acolytes working in advertising bullpens and art-service studios. The
quality ranged from primitive comics to highly polished renderings to
panels of photographs with speech balloons. Although the majority of the
texts were written by hack copywriters, some were entertaining. Who can
forget the famous Charles Atlas body-building ads where a weakling is
humiliated, loses the girl, eats sand, and ultimately takes the Atlas course
and gets revenge?
No one knows who conceived the first comic strip ad, but the
comic strip was ignored by advertisers for almost three decades. Only after
the pollster George Gallup released a report in 1930 , at the height of the
Great Depression, that ninety percent of all Americans read the comics and
comic pages, did advertisers begin to use the form. In 1935 M. C. Gaines,
manager of the color printing department of the McClure Newspaper
Syndicate, wrote in PMmagazine: “As a result of [the] discovery that the
comics enjoy the widest appeal of all newspaper features, it is estimated
that close to $1billion worth of space has been filled with advertising of the
comic strip type.... Color comic advertising has proven so profitable that,
in the opinion of one of the country’s foremost research authorities, there is
a possibility that newspapers will be forced to print comics in color several
times a week.”
Evidence of the appeal of comic strip advertising was significant.
In 1932 , six months after initiating a comics advertising campaign to boost
failing sales of its Grape Nuts cereal, General Foods announced an
unprecedented surge in profits. Soon afterward, J. Walter Thompson’s
advertising agents requested comic strip ads for all their accounts,
regardless of the appropriateness. The 1930 s became known in advertising
circles as “the balloon talk period.” In a contemporary advertising trade
journal a columnist wrote: “Psychologically the use of the comic technique
is sound...Pictures [are] one of the best attention getting devices....
Simple human interest material, based on basic wants, holds interest and
the brevity with which the story must be told [says] the reader is not asked
to concentrate too long to get the story.” Moreover, wrote Roland
Marchand in Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity
1920–40(University of California Press, 1985 ), comic strip formats, like
radio commercials, gave print advertisements a time dimension. Viewers
also identified with the true story melodramas and real people testimonials
so common in strips. No wonder advertisers hopped on the soap opera
bandwagon when the living comic strippremiered in the mid- 1930 s.
To introduce the section on comic strip advertising in the
Fourteenth Annual of Advertising Art( 1935 ) the editor wrote that this new
form “has been the complete overthrow of the government of advertising
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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