The End of Advertising by Andrew Essex

Author:Andrew Essex
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

Coke was also marketed as “a valuable Brain Tonic and cure for all nerve affections [sic].” This, of course, was before 1903, when the company removed the notorious active ingredient that fueled all that “vim and go.”

By 1906, things were starting to change as people began to wise up. That year, the United States passed its first piece of legislation on the matter, the Pure Food and Drug Act. Much of this was in response to the muckraking work of the great American journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams, who did an entire series on “the nostrum evil” for the magazine Collier’s Weekly.

Having studied the remedy business, Adams concluded, “Fraud, exploited by the skillfullest [sic] of advertising bunco men, is the basis of the trade.” Incensed, Adams sought to end the harm done to the public by “tyrannical masters,” men whose sole purpose was “the parting of a fool and his money.” According to T. J. Jackson Lears, the bunco artist had turned advertising into “a stench in the nostrils of the civilized world.”

More than a hundred years later, we no longer have patent remedies on the pharmacy shelf, at least not in such crude form. But that stench can sometimes still be detected today. And perhaps that’s why so many find advertising so annoying. People can tolerate only so much bullshit.

Imagine what ad blockers could have done to Fetridge’s Balm of a Thousand Flowers.

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