Advertising’s targeted appeal to women began when companies realized women did most household purchasing

Evidence

During this period it also struck businessmen, as if all at once, that if America was becoming a consumer society, most of this new purchasing of household goods was being done by the lady of the house. “In the purchase of things for personal use,” declared one authority in 1921, “men do very little on their own initiative.” Companies, run mostly by men, therefore, came to see cracking the code of the female consumer as the key to commerce. As an advertisement in Printer’s Ink put it, “The proper study of mankind is man…but the proper study of markets is women.” To men of industry, however, the promised land was mostly a terra incognita. Hence, advertising’s third major development was a great new effort to appeal to women—through what would later be called “targeted” advertisements. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 208

Categorization

• XREF: Fits the reader’s broader project on attention industries — this is the origin moment of ‘targeted advertising’, a precursor to algorithmic targeting. — connects to: Radio advertising targeted housewives because they controlled family purchases — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1305; Cigarettes were marketed to women as a diet aid. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 241; Advertising aimed at women tripled female smoking rates across a decade. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 243 (+1 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘targeted advertising began as gender targeting in the 1920s’ — the forgotten pre-digital history of micro-segmentation.