By the late 1920's advertising in the United States had acquired the characteristics it has now and probably will retain...

By the late 1920's advertising in the United States had acquired the characteristics it has now and probably will retain for As long as there is a competitive market economy. This "highly organized and professional system of magical inducements and satisfactions," as eminent social critic Raymond Williams described it, has continued to have as its goal the selling of a panoply of goods among which there are most often few salient differences. Working from the premise of the irrationality of the consumer, this vast fantasy machine employs every conceivable visual and rhetorical gimmick to turn the public's attention from the generic product to the symbolic attributes of a particular brand.

In retrospect, two aspects of the development of the advertising business are remarkable. The first is how quickly after the emergence of mass media it assumed its shape. The second, all the more remarkable when one considers that advertising's business is evanescent appearances, is how durable that shape has proven to be. To be sure, some changes have taken place since 1930, most notably the emergence and influence of the electronic media—radio and particularly television. But despite such surface changes, advertising remains bottom, what it was fifty or more years ago: the business of manufacturing illusions.

To some degree, advertising's means and ends remain basically unaltered because those who create ads have always experienced the same conflicts felt by other members of twentieth-century American society. These conflicts stem from a contradiction between our democratic ideology, with its emphasis on individual choice and freedom of expression, and an economy that encourages and indeed depends on conformity and predictability among both producers (employers as well as employees) and consumers.

Ours is also a society that has traditionally valued spontaneity, risk, and adventure; largely for that reason we cherish the myth of the frontier, where those qualities, we believe, once flourished. Yet in the United States today, most people inhabit an urban or suburban world that is overly regulated, hemmed in by routine, and presided over by scores of specialists and experts. "Adventure" itself has become a commodity: a packaged trip down the Colorado River, an organized trek across the Himalayas two weeks on a dude ranch. Room for real adventure is limited, if it exists at all.

Far from immune to these and other contradiction advertising people have recognized that their skills arc harnessed to large impersonal organizations and that the end of their efforts is to convince millions of consumers that they would be happier even better human beings if they used Brand X instead of Brand Y. Given the conditions of their work and of ordinary life, it is not really surprising that generations of advertising people have aimed to transform a prosaic world of commodities into a magical place of escape, illusion, and fantasy, to express imaginative freedom and creativity in the face of routine.