Advertising Navigates the Defense Economy
This chapter analyzes industry strategies for “educating the public” to a view of advertising as socially and economically useful. More specifically, it shows the use of institutional advertising for this purpose and discusses how industry leaders worked behind the scenes to prepare a solid defense of advertising. The chapter explores the challenges faced by the advertising community in the period leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor and immediately thereafter, including how the industry dealt with new forms of criticism and how it viewed its role in the war economy. The chapter concludes with the establishment of the Advertising Council, Inc., an organization that would come to define the advertising industry’s public relations efforts during World War II and beyond.