The rhetoric of promise: advertising in the information industry

During the First World War, the Creel Committee, set up by President Woodrow Wilson, used the powerful weapon of advertising to disseminate information and shape public opinion. Creel promised Wilson ‘a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventure in advertising’. This campaign, with memorable adverts such as Courtauld Smiths' Red Cross poster, ‘The Greatest Mother in the World’, and James Montgomery Flagg's self‐portrait of Uncle Sam declaring ‘I want YOU for the US Army’, was a great success for advertising technique and enhanced the status of the tyro profession. It also showed how effective advertising could be in persuading and swaying mass opinion. A ‘Printer's Ink’ editorial of 1917 clearly shows that the relationship between advertising and control has been, perhaps for the first time, fully exploited, and fully appreciated: