What was advertised in the 1930s

American Art Deco Collection IdcN holds approximately 2, Art Deco items, ranging from furniture to electric appliances, tableware, magazines and posters, all of which were produced in the United States in the s. This mode of design, having permeated the country at the dawn of the age of mass production, serves as precious material demonstrating the great shift in society and the industrial structure in the 20th Century. Even today, these supremely playful objects assert an uncanny freshness.

Many elaborate luxury toys are also produced due to their popularity. This full page Bon Marche department store ad appeared in the Nov 15, edition. Collected by Anna Wong. It has been nearly 80 years since the Great Depression of the s and we are facing another global economic crisis. It is time to review the past to see what experience we can draw on for our future. An analysis of the advertisements run in The Seattle Times during the Great Depression of the s will give us a revealing picture of Depression-era Seattle society, and will cast light on what we can do to cope with the current economic crisis.

In order to obtain a better understanding of the unfolding of the Great Depression, I chose the years , , to survey, using the month of October as my test month in all these years. Spanning the years of — will enable us to get a better picture of Seattle and a suggestive glimpse of the country in general before, during, and after the Great Depression; to compare these different years; and to see the evolution of the Depression from start to finish.

Due to the limited time and space that I have, a comprehensive study of the advertising practice during this entire period is certainly impossible. However, for the sake of fair representation and randomization, I sampled advertisements in The Seattle Times on the dates of the 1st, 2nd, 14th, 15th, 29th, and 30th of every October during these three years.

Prices fell in the early s. Coats advertized here from Nov. Ads collected by Anna Wong. The table above presents statistics about the number of advertisements run for each type of product and the approximate percentage of each type of advertisement in the total number of advertisements run.

A careful analysis of these statistics reveals several trends about the advertisements run in The Seattle Times around the time of the Great Depression. The first notable trend is the decline in the total number of advertisements during the Depression when compared with the period just before and after the Depression. It was obvious that the economic crisis hit all businesses hard, from jewelers to food production.

The second, more interesting, trend is the respective changes in the advertisement categories in The Seattle Times during the period. Food, for example, is a kind of product that has a rather inelastic demand change. Interestingly, however, food advertisements went up significantly as a percentage of total advertisements during the Depression as compared to immediately before or after.

Obviously, during the Great Depression, ordinary citizens had a hard time when they had little money for buying food. Food companies had to raise the price and cut the number of employees to make the company run.

This put the trade into a vicious cycle: the higher the price, the fewer goods were sold, and the more employees were fired. To sustain the industry, food companies had no choice but to increase advertising during the Great Depression. Another interesting trend is seen in the alcohol and tobacco advertisements, which saw a sharp increase from 0. The tobacco and alcohol industries were rarely short of money, but they rarely put out a large number of advertisements because although consumers all knew that tobacco and alcohol were not good for their health, they never stopped consuming this kind of product.

For five years, the government prohibited more than one family member, under the same roof, from working. But women became creative, and started lying about their marital status in order to acquire work. The government began hiring artists to create advertisements based on American culture and history. They used imagery with celebrities, soldiers and even Santa Claus to sway the likes of many citizens.

These advertisements placed women in a kitchen or taking care of children, while images of men were placed in the workplace. This stayed the same for 10 years, until men were needed on the battlefield and women were needed back in the workforce.

Beyond the world of gender roles, brands had something bigger to determine — whether or not they should spend on advertising at all. The ones who did ended up thriving , while others suffered deep mistrust among consumers, or disappeared altogether.