THE ADS ARE A FORM OF MAGIC WHICH HAVE
COME TO DOMINATE A NEW CIVILIZATION.

MARSHALL McLUHAN
in The Commonweal Volume LVIII, Number 23, September 11, 1953

MOST people must by now have seen the original advertisement featuring a Clifton Webb sort of gentleman wearing a white shirt and having a black patch over one eye. This advertisement sold a million Hathaway shirts in a few weeks, but few ever found out why. The ad was a piece of abstract art, of unabashed symbolism such as is reputed to outrage the ordinary man when he meets in an art gallery, but which worked perfectly in the market place.

There is no accident about this. Symbolist poetry and painting were magical in theory and in practice, linking objects which had no logical connection. Modern advertising is a form of magic (“kissing sweet in five seconds”), and it employs all the techniques of symbolist art. It is a kind of Arabian Nights world of Aladdin lamps and genii who spring from bottles to do our bidding. In this world, as in the world of Omar Khayyam, the sorry scheme of things as they are is forever being remolded nearer to the heart’s desire. So powerful is this feature of the huge artificial pictorialized neon-lighted environment created by advertising that people have got into the habit of living in that future environment which the ads promise. Not satisfied with the present, they live in those months ahead when the ice-box will be paid for or a course of beauty treatments and a psychiatric analysis will have brought romance and success into their lives. Advertising creates a promised land.

National brands of commodities like Coca-Cola or Lucky Strikes have a way of becoming a kind of totemistic institution. Totem societies were held together collectively by the totem plant or animal. A man was not a member of the Kangaroo clan or tribe. He was a kangaroo. He participated in the life of the kangaroo with his brothers. It was a kind of mystic communion or participation. Advertising, with its appeal to collective emotion, has set up national brands and totems for communal participation.

We are told that “you feel better satisfied when you use well known brands.” To use a brand of car, drink, smoke, or food that is nationally advertised gives a man the feeling that he belongs to something bigger than himself. He is part of a process or a culture that contains and nourishes him. And the irrational basis of the appeals made to him by the ads reinforces his sense of mystic communion. National ads have naturally supplanted the flag in this respect. So that there was nothing surprising in the verdict of the GI’s in the last war who decided that they were fighting for the American girl, associated in their minds with Coca-Cola, hamburgers, youth, and hygiene.

But a glace at the history of ads will correct any notion that our time is especially grotesque. Not so long ago even tombstones had been used as advertisements, like this one in Paris:

To the memory of M. Jabert, a most excellent husband and father. His inconsolable widow continues to carry on the grocery business in the Rue St. Denis.

An American newspaper a century ago carried this ad:

Here lies Adolphe Black
Who died at the age of 86 years
in the possession of all his teeth,
Thanks to the dentifrice wash of the
house of X. And Co.

And there is the local casket company that sponsors a program for shut-ins.

TODAY advertising is a major industry, absorbing most of the artistic talent of our world. But the hook-up between artists and advertising is age-old. Leonardo da Vinci painted inn signs. The parvenu Medici family advertised themselves by hiring painters and sculptors to glorify them. In our century Salvador Dali does nylon ads. In fact, as handled by such commercial geniuses as Vollard and Duveen, modern painting has itself become a branch of advertisement—as any reader of Vogue should know. The big art dealers decide who will be the fashionable painters of the day. And the fashion magazines use these same fashionable painters, directly and indirectly, to promote turnover in textiles. The recent “Moulin Rouge,” which featured José Ferrer’s Toulouse-Lautrec as the advertising genius of a french cabaret, is a case in point. In America the lay-out and design man for an ad might be a very great artist and nobody would ever discover it. We are so ashamed of our own commercial activities that we refuse to inspect our world for any symptoms of virtue or beauty which, we feel, could only creep into it by accident. The Puritans said in effect: life is very short and therefore our faces must be long. We are the new Puritans of technology rather than theology, and we say in effect: life is very cruel and therefore we must turn our faces away from it. We like roast beef and therefore we have slaughter-houses. But we despise the Spaniards who find meaning and dignity in the death of a bull.

With the arrival of display advertising, a major revolution occurred in the modern world. Life has been different since then. P. T. Barnum was really its father. It was he who broke the opposition to agate-type. Until a century ago the little advertisers had banded together against the big advertisers saying: “You shall have no big type or big lay-outs before us.” It was the organized pressure of the little men who held back the big type battalions of the national display of advertisers for fifty years. It was P. T. Barnum who smashed the dam of small agate type which still dominates the classified pages by taking over the whole newspaper as an advertising stunt. He showed the press how to use the feature story and the interview as advertising gimmicks. His press ballyhoo for the concert tour of Jenny Lind in 1850 taught America how to use the human interest story as advertising. Barnum saw clearly that the press was, from this point of view, a printed form of the circus sideshow of wonders and horrors. A few years later Macy’s translated the lay-out of the newspaper merchandise page into the physical reality of the department store. If it was an advantage to have many kinds of bargains on one page, why not have them under one roof? The modern department store was the result of the new display advertising in the press.

I offer this merely as one example of the power of a change in the form of communication to produce further changes in the physical make-up of our social lives. And it suggests many reasons why we should take an intelligent interest in the art and engineering skills that are lavished on the commercial appeals of our world today.

MORE art and intelligence go into the design and lay-out of an ad in the Saturday Evening Post or Life than into stories and features in the same magazines. Why should this be so? The answer is simple. An advertisement in these magazines costs a great deal. It represents an investment as high as twenty-five thousand dollars for a single page in a single issue. That is the least of the matter. The initial investment is hitched to multi-million dollar production plants and national sales networks. The magazine ad is a magical device contrived to create appetites and stir impulses in a vast reader mass. That page, like the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, is devised to release a storm of orders and to stimulate feverish production and distribution. Therefore, the layout of that page has to be exactly geared to the reader mass.

In order to achieve this end there has to be an elaborate series of consumer surveys to establish the exact character of the social groups whose dollars are to be magically extracted. Because of this the sociological studies conducted by modern industry far exceed in scope those of sociologists in the universities. The consumer surveys of modern industry can only be likened to the departments of military intelligence maintained by modern governments. And the advertising divisions of these departments of intelligence employ professors of psychology and anthropology. Why is Michigan chewing less gum this year? Send in the staff of experts to look over the psychology of the Michiganders. Perhaps it will be necessary to undermine some recently launched dentistry campaign for better teeth. Beer is best? Beer belongs? Of course. But why don’t the people of Idaho have a sufficiently lively appreciation of this fact? Anthropologist Gardiner will find the answer in the social conditioning of that area.

Of course, nothing kills the power of an ad like paying conscious attention to it. Ideally, ads are most valuable as windows providing a rational view of the entire social and psychological landscape of our communities. But their magical power is felt only by those who think they don’t read them. Ads are written to have their effect on those whose attention is distracted by the other items around them. And no ad has its meaning by itself. Anybody can prove this simply by cutting one out of a magazine and studying it, or by stopping and looking carefully at one. Soon he will begin to smile. Then to laugh. Ads are like the weird faces or masks used by witch-doctors to control the powers of nature. If one is merged into the tribal horde, the mask will look good to him. It may decided whether he will eat next year. To the outsider the same magical layout will seem comical.

Our own advertising layouts are so extremely funny that if we paid any serious attention to them we would soon be in stitches of laughter. The reason this does not happen is not that we have become hardened to these fantastic appeals to our passions, but that we have become so groggy, so passive, so helpless amidst the endless barrage of appeals that “we go out about our business,” as we say. But the business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds. There it subtly rearranges the pattern of our wishes and impulses like dinner music, the smell of cooking, or the sound of the surf. Today our whole society is reeling from copy-writer’s shock as much as any soldier ever felt battle-shock. The battle of the name-brands is carried on with an unceasing and relentless intensity.

The important point about ads and fashions can be stated in a word. Fashion is the popular substitute for art. It is a constantly applied stimulus to our natural sluggishness. A kind of social tonic. From this point of view fashion is the life-blood of advertising. For if the ads are psychological machines hitched to the assembly lines of mass-production at the distribution end, it is only by an intense appeal to the new, the different, the latest model or gadget that these lines can be kept rolling. And if fashion is a popular substitute for art, it is equally true to say that art cannot dispense with fashion. The strange marriage between the two is presented in every issue of Vogue, for example, where the latest art mingles with the latest models.

The impact of modern advertising has been to substitute the jingles of the singing commercials for age-old nursery rhymes. It has provided a stream of images and phrases which carry much of the burden of ordinary greetings, quips, gags, and conversation. It has created a world in which everyone wants to be hep—“How’m I doin’?” It represents an enormous leveling process from which nobody is excluded.

There is a remark in Roy Campbell’s study of the Spanish poet, Lorca, which, by contrast, brings all these matters into focus. Campbell is explaining in a country like Spain, where rural people are not much affected by the new media of communication, great poetry and oratory are popular among the illiterate. Moreover, he says, “Spain is the last European country where conversation remains a popular art, and where the peasants, though illiterate, are as a rule so highly cultured that high society and intellectuals imitate their special accents and expressions out of snobbism—just as the new rulers of the [British] bureaucracy affect and imitate the accents which are current at the moment at Oxford and Cambridge.”

Because the ads have created a world in which fashion dictates that each of us must always have enough cash to conform, success is the cash-ability to be like everybody else. Our fashions change rapidly so that to be in fashion takes a great deal of ready money. Apart from that simple requirement, nothing could be more democratic than our fashions which require uniformity as the mark of distinction. Our social culture today is, even at the intellectual level, mainly an affair of advertising. And ads, in turn, represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

Mr McLuhan, of St. Michael’s College in Toronto, is the author of “The Mechanical Bride.”

I’ve analyzed this piece in the fourth entry of my series on Logos.