1920s Advertising Analysis

Identification and Targeting of Consumer Groups in Advertising Strategies of the 1920s Advertising is critical to building business in a capitalist society like the United States. In fact, today, the U.S. spends over 220 billion dollars annually on internal and external advertising (“Statistics”). A market as large as this has a significant impact on the American population. This impact results from the cultural trends that advertising exposes and highlights to the general public. However, advertising has only been a major component of the American business scene for the past hundred years. It was during this time in the 1920s that the ad industry saw a major boom that launched it into prominence on the American stage as a crucial part of

They either are very feminine or they are held to high standards for excellence in beauty through their objectification for the purposes of creating an ad. This image is not how all ads in the 1920s treated women. In fact, Einav Rabinovitch-Fox argues in her article “Baby, You Can Drive My Car: Advertising Women’s Freedom in 1920s America” that car companies in the 1920s used women as a symbol for something other than seduction and their heightened femininity. Instead, she maintains that the women featured in the advertisements for cars were actually being depicted because they symbolized the new foothold women had in society with the success of the suffrage movement and the new freedoms they were beginning to enjoy. Rabinovitch-Fox argues that this symbol is the “modern woman” of the early-twentieth century. Consequently, she would likely challenge Cox’s description of the role that women played as the subject of advertisements in the 1920s as nothing more than objects whose sole purpose is to be beautiful. She would be more prone to state that instead of this harsh and objectifying image set forth in Cox’s narrative, women as subjects in advertisements during this time period were “the visual representation of a modern cultural consciousness that defined the 1920s” (Rabinovitch-Fox, 374). This is a very drastic contrast to what has been the narrative thus far regarding women’s status in society through the lens of the advertising companies. These companies have either been demeaning them as nothing more than housewives by pandering to that notion in their radio programming or outright objectifying women completely when they make them the subject of an