Tourist Photographers and the Promotion of Travel: the Polytechnic Touring Association, 1888–1939

The Polytechnic Touring Association (PTA) was a London-based, originally philanthropic turned commercial travel firm whose historical origins coincided with the arrival of the Kodak camera in 1888 – thus, of popular (tourist) photography. This article examines the PTA’s changing relationship with tourist photographers, and how this influenced the company’s understanding of what role photography could play in promoting the tours, in the late nineteenth and early twenty century. This inquiry is advanced on the basis of the observation that, during this time, the PTA’s passage from viewing tourists as citizens to educate, to customers to please, paralleled the move from using photography-based images to mixed media. Such a development was certainly a response to unprecedented market demands; this article argues that it should also be considered in relation to the widening of photographic perceptions engendered by the democratization of the medium, to which the PTA responded, first as educator, then as service provider. In doing so, the article raises several questions about the shifting relationship between “high”, or established, and “low”, or emerging, forms of culture, as mass photography and the mass marketing of tourism developed

‘Salesmen of the Will to Want’: Advertising and its Critics in Britain 1951–1967

Through the 1950s and 1960s, a sustained public debate about advertising's economic and social role occurred. This was a debate dominated by the critics of advertising. Across a swathe of educated opinion, an almost obsessive fascination with and scrutiny of advertising flourished. The arrival of commercial television in 1955 and with it television advertising stirred new popular, as well as elite, anxieties. For its critics amongst the viewing public, 'commercials' spoilt their enjoyment of television: there were too many adverts, they interrupted programmes and they were repetitive. These negative feelings towards their practice were the cause of considerable concern for the representatives of the advertising industry. They had good grounds to be concerned. In a period in which advertising was subject to criticism from both an increasingly influential consumer's movement and with politicians prepared to use the law to tax and regulate commercial practices, the representatives of advertising saw themselves in a constant struggle to resist and limit the effects of government intervention in the operation of their business. How they did this and the nature of both the charges made against them and their defence of advertising form the focus of this article. © 2010 Taylor & Francis

Profiting from war:Bovril advertising during World War II

This article addresses the lack of research on commercial advertising during wartime. It takes as its focus Bovril ads during World War II, to argue that commercial advertising, rather than diverging from state propaganda consistently drew upon wider representations of war in order to integrate into a society increasingly dominated by the image. To examine this, all of the Bovril ads from World War II appearing in the Times, Daily Express and Daily Mirror are compared in both quantitative and qualitative analyses, which helps to avoid the “cherry picking” problems of relying on a qualitative analysis alone. The main contention is that ads are socially situated media and, as such, cannot strongly divert from other messages being circulated within society because their reception depends upon their message creating an instant identification with the reader. In the 1940s this was especially true because society was confronted with an unprecedented mass of state propaganda