Creativity, Beautification, and Optimization in the 1960s American Advertising Industry

The 1960s was a key decade in the evolution of the American advertising industry. Each of these papers addresses a specific element of change during this period, illuminating shifting strategies and practices, and bringing out questions of how to serve the public interest.
In “Philip Morris, Alpine and DDB: The Advent of the ‘Creative Revolution’ in Cigarette Advertising,” Peter Kovacs examines an ad campaign for a low-tar cigarette brand using self-deprecating humor in cigarette advertising, a strategy that became so widespread that anti-smoking forces accused the tobacco oligopoly of using it to deflect smokers’ health fears.
In “The 1960s Creative Revolution in Advertising: Resistance from Traditionalist Ad Agencies,” Cynthia Meyers analyzes the intraindustry debates over the Creative Revolution’s shift in ad strategy away from providing product information and toward appealing to consumers with humor and irony. Traditionalists in the ad industry deplored the Creative Revolution for undermining advertising’s public purpose: to increase sales, expand the economy, and help build wealth for the American people.
Alex J. Taylor considers a specific aesthetic debate in “Beautify America with Billboards: Art and the Outdoor Advertising Lobby, 1967,” in which a billboard trade organization’s public relations campaign employed modern art to resist government regulation.
Lee McGuigan’s “Public Culture and Private Value: Advertising Optimization Models and the Financing of American Mass Media” analyzes the technological changes shaping media buying practices within major ad agencies. McGuigan analyzes how computerization and the ideology of optimization shaped both the advertising industry’s broad commitment to financing mass media and the specific orientation of media departments toward the interests of clients and the public.
Questions of how to serve the public interest underlie each of these papers. By focusing on the 1960s, this panel illuminates lesser known aspects of a key era in the history of the American advertising industry.