Wartime ads sold promises of future plenty when goods were unavailable

Evidence

Visions of “the world of tomorrow” quickly became the most common form of advertising. Thousands of factories converted to defense production, so the consumer goods market was severely restricted: Manufacturers could only sell promises. Often, the promise was generic, a corporate effort to revive faith in a capitalist system shaken by depression. The world-of-tomorrow advertising almost always cited the miracles of wartime production. Forced to do or die, the ads proclaimed, the nation’s engineers and scientists had invented dozens of new products and production processes, and their inventions would transform everyday life after the war. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 136

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postwar advertising arose to manufacture demand once government guaranteed sales ended — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 150