The world of advertising changed dramatically about 50 years ago, just as the self-service supermarket was rapidly replacing the hands-on neighborhood grocer (and butcher and baker, among others) as America's principal food merchant.
That the change in retail channels coincided with a seismic shift on Madison Avenue is no accident, according to James Twitchell, professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and author of such books as "Twenty Ads That Shook the World" and "Adcult USA."
"The great event of advertising was to get the consumer to make up his or her mind before entering the store," he told SN. In the past, Twitchell said, the friendly neighborhood storekeeper was available to answer customer questions about products. "But the whole key to the modern store is that there is no storekeeper."
The art of persuading people what to buy has also evolved over the past half century, according to Twitchell. "Advertising has changed from attempting to define product differentiation to generating sensation," he explained. "It has gone from explaining real differences among real products to realizing that there are no differences, and so trying to find a story that will distinguish one manufacturer's product from the competitor's virtually interchangeable product."
As a result, advertising now focuses much more on images and much less on words than in the past. "Consumers don't care about what's in the box now," Twitchell said. "They want to know about how the product will affect them experientially, sensationally.
"The focus has moved from what's inside the packages to what's inside the consumers. Pictures do that a lot better than words, and literacy is not something that we share as much as we used to.
"We are a highly visual culture. We expected to see things in motion, and we are hard-wired to watch. We had to learn how to read how to read, but we didn't have to learn how to watch."
Pictures may work better than words perhaps, but Twitchell said he is not sure how effective advertising is. About a century ago, Lord Leverhulme, the founder of Unilever, famously remarked, "Half my advertising is wasted -- the trouble is, I don't know which half." Twitchell said although the soap magnate may have had the ratio correct for the late 19th century, today probably about 99% of advertising is wasted.
"We're currently going through a small recession," he said. "Ad agencies are saying their billing in plummeting. If advertising worked, you'd be doing more during a downturn, not less.
"Instead, the minute companies feel a squeeze, advertising is the first thing to go. Nobody can put a meter on what advertising does, whether you're going to make it back in the end.
"A lot of the reason companies advertise now is not to so to persuade consumers before a purchase as to comfort them afterwards."
Not that advertising is always useless, Twitchell admits.
"If you have a unique product, a little bit of advertising will help you a lot," he observed. "But if you have an interchangeable product, it's hard as heck to get advertising to do much."
