Personalities and Products

Profiling such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, P. T. Barnum, John Wanamaker, and Harley Procter, this book examines the contributions that several prominent individuals have made to advertising in America. The work opens with a discussion of Colonial advertising and the printers, such as Benjamin Franklin, who created it. It then goes on to consider early advertising agents such as Francis Wayland Ayer and the contributions of the great promoter P. T. Barnum.Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound and the advertising of patent medicines is also covered, as is John Wanamaker's impact on retail advertising. The book then examines the advertising style of Albert Lasker, owner of Lord and Thomas advertising agency, as well as Harley Procter's advertising of Ivory soap and Procter & Gamble's first 100 years. Elliot White Springs's use of sex in advertising and the Springs Cotton Mills advertising campaign of the 1940s and 1950s concludes the volume.

"The book is a quick read and is clearly not intended to be a comprehensive history of advertising. Yet in its brevity it provides enough background material to make many of the people gain dimensional significance. In doing so, it presents important people interestingly in a way that is unassuming, straightforward, and occasionally charming....[F]or those interested in gaining a better sense of some of advertising's legendary characters and the times and challenges they faced, the book should be quite satisfying. Readers will find this book provides texture to the stories of some of the more famous and infamous people who have affected advertising in America....And it is certainly a worthy read for any professor of mass communications or marketing interested in the fascinating roots of today's advertising world."-Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, ?The book is a quick read and is clearly not intended to be a comprehensive history of advertising. Yet in its brevity it provides enough background material to make many of the people gain dimensional significance. In doing so, it presents important people interestingly in a way that is unassuming, straightforward, and occasionally charming....[F]or those interested in gaining a better sense of some of advertising's legendary characters and the times and challenges they faced, the book should be quite satisfying. Readers will find this book provides texture to the stories of some of the more famous and infamous people who have affected advertising in America....And it is certainly a worthy read for any professor of mass communications or marketing interested in the fascinating roots of today's advertising world.?-Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

EDD APPLEGATE is Professor in the School of Journalism at Middle Tennessee State University. His earlier books include The Ad Men and Women: A Biographical Dictionary of Advertising (Greenwood, 1994), Print and Broadcast Journalism (Praeger, 1996), Literary Journalism: A Biographical Dictionary of Writers and Editors (Greenwood, 1996), and Journalistic Advocates and Muckrakers: Three Centuries of Crusading Writers (1997).