Marketing Modernity: The J. Walter Thompson Company and North American Advertising in Brazil, 1929–1939
2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-82-2-257
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Fashion and Cultural Textiles
ResumoIn 1929 the J. Walter Thompson Company (JWT), a leading North American advertising agency, opened an office in São Paulo. JWT's founding of a Brazilian subsidiary emerged from a decade's worth of discussion of how to increase North American exports and of what role advertising would play in this expansion. Manufacturers, advertising executives, and representatives of key sectors of the U.S. government took part in these discussions through articles in the nation's leading trade publications and participation in conferences on the subject. These businessmen and bureaucrats envisioned exports and overseas advertising as a way to guarantee the nation's future prosperity, protect and extend North American economic power, and raise backward regions to the economic and cultural level of the United States, then immersed in the triumphalist consumerism of its Second Industrial Revolution.The General Motors Corporation (GM) was an early adherent to the expansionist creed, establishing assembly operations in São Paulo in 1925 and a Brazilian advertising department the following year. In 1927 GM and Thompson signed an agreement that would make JWT the first major U.S. advertising agency to open offices in Brazil. The modern advertising agency, having served the U.S. corporate economy at home since its inception, would now serve the emerging multinational arm of this economy abroad.1With the opening of the São Paulo office in 1929, Thompson executives hired former employees of the General Motors advertising department, professionals already attuned to North American methods and modalities. The advertising men also began to cultivate new clients and initiated the first surveys of the Brazilian market, research that not only afforded them greater insight into local business and the lives of Brazilian consumers but that also provides historians with the opportunity to examine North American attitudes toward Brazil during this period. Finally, the new office conducted the work for which it was founded: the creation and dissemination of advertising for an array of complementary products, thus promoting a certain vision of modernity that was to be assembled in Brazil.The JWT experience had, in turn, far-reaching effects on Brazilian society. With Thompson's entry into the Brazilian market, other North American agencies were forced to follow. These agencies, along with JWT, provided the training that created a new group in Brazilian society, a group of Brazilian advertising men who formed part of a larger professional-managerial elite that looked increasingly to the United States as a model for their own country. The expansion of JWT and its subsequent competitors also led to an increase in advertising; this increase stimulated the expansion and professionalization of Brazilian media, with a consequent growth of dependence on advertising revenue on the part of media outlets. Finally, advertising's appeals reached the men and women of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, who received and interpreted these appeals in different ways.By the 1920s, U.S. industry had reached unprecedented levels of production. Increasingly, exporting and advertising were looked upon as the means to ensure future prosperity, contain European competition, and carry out the Americanization and modernization of host countries. At a 1925 convention, no less an authority than James A. Farrell, president of U.S. Steel, urged his colleagues to increase their exports, "an increasing element in the prosperity of our country," in order to keep up with the production capacity of U.S. industry.2 The previous year, a contributor to Printer's Ink, the leading advertising trade publication, called for greater overseas sales, writing that exporting "is and has been a policy of economic necessity, an answer to the urgent demand for markets which will absorb production and keep factories humming."3 Government officials agreed, including Henry H. Morse, chief of the Specialties Division of the Department of Commerce, who saw exporting as the "foundation" of future U.S. prosperity.4The enthusiasm for exporting extended to overseas advertising. Charles Fischer, the foreign manager of Standard Brands—a JWT-Brazil client from the 1930s through the 1980s—called for more advertising abroad because "it costs us approximately fifty percent more to advertise in foreign countries.… But the returns of today is [sic] not our yardstick; it is the returns our money is building for tomorrow from those new markets [we are] in the process of making."5Advertising was seen as a particularly effective means of countering the commercial advances of European nations as their economies recovered from war. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce Director Julius Klein warned that in "Japan, China, South America, and other parts of the world, British, French, and German interests are now making every possible effort to undermine American prestige." North American advertising, however, could serve to counter these efforts as "the American manufacturers who are making the most headway against the foreign handicaps are those who are advertising and merchandising their products on the sound basis of high quality and reasonable price."6Businessmen, increasingly concerned with export advertising, agreed. At the 1926 National Foreign Trade Convention in Charleston, J. W. Sanger of Frank Seaman, Inc." declared, "In today's international competition for free trade, America has the distinct advantage of superior initiative, larger plant capacity, greater reserves of capital, more open-mindedness, and last but not least, more faith in and better knowledge of modern advertising. Of these weapons, the most patent one at our command, is advertising."7Seven years earlier, Sanger had traveled to Brazil to study the country's advertising conditions for the U.S. Department of Commerce. In Brazil he saw a lack of advertising on the part of European interests and called for advertising, a "distinctly American idea," to be "used in Brazil as one of the most potent forces at our command and with but little fear of European competition of like character."8If advertising was envisioned as a means of protecting and extending U.S. influence in the face of European competition, it was also seen as part of a larger, mutually beneficial exchange between the United States and backward regions such as Latin America. In the minds of its practitioners and devotees, advertising occupied a favored position in a rational, liberal, modernizing project that would benefit all the nations of the world. This idea was based on a number of deeply held beliefs: (1) a universalistic belief in advertising, in the idea that advertising and—by extension—North American consumer culture held the same appeal to all people; (2) a quasi-messianic faith in advertising as a central component of the "American way of life," one which assumed that "Americanism" and advertising were by nature progressive influences; and (3) the conviction that advertising was a social and economic force in its own right. In this discourse, "Americanization" and "modernization" emerged as synonyms. Advertising, as both product and promoter of emergent North American corporate and material culture, was to be spread worldwide and usher in universal prosperity.In 1924 the universalist doctrine was summed up by the Printer's Ink correspondent to the London Convention of the Associated Advertisers Clubs of the World: "Just as advertising has long been a common denominator of interest for progressive business men in America, it is being proved that better sales, advertising, and distribution methods speak all languages."9 Following a seven-month trip through Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru, Louis D. Ricci of the Foreign Advertising and Service Bureau reported that the "public is stirred by a new desire to learn things, to follow the fashion, to live as the rest of the world is living."10Advertisers and advertising men were unswerving in their faith in the progressive character of North American life and society, and of advertising as a progressive force therein. The editor of Nation's Business projected that a "future historian" would write, "About 1930 advertising itself began to understand more clearly its responsibilities as an era of civilization's advance [sic]. And this new conception rapidly spread to the four corners of the earth and increased by leaps and bounds the standards of living of millions of people."11 James D. Tew of B. F. Goodrich, the Brazilian accounts of which JWT was to handle beginning in late 1929, remarked that the "history of American commerce is inseparably linked with the history of advertising as a progressive element in merchandising."12The conception of advertising as indispensable to North American modernity and the related emergence of "modernization" and "Americanization" as synonyms were particularly prevalent in the discourse of the 1920s. JWT President Stanley Resor was an early adherent to the creed. As one of his employees remembered, "his belief in advertising as an essential component of American culture was persistent and devout." Resor believed "[m]ore and more American technicians in advertising, selling, transportation, and manufacturing were to live and work throughout the world, helping local people develop their skills in various fields."13Louis D. Ricci commented on advertising's advance in South America: "About half the advertising in the more prominent newspapers and periodicals in South America has its origin in this country. The public has become air-conscious, road-conscious, home-conscious, health-conscious—and luxury-conscious. American automobiles, American cigarettes, American cosmetics and toilet goods set the fashion here. Americans are supplying the materials and equipment for public improvements—electric power, telephone systems, railways, new automobile roads."14North American triumphalism was frequently accompanied by the even uglier racism of the period. As one Printer's Ink contributor recommended, "South Americans must be shown that we bear only a disinterested goodwill and they will soon forget their decadent mother culture in a surging rush of Americanism."15The General Motors Corporation was associated with the expansion of exporting and overseas advertising throughout this period. In 1921 a South American Sales Division of the General Motors Export Company was established.16 In 1925 the company opened an assembly plant in São Paulo.17 The following year, General Motors established an advertising department alongside its assembly operations. Founded with five employees, the department was initially responsible for the production of pamphlets, car cards, and a GM-Brazil house organ, as well as the organization of North American-style car shows and cooperative campaigns with local dealers.18 By the end of 1926, the department had begun producing and placing advertisements. In 1927 a specialist from the United States arrived to lead the department and teach "modern advertising" along North American lines. As automobile sales increased, the department grew to 34 people in 1928.19 GM was not the only foreign interest to develop a Brazilian advertising department; other North American companies also established house agencies, most notably General Electric. However, GM's department was widely recognized as the "most professional and able of the time," and its employees would later be sought after by U.S. advertising agencies entering the Brazilian market.20While GM's advertising department was being staffed and trained in São Paulo, the automobile manufacturer and JWT were extending contacts. In 1927 these contacts were formalized such that Thompson became GM's advertising council for all markets outside of the United States and was committed to opening a local office everywhere that GM had an assembly plant, including São Paulo.21 In Brazil, ties between the advertising agency and the automobile company were so close that one advertising man would later remark that "We moved with General Motors; we were the advertising department of General Motors."22North American advertising, enlisted by business and government, was now to be exported to Brazil. In mid-1929 JWT opened its office in São Paulo, investing in it all of the perceived modernity of its profession. While at one level, the opening can be seen as an episode in the larger expansion of U.S. commercial influence in Brazil in the interwar era (as can the preceding growth of local General Motors operations), the establishment of the São Paulo office also marked an important milestone in the corporate and cultural history of the city.23 The founding of the first subsidiary of a U.S. advertising agency introduced to Brazil a company that produced advertisements for many companies—some of them even domestic—and presented a distinct vision of itself, of its craft, and of what its role should be in society. This vision, transmitted to employees and others, was reflected in its advertisements, its clients, its studies of the country, and its earliest organization and staffing.In May 1929, after opening an office in Buenos Aires, Henry Corwin Flower Jr. was met at the port of Santos by J. Maxwell Kennard, who had been sent directly to Brazil to assist in the opening.24 Kennard, the son of a North American diplomat who had served in Rio de Janeiro, was enlisted for his language skills. Flower, a banker's son, had been educated at Harvard and risen swiftly through the ranks at Thompson. The similarities between the two men are telling. They were in many ways typical of the newly professionalized managerial elite of North American advertising executives: they were born to wealth and privilege, educated at the better schools, and now looked toward progress abroad, as well as at home.25São Paulo, which Flower called the "Detroit of South America," was selected as the site for the initial unfolding of this progress. This decision was made primarily because General Motors was based in the city, but was also influenced by other factors. Flower, like other North American observers, was impressed that its "people were so much more alive and progressive." Giving voice to the dominant racism of the period, he also saw racial admixture in the rest of the country as an "obstacle to its future development," but found this to be less true of the southeastern part of the country, the "real Brazil."26The advertising men set up shop in the Edifício Glória on the praça Ramos de Azevedo and began the process of staffing the new office.27 The New York organization specified that local employees should have "some business experience" and "a point of view in sympathy with American methods and ideas."28 As an earlier investigation had suggested, the GM advertising department was crucial.29 Its employees, soon to be put out of work by Thompson, more than fit the description above, some having worked for the automobile company since 1926. Oscar Fernandes da Silva, a writer for GM's advertising department, became JWT's media chief. Américo Cassoli was brought over from the advertising department as checker. Another former GM employee, Henrique Becherini, was retained as a photographer.30 Trained in the program and practices of North American advertising during their time at General Motors, these men would continue their apprenticeship with Thompson. As JWT grew over the course of the decade, they would in turn help train others, eventually forming the basis of a national group of professional advertising men. "With its tremendous growth," one Brazilian advertising agent later wrote, Thompson "was forced to recruit and develop talent at an extremely quick rate. To do this, [the company] instituted a system of 'trainees,' who were real students of advertising, learning through a practical course of well-planned stages in every department" of the office.31Within the JWT organization, however, the top managerial positions would remain in the hands of North Americans through this period. A historian of North American advertising has described the staffing and management of the foreign offices as follows: "At Mr. Resor's insistence these outposts were administered like a colonial empire, staffed by natives but opened and managed by Thompson men sent out from the U.S."32In August, the new office began to place advertisements for General Motors and Flower returned to the United States. Upon his arrival in New York, he presented his impressions of South America to a group of Thompson executives. Despite what he saw as a dismaying amount of racial admixture in Brazil, Flower still entertained high hopes: "Brazil is the great and powerful country of Latin America, a great sleeping giant. It is going to be slower—very much slower—in developing than the Argentine. The Argentine has real advertising possibilities in the next ten years. Brazil will grow more slowly but there'll be no stopping it once it begins."33 Despite Brazil's relative lack of "real advertising possibilities," the disparity in cost of living between Brazil and Argentina made Brazil as attractive a market in the short term: "It would be possible for us to make a great deal more money on $500,000 worth of business in Brazil than on $1,000,000 in the Argentine because of the difference in living costs in the two countries. The Argentine is more expensive than the U.S. to live in and Brazil is much cheaper so on an equal volume of advertising, we might conceivably make money on one and lose it on the other."34Finally, Flower linked JWT's entry into the Brazilian market to the larger movement of North American business into the export field generally and South America specifically. His discussion of business history and empire may seem crude, and his insistence on the importance of "American brains" distasteful, but his conception of the status and intent of U.S. business abroad provides a clear picture of expansionist thought:While Flower commented on the progress of North American enterprise in Brazil, Kennard and the new Brazilian staff began searching out clients. Although the office's close connections with General Motors would later lead to boasting among JWT executives, at that time there was a great effort to lessen the new office's dependence on the automobile company. Through June and July, the advertising men courted Frigidaire, Standard Oil, Victor, and RCA, and managed to secure National City Bank, JWT's bank in New York and São Paulo.36 However, the National City Bank account was soon lost and the other companies declined to place their billings with Thompson. It was not until September that the company's luck began to change as Kennard secured the Brazilian advertising for the International B.F. Goodrich Company, the U.S. advertising of which was conducted by JWT-New York.37 By the end of the year, the office, now led by Harold Barton, began advertising for Blue Star Line Limited of England.38Through the 1930s, the new office continued to pursue new clients, pro ducing a client roster that suggests certain patterns. Surviving company records, memoirs of participants, and other sources record a total of 32 clients through mid-decade.39 Of these companies, 16 were North American and 6 were European; of the remainder, 3 were local distributors of U.S. products or affiliated with U.S. companies; a fourth was a distributor of Lipton teas. Brahma and Cimento Mauá were the only major Brazilian companies whose advertising was handled by Thompson. The preeminence of U.S. multinationals, many of which, such as Standard Brands and B.F. Goodrich, were clients of the parent company, was marked. Brazilian clients were most useful in allowing Thompson to look like a domestic enterprise; as one advertising man remarked, such clients were pursued because then "we could begin to say … we're a Brazilian agency."40Alongside the pursuit of new clients, the advertising men set about exploring their environment. Extensive studies of marketing and media conditions were carried out to enable the office to conduct its business and provide information to North American advertisers contemplating southward expansion. The advertising men had a vested interest in finding out as much as possible about certain aspects of the country, while at the same time these explorations required reducing the Brazilian experience of the time into words and figures that fit their worldview.The advertising men felt fairly comfortable with the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Initial investigations began with the aim of providing the office with more information about the rest of the country. The advertising men were evidently in dire need of it: in September, having been in Brazil for over three months, Kennard reported that carrying out investigations was a formidable task "as the area of the country is greater than that of the United States and Canada combined."41 The media chief carried out an investigation of the south (Porto Alegre, Pelotas, and Rio Grande), while his assistant covered the north of the country. Up to this point the office had relied on the 1920 census and information provided by Julius Klein's Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce; with the new information Kennard was convinced that JWT would be "envied even by the Government."42 Other investigations included studies of the concentration of wealth nationwide, of rural and urban banks, and of population and car ownership. Perhaps the most important result of the surveys was the acquisition of mailing lists of car registrations, club memberships, bank customers, and home and property owners. These lists included almost all potential consumers resident in metropolitan Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and a significant sector of the consuming public nationwide.43Media studies were obviously essential for an advertising agency's new subsidiary. Contacts with São Paulo's newspapers began in June; by early August, professional contacts had been made with 80 papers across the country.44 Along with these contacts, the agency studied the Brazilian media independently, looking at urban and provincial newspapers and their readers, the geographic and socioeconomic circulations of these papers, and the state of other media such as magazines, billboards, car cards, radio, and moving pictures.45In São Paulo, the advertising men found O Estado de S. Paulo most to their liking, as it was read "by all the better class people in São Paulo city and the richer farmers in São Paulo, North Paraná, South Minas and [the] 'Triangulo Mineiro.'" For the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the advertising men compiled information on the readership of different publications, cataloging them by class, age, gender, and lifestyle.46Investigations were also undertaken at the behest of foreign interests (mostly North American, but one British) to explore their market potential in Brazil.47 These investigations are of interest to the historian to the degree to which they represent the creation of knowledge about areas of Brazilian society previously ignored, even, as Kennard pointed out, by the government. They are striking in their concern with race, class, and gender as benchmarks of consumption. In these respects, the most important of the surviving investigations is one made for Lehn and Fink, the North American manufacturer of Lysol disinfectant.In examining Brazilian society through this investigation, the advertising men not only came to understand what they saw through their North American experience but also from the point of view of where they were in Brazil; they interpreted Brazil not only through their own prejudices, liberal worldview, and the historical experience of the United States but also from the point of view of members of the paulista bourgeoisie with whom they identified. The Lehn and Fink investigation confirmed these ties: "social life tends to establish a fairly close relationship between the foreign families [the immigrant elite as well as the expatriate elite to which the advertising men belonged] and the [elite] nationals. This tendency is naturally more accented in the areas of greatest population density," such as São Paulo.48 These ties were more than merely social, they were also commercial and cultural ties, as the two groups had a host of interests and attitudes in common.49When discussing race, the North American advertising men accepted the myth of "racial democracy," ruling class (white) Brazil's image of itself.50 Although they probably would have disagreed privately with the desirability of racial equality or admixture, the advertising men reported that "whites, blacks, and mixtures mingle in social life without any restraint," and that racial intermarriage enjoyed "every possible legal encouragement."51 This acceptance of the myth of Brazilian racial harmony and equality, the advertising men's view of Brazil from São Paulo, and their genuine interest in race in Brazil translated into printed investigations which equated race and class, dividing the population into "whites" (like themselves) and "natives" (the ubiquitous other).52 From the vantage point of São Paulo, the advertising men could discount Afro-Brazilians as on the periphery or outside of the consuming public as they did not, to any real extent, form part of the paulistano middle or upper classes in this period.53 This is indeed what happened, as blacks—and all nonwhites —were conspicuously absent from the advertising of the period.In marked contrast to the status of Afro-Brazilians, both the investigations and the advertisements that they laid the groundwork for were profoundly concerned with women, insofar as these women belonged to a class that could afford to buy the goods and services of modern consumer society. Women appeared in advertisements and were appealed to in testimonial advertising by doctors and public figures. They were alternately portrayed as housewives and mothers, or as society people, depending upon their age and perceived buying power. Research focused on women as consumers and as potential influences on their husbands' behavior. For example, newspapers that were known to be popular with women were favored for potential advertising, even for goods and services that demanded decision-making deemed to be outside of women's traditional sphere, such as travel to Europe.54The advertisements themselves were perhaps the most important, and certainly the most visible, of JWT's activities. Thompson became the first company in Brazil to produce and disseminate advertisements for a variety of products and, through those advertisements, present to its audience a distinct vision of consumer culture and life.In the advertising of the 1930s, JWT focused on reaching select sectors of the Brazilian public. Literacy rates and poverty automatically placed the vast majority of the population beyond the reach of print or radio. The advertising men further limited their audience. Advertisements were created to appeal to a relatively small number of families in the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo metropolitan areas further divided into two groups: "class A" and "class B." Advertisements were designed to appeal to these two groups—and men and women within each group—in distinctly different ways. All of the era's advertising, however, shared a common worldview, the liberal developmentalism of the 1920s and 1930s, and a common design, the promotion of a distinctly North American ideal of modernity and consumer culture, one in which science, medicine, and technology were unified in the pursuit of efficiency.The advertising men brought with them a scale for measuring consumer income. On the basis of "apparent income and standard of living," people were placed in classes A, B, C, or D. In Brazil, the classes were broken down as follows: class A made upwards of 24,000 milreis per year, class B over 12,000, class C over 5,000, and class D under 5,000.55 Industrialists, owners of big commercial houses, large landholders and coffee planters, and the upper reaches of the liberal professions made up class A, while class B was made up of more modestly prosperous merchants and farmers, other liberal professionals, and upper-level civil servants.The advertising men chose to concentrate on classes A and B as "it is probable that a more satisfactory net profit can be secured by concentrating on the small, wealthy section of the population." These two groups were estimated to number 125,000 families in the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo markets. When opened up to include the states of Minas Gerais, Bahia, Rio Grande do Sul, Pernambuco, Santa Catarina, Paraná, and Espirito Santo, this number was raised to 193,244 families, 20 percent of the total number of literate families. The remainder of the country's population was excluded from the marketing of modernity.56Luxury automobile advertisements clearly reflected the projection of distinct needs and wants—a distinct consumer culture—onto the elite audiences targeted as class A. Advertisements for LaSalle touted the automobile's "Distinction, Luxury, and Mechanical Perfection." The 1929 Cadillac Phaeton Sport was sold on the basis of its "Security and Comfort." The two cars were "preferred by people who desire comfort, luxury, and security."57 A 1935 Buick advertisement invited the reader to come and see the new Buick, the "bestselling luxury car," the interior of which "was notably improved to satisfy people of demanding tastes for comfort and elegance." The text was set off against a picture of society men and women in top hats and gowns standing by their cars watching a plane fly overhead in the night sky. Below the text was a list of private companies and prominent individuals that had recently purchased Buick automobiles.58 A similar Buick advertisement announced "the continuation, in 1935, of its elegant sty
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