'Madison Avenue puts on its best hair shirt': US advertising and its social critics

Ian Brailsford

Examines how the American advertising industry responded to its critics in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

'Madison Avenue puts on its best hair shirt': US advertising and its social critics

Ian Brailsford

This paper examines how the American advertising industry responded to its critics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Criticism of advertising was not new. Advertising had come under scrutiny during the Progressive era and the New Deal years. What made this wave of criticism novel was that it occurred during a period of economic affluence and relative social stability. Although recent academic scholarship from authors such as Michael Schudson (1984) and Jackson Lears (1994) has challenged the social critics, popular discourse in the...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands