Advertising to the elite : the role of innovation of fine art in advertising in the development of the advertising industry

Abstract

This study explores the intersection of the developments in the growing advertising, railroad, and automotive sectors of the U.S. economy. It examines the latter two sectors’ advertising to the elite by focusing on how industries that targeted the luxury market used fine art to emphasize and underscore the exceptionalism of that high-end market compared with the mass market. It does so by looking at the transition from using art as a decorative component unrelated to the product to using art specifically designed to advertise a product or experience. In the literature, advertising history has been delineated rather narrowly as the history of advertising to the mass consumer or as the history of advertising a specific type of product. This work broadens the focus in advertising history to show that luxury advertisers, as a sub-category of advertisers, developed particular advertising strategies, which recognized and exploited the relationship between their respective service or product, and a consciously selected audience for their respective advertisements. It shows that high art became a differentiating characteristic of advertising strategies aimed at the social elite market. This work also proposes the need for adding a specific timeline for the development of luxury advertising to the broad, more generally known outline of advertising history.