Advertising The American Dream Summary

Advertising the American Dream is a book by Roland Marchand and this book is all about talking about 3 major topics in advertising and those 3 topics throughout the book are as follows: advertising and its place in society throughout the years, advertising as an industry and who helps make advertising better, and lastly in the book they also talk about how much the Great Depression effected not only the economy but society and consumers as a whole as well.
In the beginning of the book, Marchand starts by talking about the 1920’s and 1930’s and he says this is when he began seeing a huge difference in advertising early. He says that this is when he saw a huge increase in the work and difference “admen” made in the advertising world. Roland …show more content…
After the spike nothing was too little or too big to be on a radio advertisement, businesses just wanted to reach out to people about products as much as they possibly could. Also during this time companies seemed to use a new tactic in which they would encourage people to use items that were before a luxury item to use and was only used when needed to a necessity and a product that is used throughout the day on a daily basis. A very good example of this is the phone usage that went up around that time, before phone companies started using the consumption-ethic mindset phones were viewed as a use only once in a while thing but during this time phone’s became a more used, common thing among American households across the …show more content…
Admen noticing this started telling companies to make their ads more centered or focused towards women and their insecurities. Many of these ads poked at women and made all women seem as if they were naïve or defenseless. A lot of ads also tried to make women feel like they weren’t truly a woman unless they had the product in the advertisement. During this time there was also a growth in advertisements aiming at women because back then women were usually in charge of the household and usually would do all the things around the house such as the cleaning, cooking, and shopping for the house. And if the woman was doing all the shopping she is pretty much in charge of what products are bought and brought into the household. One thing also interesting about this section is Marchand says this is when you began to see advertisements that were more in touch with the times and started to become more cultural and socially