Your grandparents remember Pears Soap
It was one of the biggest brands of its day.  Nearly everyone used it.
But it didn’t come with fancy packaging, or the promise of being 99% percent pure. People bought Pears Soap – whether they know it or not – because of a man named Thomas Barrett.

Barrett’s considered “The Father of Modern Advertising” because he realized Pears had to bury the competition in order to survive.  So, he created beautifully painted ads that appealed to consumers subconsciously – plump, red-cheeked children playing in the bath – images that represented “quality, purity (i.e., untainted by commercialism) and simplicity (cherubic children).”

In turn, Pears got paid.  The British soap is still around, but is now being made in India – 218 years after it was created.

The Pears ads were the forerunners of modern advertising – marketing didn’t become vital until the early 20^th century.  World War I was pounding Europe then; industry was churning out marvels like the Model T, and consumer goods were being mass produced for the newly affluent.  All those costs had to be paid for – that’s where advertising posters came in.

Before the advent of television, posters were the new media, hawking everything from cigars to cosmetics.  They were designed to get shoppers to spend money, but poster advertisements also had to grad attention, stimulate interest and stop consumers from buying something else instead.

Yet amazingly, advertising did more.  Ads subconsciously played on sex, race and class – marketing on our emotions as well as economics.  Sought-after poster artists like Leonetto Cappiello and Jules Cheret hawked kerosene lamps and bicycles with beautiful women riding them, because they knew men and women preferred buying a brand that was “somehow instilled with glamour”.  And if you were looking for grace, style and sex-appeal in a product, a pretty woman could sell anything.

Blacks and other people of color were fairly invisible in ads until the 20^th century, but when they were used they were portrayed in stereotypes, such as servants or bumbling, child-like adults.  Non-threatening characters were used to associate products with a

“simpler” time, when products were made that you could trust.  And who’s more trustworthy than your Old Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben?

The ads weren’t dishonest – not directly.  But they presented a distorted image of society, and did so in the push to sell products.  According to sociologist Michael Schudson, advertising is “capitalist realism… an art form that abstracts from and reconfigures the world as it is to fit the marketing needs of the business system.”  In other words, advertising – Schudson says ---“is capitalism’s way of saying ‘I love you’ to itself.”