Marketing Modernity: The J. Walter Thompson Company and North American Advertising in Brazil, 1929–1939

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

In 1929 the J. Walter Thompson Company (JWT), a leading North American advertising agency, opened an office in São Paulo. JWT's founding of a Brazilian subsidiary emerged from a decade's worth of discussion of how to increase North American exports and of what role advertising would play in this expansion. Manufacturers, advertising executives, and representatives of key sectors of the U.S. government took part in these discussions through articles in the nation's leading trade publications and participation in conferences on the subject. These businessmen and bureaucrats envisioned exports and overseas advertising as a way to guarantee the nation's future prosperity, protect and extend North American economic power, and raise backward regions to the economic and cultural level of the United States, then immersed in the triumphalist consumerism of its Second Industrial Revolution.The General Motors Corporation (GM) was an early adherent to the expansionist creed, establishing assembly operations in São Paulo in 1925 and a Brazilian advertising department the following year. In 1927 GM and Thompson signed an agreement that would make JWT the first major U.S. advertising agency to open offices in Brazil. The modern advertising agency, having served the U.S. corporate economy at home since its inception, would now serve the emerging multinational arm of this economy abroad.1With the opening of the São Paulo office in 1929, Thompson executives hired former employees of the General Motors advertising department, professionals already attuned to North American methods and modalities. The advertising men also began to cultivate new clients and initiated the first surveys of the Brazilian market, research that not only afforded them greater insight into local business and the lives of Brazilian consumers but that also provides historians with the opportunity to examine North American attitudes toward Brazil during this period. Finally, the new office conducted the work for which it was founded: the creation and dissemination of advertising for an array of complementary products, thus promoting a certain vision of modernity that was to be assembled in Brazil.The JWT experience had, in turn, far-reaching effects on Brazilian society. With Thompson's entry into the Brazilian market, other North American agencies were forced to follow. These agencies, along with JWT, provided the training that created a new group in Brazilian society, a group of Brazilian advertising men who formed part of a larger professional-managerial elite that looked increasingly to the United States as a model for their own country. The expansion of JWT and its subsequent competitors also led to an increase in advertising; this increase stimulated the expansion and professionalization of Brazilian media, with a consequent growth of dependence on advertising revenue on the part of media outlets. Finally, advertising's appeals reached the men and women of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, who received and interpreted these appeals in different ways.By the 1920s, U.S. industry had reached unprecedented levels of production. Increasingly, exporting and advertising were looked upon as the means to ensure future prosperity, contain European competition, and carry out the Americanization and modernization of host countries. At a 1925 convention, no less an authority than James A. Farrell, president of U.S. Steel, urged his colleagues to increase their exports, "an increasing element in the prosperity of our country," in order to keep up with the production capacity of U.S. industry.2 The previous year, a contributor to Printer's Ink, the leading advertising trade publication, called for greater overseas sales, writing that exporting "is and has been a policy of economic necessity, an answer to the urgent demand for markets which will absorb production and keep factories humming."3 Government officials agreed, including Henry H. Morse, chief of the Specialties Division of the Department of Commerce, who saw exporting as the "foundation" of future U.S. prosperity.4The enthusiasm for exporting extended to overseas advertising. Charles Fischer, the foreign manager of Standard Brands—a JWT-Brazil client from the 1930s through the 1980s—called for more advertising abroad because "it costs us approximately fifty percent more to advertise in foreign countries.… But the returns of today is [sic] not our yardstick; it is the returns our money is building for tomorrow from those new markets [we are] in the process of making."5Advertising was seen as a particularly effective means of countering the commercial advances of European nations as their economies recovered from war. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce Director Julius Klein warned that in "Japan, China, South America, and other parts of the world, British, French, and German interests are now making every possible effort to undermine American prestige." North American advertising, however, could serve to counter these efforts as "the American manufacturers who are making the most headway against the foreign handicaps are those who are advertising and merchandising their products on the sound basis of high quality and reasonable price."6Businessmen, increasingly concerned with export advertising, agreed. At the 1926 National Foreign Trade Convention in Charleston, J. W. Sanger of Frank Seaman, Inc." declared, "In today's international competition for free trade, America has the distinct advantage of superior initiative, larger plant capacity, greater reserves of capital, more open-mindedness, and last but not least, more faith in and better knowledge of modern advertising. Of these weapons, the most patent one at our command, is advertising."7Seven years earlier, Sanger had traveled to Brazil to study the country's advertising conditions for the U.S. Department of Commerce. In Brazil he saw a lack of advertising on the part of European interests and called for advertising, a "distinctly American idea," to be "used in Brazil as one of the most potent forces at our command and with but little fear of European competition of like character."8If advertising was envisioned as a means of protecting and extending U.S. influence in the face of European competition, it was also seen as part of a larger, mutually beneficial exchange between the United States and backward regions such as Latin America. In the minds of its practitioners and devotees, advertising occupied a favored position in a rational, liberal, modernizing project that would benefit all the nations of the world. This idea was based on a number of deeply held beliefs: (1) a universalistic belief in advertising, in the idea that advertising and—by extension—North American consumer culture held the same appeal to all people; (2) a quasi-messianic faith in advertising as a central component of the "American way of life," one which assumed that "Americanism" and advertising were by nature progressive influences; and (3) the conviction that advertising was a social and economic force in its own right. In this discourse, "Americanization" and "modernization" emerged as synonyms. Advertising, as both product and promoter of emergent North American corporate and material culture, was to be spread worldwide and usher in universal prosperity.In 1924 the universalist doctrine was summed up by the Printer's Ink correspondent to the London Convention of the Associated Advertisers Clubs of the World: "Just as advertising has long been a common denominator of interest for progressive business men in America, it is being proved that better sales, advertising, and distribution methods speak all languages."9 Following a seven-month trip through Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru, Louis D. Ricci of the Foreign Advertising and Service Bureau reported that the "public is stirred by a new desire to learn things, to follow the fashion, to live as the rest of the world is living."10Advertisers and advertising men were unswerving in their faith in the progressive character of North American life and society, and of advertising as a progressive force therein. The editor of Nation's Business projected that a "future historian" would write, "About 1930 advertising itself began to understand more clearly its responsibilities as an era of civilization's advance [sic]. And this new conception rapidly spread to the four corners of the earth and increased by leaps and bounds the standards of living of millions of people."11 James D. Tew of B. F. Goodrich, the Brazilian accounts of which JWT was to handle beginning in late 1929, remarked that the "history of American commerce is inseparably linked with the history of advertising as a progressive element in merchandising."12The conception of advertising as indispensable to North American modernity and the related emergence of "modernization" and "Americanization" as synonyms were particularly prevalent in the discourse of the 1920s. JWT President Stanley Resor was an early adherent to the creed. As one of his employees remembered, "his belief in advertising as an essential component of American culture was persistent and devout." Resor believed "[m]ore and more American technicians in advertising, selling, transportation, and manufacturing were to live and work throughout the world, helping local people develop their skills in various fields."13Louis D. Ricci commented on advertising's advance in South America: "About half the advertising in the more prominent newspapers and periodicals in South America has its origin in this country. The public has become air-conscious, road-conscious, home-conscious, health-conscious—and luxury-conscious. American automobiles, American cigarettes, American cosmetics and toilet goods set the fashion here. Americans are supplying the materials and equipment for public improvements—electric power, telephone systems, railways, new automobile roads."14North American triumphalism was frequently accompanied by the even uglier racism of the period. As one Printer's Ink contributor recommended, "South Americans must be shown that we bear only a disinterested goodwill and they will soon forget their decadent mother culture in a surging rush of Americanism."15The General Motors Corporation was associated with the expansion of exporting and overseas advertising throughout this period. In 1921 a South American Sales Division of the General Motors Export Company was established.16 In 1925 the company opened an assembly plant in São Paulo.17 The following year, General Motors established an advertising department alongside its assembly operations. Founded with five employees, the department was initially responsible for the production of pamphlets, car cards, and a GM-Brazil house organ, as well as the organization of North American-style car shows and cooperative campaigns with local dealers.18 By the end of 1926, the department had begun producing and placing advertisements. In 1927 a specialist from the United States arrived to lead the department and teach "modern advertising" along North American lines. As automobile sales increased, the department grew to 34 people in 1928.19 GM was not the only foreign interest to develop a Brazilian advertising department; other North American companies also established house agencies, most notably General Electric. However, GM's department was widely recognized as the "most professional and able of the time," and its employees would later be sought after by U.S. advertising agencies entering the Brazilian market.20While GM's advertising department was being staffed and trained in São Paulo, the automobile manufacturer and JWT were extending contacts. In 1927 these contacts were formalized such that Thompson became GM's advertising council for all markets outside of the United States and was committed to opening a local office everywhere that GM had an assembly plant, including São Paulo.21 In Brazil, ties between the advertising agency and the automobile company were so close that one advertising man would later remark that "We moved with General Motors; we were the advertising department of General Motors."22North American advertising, enlisted by business and government, was now to be exported to Brazil. In mid-1929 JWT opened its office in São Paulo, investing in it all of the perceived modernity of its profession. While at one level, the opening can be seen as an episode in the larger expansion of U.S. commercial influence in Brazil in the interwar era (as can the preceding growth of local General Motors operations), the establishment of the São Paulo office also marked an important milestone in the corporate and cultural history of the city.23 The founding of the first subsidiary of a U.S. advertising agency introduced to Brazil a company that produced advertisements for many companies—some of them even domestic—and presented a distinct vision of itself, of its craft, and of what its role should be in society. This vision, transmitted to employees and others, was reflected in its advertisements, its clients, its studies of the country, and its earliest organization and staffing.In May 1929, after opening an office in Buenos Aires, Henry Corwin Flower Jr. was met at the port of Santos by J. Maxwell Kennard, who had been sent directly to Brazil to assist in the opening.24 Kennard, the son of a North American diplomat who had served in Rio de Janeiro, was enlisted for his language skills. Flower, a banker's son, had been educated at Harvard and risen swiftly through the ranks at Thompson. The similarities between the two men are telling. They were in many ways typical of the newly professionalized managerial elite of North American advertising executives: they were born to wealth and privilege, educated at the better schools, and now looked toward progress abroad, as well as at home.25São Paulo, which Flower called the "Detroit of South America," was selected as the site for the initial unfolding of this progress. This decision was made primarily because General Motors was based in the city, but was also influenced by other factors. Flower, like other North American observers, was impressed that its "people were so much more alive and progressive." Giving voice to the dominant racism of the period, he also saw racial admixture in the rest of the country as an "obstacle to its future development," but found this to be less true of the southeastern part of the country, the "real Brazil."26The advertising men set up shop in the Edifício Glória on the praça Ramos de Azevedo and began the process of staffing the new office.27 The New York organization specified that local employees should have "some business experience" and "a point of view in sympathy with American methods and ideas."28 As an earlier investigation had suggested, the GM advertising department was crucial.29 Its employees, soon to be put out of work by Thompson, more than fit the description above, some having worked for the automobile company since 1926. Oscar Fernandes da Silva, a writer for GM's advertising department, became JWT's media chief. Américo Cassoli was brought over from the advertising department as checker. Another former GM employee, Henrique Becherini, was retained as a photographer.30 Trained in the program and practices of North American advertising during their time at General Motors, these men would continue their apprenticeship with Thompson. As JWT grew over the course of the decade, they would in turn help train others, eventually forming the basis of a national group of professional advertising men. "With its tremendous growth," one Brazilian advertising agent later wrote, Thompson "was forced to recruit and develop talent at an extremely quick rate. To do this, [the company] instituted a system of 'trainees,' who were real students of advertising, learning through a practical course of well-planned stages in every department" of the office.31Within the JWT organization, however, the top managerial positions would remain in the hands of North Americans through this period. A historian of North American advertising has described the staffing and management of the foreign offices as follows: "At Mr. Resor's insistence these outposts were administered like a colonial empire, staffed by natives but opened and managed by Thompson men sent out from the U.S."32In August, the new office began to place advertisements for General Motors and Flower returned to the United States. Upon his arrival in New York, he presented his impressions of South America to a group of Thompson executives. Despite what he saw as a dismaying amount of racial admixture in Brazil, Flower still entertained high hopes: "Brazil is the great and powerful country of Latin America, a great sleeping giant. It is going to be slower—very much slower—in developing than the Argentine. The Argentine has real advertising possibilities in the next ten years. Brazil will grow more slowly but there'll be no stopping it once it begins."33 Despite Brazil's relative lack of "real advertising possibilities," the disparity in cost of living between Brazil and Argentina made Brazil as attractive a market in the short term: "It would be possible for us to make a great deal more money on $500,000 worth of business in Brazil than on $1,000,000 in the Argentine because of the difference in living costs in the two countries. The Argentine is more expensive than the U.S. to live in and Brazil is much cheaper so on an equal volume of advertising, we might conceivably make money on one and lose it on the other."34Finally, Flower linked JWT's entry into the Brazilian market to the larger movement of North American business into the export field generally and South America specifically. His discussion of business history and empire may seem crude, and his insistence on the importance of "American brains" distasteful, but his conception of the status and intent of U.S. business abroad provides a clear picture of expansionist thought:While Flower commented on the progress of North American enterprise in Brazil, Kennard and the new Brazilian staff began searching out clients. Although the office's close with General Motors would later lead to JWT executives, at that time was a great effort to the new office's dependence on the automobile and the advertising men Standard and and managed to National JWT's in New York and São However, the National was soon and the other companies to place their with Thompson. It was not that the began to as Kennard the Brazilian advertising for the the U.S. advertising of which was conducted by By the end of the year, the now led by began advertising for of the the new office to new clients, a client that certain company of and other a of clients through Of these were North American and were of the were local of U.S. products with U.S. a was a of and were the only major Brazilian companies advertising was by Thompson. The of U.S. many of such as Standard and Goodrich, were clients of the was Brazilian clients were most in Thompson to like a as one advertising man such clients were because then could to a Brazilian the of new clients, the advertising men set their studies of and media conditions were out to the office to its business and to North American expansion. The advertising men had a interest in out as much as possible certain of the country, at the same time these the Brazilian experience of the time into and that fit their advertising men with the of São Paulo and Rio de began with the of the office with more the rest of the country. The advertising men were in of in having been in Brazil for over Kennard reported that out was a the of the country is greater than that of the United States and The media chief out an investigation of the and Rio his the of the country. to this point the office had on the and provided by Julius Bureau of Foreign and Domestic with the new Kennard was that JWT would be even by the studies of the of wealth of and and of and car the most important of the surveys was the of of car and home and These all consumers in Rio de and São Paulo and a of the public studies were essential for an advertising new with São newspapers began in by early August, professional contacts had been made with the with these the agency the Brazilian media at and newspapers and their the and of these and the of other media such as car cards, and São Paulo, the advertising men found de Paulo most to their as it was all the better people in São Paulo and the in São Paulo, North South and the of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the advertising men on the of different them by and were also at the of foreign interests North but one to their market in These are of interest to the historian to the to which they the creation of knowledge of Brazilian as Kennard by the They are in their with and as of In these the most important of the is one made for and the North American manufacturer of Brazilian through this the advertising men not only to understand what they saw through their North American experience but also from the point of view of they were in they interpreted Brazil not only through their own and the experience of the United States but also from the point of view of of the with they The and investigation these life to a close between the foreign [the elite as well as the elite to which the advertising men and the This is more in the of such as São These ties were more than they were also commercial and cultural as the two had a host of interests and attitudes in the North American advertising men the of Brazil's of Although they would have with the of racial the advertising men reported that and in social life and that racial possible This of the of Brazilian racial and the advertising view of Brazil from São Paulo, and their interest in in Brazil into which and the into and the point of São Paulo, the advertising men could as on the outside of the public as they to real part of the in this This is what as all from the advertising of the marked to the status of both the and the advertisements that they the for were concerned with as these women to a that could to the goods and of modern consumer society. in advertisements and were to in advertising by and public They were as and as upon their and perceived on women as consumers and as on their newspapers that were to be with women were favored for advertising, even for goods and that to be outside of such as to advertisements were the most and the most of JWT's Thompson became the first company in Brazil to and advertisements for a of products through those advertisements, to its a distinct vision of consumer culture and the advertising of the JWT on sectors of the Brazilian and the of the the of The advertising men their were created to appeal to a number of in the Rio de and São Paulo into two and were to appeal to these two men and women different of the advertising, however, a common the of the and and a common the of a North American of modernity and consumer culture, one in which and were in the of advertising men brought with them a for consumer the basis of and of people were in D. In Brazil, the were as follows: A made of year, over over and of commercial and and the of the made up was made up of more and other and advertising men to on A and as "it is that a more can be by on the of the These two were to number in the Rio de and São Paulo opened up to the of Rio do and this number was to percent of the number of The of the country's was from the of automobile advertisements clearly reflected the of distinct and distinct consumer the elite as A. for the and The 1929 was on the basis of its and The two were by people who desire and A the to and the new the the of which "was notably to people of for and The was set against a picture of men and women in top and by their a in the the was a of companies and prominent that had A "the in of its