"Television, Advertising, and Consumption: Argentine Capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s"

In 1973, a new Peronist coalition won the national elections in Argentina. Having spent 18 years of exile in Spain, Juan Domingo Perón returned to his native country backed by a political agreement between trade unions and the Confederación General Empresaria. Together, this coalition promised to achieve what it called “national liberation.” Under the banner of national liberation, the government tried to mitigate what it considered to be the pernicious effects of advertising: the creation of “false” needs and superfluous patterns of consumption. Implementing price controls, the Subsecretary of Commerce prohibited corporations from including advertising expenditures in the business costs that would be factored into newly fixed sale prices.
This policy was in response to a long-standing debate over the effects of advertising and TV on consumption patterns in Argentina during the 1960s and early 1970s. For many economists, experts, and intellectuals of the time, Argentina exhibited two characteristics: it was a mass consumption society. And it was also “underdeveloped”: a peripheral nation in the world economy. Mutually reinforcing, by the logic of the time, it was precisely consumerism, fostered by the advertising industry, that produced underdevelopment in the first place. Local elites imitated consumption patterns from developed countries; by increasing the number of luxury imports, this behavior deprived Argentina of productive investments. This consumption-underdevelopment thesis became a consensus. By 1973, it was a theory that supported the regulation of advertising. In this paper, I argue that this consensus was in fact mistaken. This paper traces the origins of that consensus and reconstructs the expansion of TV consumption and the advertising industry in Argentina during the 1960s. At least in comparison to the rest of South America, and to some European countries, I show that—far from an underdeveloped economy—the country is best understood as an integrated national market.