Selling Brand America: The Advertising Council and the ‘Invisible Hand’ of Free Enterprise, 1941-1961 explores the relationship between American advertisers and the
federal government. Since the 1940’s, American advertising companies have worked
closely with – the United States government; major broadcasters such as ABC, CBS, and
NBC; popular magazines such as Reader’s Digest, Time and Life; market research and
psychological testing organizations such as the AC Nielsen, the Gallup poll, and the
Psychological Corporation; and brand name corporations such as Coca-Cola, Ford, Kodak,
Kraft Foods, Procter & Gamble, General Electric, General Foods, and General Motors – to
persuade public opinion at home and abroad.
Since its inception as the War Advertising Council in 1941, the Advertising
Council, known in the twenty-first Century as the Ad Council, has coordinated public
service campaigns and brought government agencies together with the media and brand
name corporations. Originally, intent on making sure advertising remained a vital part of
capitalism, education, the media, politics, and religion, the Advertising Council helped
these organizations pursue an economic and political strategy in which the United States
led the world in a geo-political order based on the consumption of advertised brand name
goods. These early evangelists of the system called the system free enterprise. To them the
term meant a system in which government and business worked together to stimulate the
mass consumption of brand name goods using advertising across all major media.