Wartime government advertising legitimized commercial advertising as respectable

Evidence

With the government campaigns as proof-of-concept for what a mass advertising campaign might achieve, corporate America soon caught Bernays’s enthusiasm. There was something about the British and American use of advertising for official purposes that cleansed the practice of its tainted reputation. Applied to a high common purpose it could no longer be deemed a mere prop of charlatanry. “Advertising has earned its credentials,” concluded Printer’s Ink, the advertising trade magazine, “as an important implement of war.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 172

Categorization

• XREF: The legitimizing effect of wartime purposes on advertising connects to my interest in how attention industries gained cultural acceptance — parallels the pattern of technologies gaining legitimacy through war use. — connects to: Wartime propaganda’s end left a vacuum that postwar advertising filled — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 430; British war propagandists discovered mass attention’s power before commerce did — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 15; Advertising before 1930 had not yet penetrated twentieth-century media or the family home. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 285