Hard Sell ― Advertising, Affluence and Transatlantic Relations C. 1951-69

How did advertising shape growing popular prosperity in the 1950s and 60s? What were the images of domesticity and modern living which it promoted? Focusing on advertising's relationship to the mass market housewife, Hard sell shows how advertising promoted new standards of material comfort in the selling of a range of everyday consumer goods and, in the process, generalised a cross-class image of the 'modern housewife' across the new medium of television.

Nixon shows how the practices through which British advertising understood and represented the 'modern housewife' and domestic consumption were influenced by American advertising and commercial culture. In drawing out these trans-Atlantic influences, Hard sell challenges the way critics and historians have often understood Anglo-American relations. It shows how American influences across a range of areas of advertising practice, including the development of television advertising, were not only a source of inspiration, but also were adapted and reworked to more effectively speak to the British consumer.

Through detailed studies of advertising, the practices of advertising agencies and the public debates that shaped their reception, Hard sell offers a major new analysis of advertising in the decades of post-war affluence and the Anglo-American exchanges that shaped advertising's contribution to this period of social change. It marks a significant contribution to debates within contemporary British history, the sociology of affluence and to studies of consumer and marketing history.

Sean Nixon is Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Essex