Summary Of Inger L. Stole's Advertising At War

Counter to the previous argument may be traced from Inger L. Stole’s “Advertising at War: Business, Consumers, and Government in the 1940s”. here Stole discusses the role and impact of advertisement in the United States during the Second World War. Stole argues that by the start of year 1941, defense theme advertisements became popular among the masses. These advertisements were executed by both commercial sector brands and the U.S. Army. Initially the ratio of defense ads was higher in newspapers and magazines but later on a decline was observed in public interest in defense theme advertisements. Stole strengthens the argument by referring a study conducted on 18 consumer magazines of that time claiming that out of 13,741 advertisements published in 386 issues only 498 (3.6%) advertisements were found using defense as a theme.
This is pretty much true that the commercial sector brands/ companies used to adopt war theme in order to attain public attention and to associate their brand with patriotism, that to increase the consumption and ultimately sale of the product. Whereas the government used advertisement as tool to build a strong home front and keep the public in confidence regarding war affairs. But as soon as the people starting giving less attention to such advertisements, it raised a question on the efficiency of war themed advertisements. The popularity of such advertisements was even lesser in women magazines or the magazines with more female readership. A research depicts that there was a minor amount of war themed ads in such magazines i.e. 0.7% where as other publications like Times, Look and Liberty had a slightly more ration of such ads ranging between 6.3 to 8 percent. This was even a small percentage that called the advertisers and manufacturers to rethink their PR