect literature to provide happy resolutions so, in an extended epilogue, lectures them as to why his Liza doesn’t get the perfect ‘happy-ever-after’ after all.
• Han Kang’s The Vegetarian – part two of Kang’s novel is narrated from the point of view of a frustrated artist. The first scene is him in a provocative show, searching for a new kind of artistic vision. But what is he really trying to avoid?
• David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross – Levene is a fading salesman who is struggling to meet his targets at work. He often retreats into nostalgia, reminiscing about a time when he was the top man in the office. alternatively, you could explore how the salesmen in Mamet’s dark comedy expertly wield language to deceive their clients – and each other.
• Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The Visit – in this biting satire, almost nobody says what they mean and truth is a slippery concept. A perfect pairing for a talk about the power of language to mislead and manipulate.
• Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes – in these elegant stories, the modern world seems covered in gloom and a general malaise permeates life. Many characters seek comfort in dreams, fantasy worlds, or the events of a tumultuous past.
• J.M.Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians – in the first chapter of this powerful novel is a perfect illustration of how language can be used to mislead and manipulate. After torturing an innocent man to death, Colonel Joll submits a report on his interrogation which conceals the reality of what really happened.
• Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home – this graphic memoir is a perfect illustration of how somebody might need to ‘escape’ into a fantasy in order to cope with life’s struggles. Not only is the graphic novel genre an imaginative depiction of escapism, but her frequent allusions to other literary works help her to come to a better understanding of herself and her father Bruce.
• Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy – what happens when there are no permitted outlets of escapism in everyday life or the society around you? Many of the defectors Demick interviewed began to harbour secret ‘inner’ thoughts and dreams in order to escape from the reality of the world around them.

Towards Assessment: HL Essay

Students submit an essay on one non-literary text or a collection of non-literary texts by one same author, or a literary text or work studied during the course. The essay must be 1,200-1,500 words in length. (20 marks).††

The Lucky Strike adverts in this collection would make a perfect case study for an extended written task. Beginning in the 1910s and continuing through to the 1960s, these campaigns demonstrate how a text changes in response to social and historical developments. For example, early adverts focused on the health benefits of smoking; this strategy was abandoned later in the century in favour of aligning Lucky Strike cigarettes with celebrities and even with the war effort.

You might therefore like to investigate how the campaigns develop and change over time. Your essay would include a range of campaigns, with a focus on exemplar adverts. You should make sure to include analysis of both visual and written elements in your work, as well as researching Edward Bernays in more detail. You could consider one or two of the following angles of approach to help you focus your work:

• Explore the use of symbolism in adverts for Lucky Strike.
• How did Lucky Strike use colour in increasingly sophisticated ways in their print adverts?
• How are men and women depicted in adverts by Lucky Strike?
• To what extent did Lucky Strike rely upon certain advertising claims in their advertising throughout the first half of the twentieth century?
• How do the changes in Lucky Strike adverts between 1910 and 1950 reflect wider social changes?
• Investigate examples of ‘sloganism’ in Lucky Strike adverts? How important were slogans to the success of these advertising campaigns?

Wider Reading and Research

• Century of the Self – the full documentary film series
• The Oldest Advertisement in History – article at The Vintage News