Advertising: The Mammoth Mirror

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Nor is there any obvious compelling need for such a drastic departure. "You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements," wrote British Author Norman (South Wind) Douglas. Allowing for occasional flaws in the glass, advertising is simply a mammoth mirror of the world around it, and the intellectuals who flog advertising are using it, consciously or unconsciously, as a whipping boy for all that they dislike about U.S. society and the U.S. character. In the most effective rebuttal any adman has yet made to Arnold Toynbee, William Bernbach wrote: "Mr. Toynbee's real hate is not advertising. It is the economy of abundance . . . If Mr. Toynbee believes a materialistic society is a bad one (and I am not saying he is wrong in that belief), then he owes it to mankind to speak out against such a society and not merely against one of the tools that is available to any society."

In fact, as Historian Toynbee should know, taste and cultivation have historically reached their heights in prosperous societies. By helping to produce mass prosperity, advertising has at least indirectly helped to raise the general level of taste in the U.S.—a development that, in turn, has been mirrored in advertising itself. Even its critics concede that advertising has come a long way since the days when national magazines were littered with ads for nostrums that purported to cure everything from consumption to lost manhood, and when a U.S. soapmaker could bugle: "If we could teach the Indians to use SAPOLIO, it would quickly civilize them." Today most ads, if not 99, 44, 100% of them, strive for both taste and believability. And, assuming a continued increase in U.S. affluence and cultivation, tomorrow's advertising should be even more sophisticated and tasteful.

Whatever the state of American culture, all signs are that advertising will always be a conspicuously visible part of it. Fascinated as it is with the business of finding better ways to live, the U.S. public wastes little time worrying about whether advertising may be damaging to its collective psyche. It is unlikely that the citizenry will ever take the step some admen seem to yearn for and pass a national vote of thanks to advertising for its part in enriching U.S. life. But it is equally unlikely that the public will ever be suborned out of its unemotional recognition of the adman for what he is: a highly effective salesman without whose efforts the world would be a far more primitive and less pleasant place.