Preliminary Programme

In this paper, I will bring into question the ethos of commercial and political advocacy from the double case of France and Belgium. Mutual as well as American transfers and influences are a core issue. This paper will mostly focus on the professionals and on the techniques used, including cross-fertilization processes between the conceptually distinct fields of commercial and of political mass communication.
The period examined in this paper (1910-1950) is defined by two significant technical advances: in 1910, the outbreak of the first professional admen in France and Belgium; in the early fifties, the late but widely acknowledged adoption of PR expertise in both countries, by Governments, private and nationalized companies. My purpose is not to set up a complete study, but to highlight thorough cases in which the ethos was brought into question in the related, even if distinct, fields of commercial and political communication.
Before WWI, the question of ethics barely appears outside of the discourse on the freedom of the press and in public political debate. This right was acknowledged in the Belgian Constitution of 1831, while the process was much slower in France and only achieved for good under the Third Republic, with the law of July 19th, 1881 . The ethos of commercial publicity and (maybe a bit later) of advertising became a public concern with the scandals of financial publicity and in some ways with the expertise of the courtiers, who sold media space to the announcers without providing any copywriting expertise. The links between information and advertising in the management of Havas, the first French advertising agency, is probably one of the best cases of these dangerous liaisons during the nineteenth century.
However, it is when advertising became professionalized (for both countries in the early 1910s) that the ethos of commercial expertise slowly became a concern. These advertising professions who were then building their identity as techniciens (technicians) brought the American debate about Truth in Advertising front stage, mainly to support their claim for self-organization and therefore to keep themselves out of state control . The Truth in Advertising motto reclaimed by the American professionals found its way, at first through the works of Belgian advertising pioneer Paul Mosselmans, who published in 1908 the first advertising techniques manual in French . However, the admen’s self-regulation happened quite late in Belgium compared to its main countries of influence which were France and the USA. It is only in 1921 that the Belgian admen finally put aside their dissents and founded a Chambre Syndicale de la Publicité.
Despite the fact that the French and Belgian admen tried, as much as their American counterparts for example, to keep themselves out of state intervention, some precise topics led to the creation of a – however very limited - number of new laws ruling commercial advertising in the years following WWI. It is relevant to note that, at these times when advertising was only on its way to professionalization in Belgium, it was not advertising in itself that interested the State. Rather, two main topics came into discussion: the preservation of the landscape, and the respect of Christian ethics, especially through the issues of the advertising for abortion remedies and private clinics, then present in the wide-audience press.
On the other side, one has to question WWI. As elsewhere, it contributed to reinforce the idea of the efficiency of propaganda, in political as well as in public affairs. Some admen were hired to handle political campaigns, especially in the late twenties and early thirties, when the political debate became stronger, but neither the French nor the Belgian State, during or after the war, did use the admen’s expertise as George Creel reports during WWI in the USA . In public affairs, especially in austerity publicity and in the campaigns for national consumption and bonds, the main characteristic of both countries is that they did not embrace then the American model of PR . Therefore, as a conclusion, I will question in retrospect how and why PR expertise eventually found its way in Belgium and France in the 1950s. (Show less)

This paper traces the development of ideas about ‘professional’ and ‘scientific’ publicity during the inter-war era, and their gradual absorption by mainstream politicians and officials from the late 1920s onwards. The unprecedented wartime efforts to influence domestic morale and the scandalous revelations of misinformation afterwards greatly increased popular awareness of the ability of elites to manipulate public opinion, and generated intense interest in the problems of communicating with mass publics. Nowhere was this fascination greater than in Germany, where many attributed their defeat primarily to superior enemy propaganda.

Despite the peculiarities of the German case, this was by no means a discrete process confined to the indigenous advertising milieu. Quite the contrary, it was an integral part of two wider contexts: international developments in publicity, whereby the United States in many ways as a model; and the gradual blurring, indeed active undermining, of the distinction between ‘propaganda’ and ‘advertising’ in journalistic and academic discourse. The result was a wide-ranging post-war discourse about the power of this modern ‘weapon’ and its unavoidability as a part of modern political and commercial life. It was in the midst of this unprecedented interest that German advertisers and publicity experts undertook their first great strides towards ‘professionalization’, both in the sense of adopting more ‘scientific’ ways of marketing goods, as well as gaining social recognition from political and economic elites and convincing people of their own economic and political importance.

Far from learning the so-called ‘lessons of the war’, government self-representation efforts were steadily criticized by journalists and commercial advertisers as both quantitatively and qualitatively inadequate. Whereas most republicans regarded ‘propaganda’ as mendacious and un-statesmanlike, many of the radical parties’ publicity efforts clearly reflected the basic tenets of the concurrent propaganda discourse, in particular the emphasis on emotional appeal and ritualistic symbols. During the crisis of the early 1930s, amidst the visible success of the Nazis’ advertising-inspired campaigning, the spread of this discourse across the political spectrum helped to hollow out democratic conceptualizations of leadership and public opinion from the very centre of Weimar political life. After 1933, the belief that modern publicity techniques were an indispensable tool of the twentieth-century technocrat, a point made incessantly by advertisers and publicists throughout the Weimar era and eventually taken up by moderate politicians as a means to curb the radical political movements, arguably found its apotheosis in the charisma-driven stage management of the Third Reich. (Show less)

This panel examines how a professionalised persuasion industry changed the ways corporations and governments communicated with citizens and consumers in the twentieth century. By the end of World War II, a number of institutions and actors had emerged – advertising agencies, government propaganda units, market research and opinion polling services, corporate publicity departments etc. – which were characterised by what Robert Jackall called “ethos of advocacy”. Papers at this panel will look at how people at the centre of this emerging social and professional ethos reacted to the challenges of expanding markets, mass democracy, new media technologies and the threats of war and dictatorship.

My paper focuses on the question whether terms such as “Americanisation”, “Rationalisation” or “Professionalisation” can help us explain the structural changes that characterised the British advertising industry in the mid-twentieth century. The paper will engage with recent historical work on the development of advertising and marketing in Europe after World War I (Arvidsson 2003, Chessel 2002, de Grazia 2005, Pouillard 2005, Schröter 2005) and test the hypothesis that “American” methods and practices had a major influence on the social and cultural identities of those who prided themselves of being able to communicate brands, corporate images, political leaders or social policies to the masses. Drawing on a variety of unpublished and largely under-used sources – such as the advertising agencies’ self-promotional literature and industrial research reports – I argue that the making of British commercial and political communication was not a mere function of the alleged dominance of American advertising after Europe’s slow decline since 1918. (Show less)

Many commentators point to the political communications work of the advertisers Saatchi and Saatchi on behalf of Margaret Thatcher as a key moment in the development of political marketing in the UK. Others suggest a more substantial change took place during the 1950s and 1960s with the intensification in the relationship between parties and their communications' advisers. This paper will, however, focus on developments during the inter-period, arguably a critical era which saw the forging of important partnerships between leading advertising professionals and vote seeking politicians in the 1920s and 1930s. (Show less)