advertising
This site is dedicated to the study of the Australian advertising industry in its broader world context. The aim is to provide a central hub for scholars and other interested individuals - within and without the academy - to engage in scholarship, locate resources, and be informed of new events and research in the field.
Content of the site has been inspired by Jackie Dickenson’s long involvement in advertising, both within the advertising industry, and in advertising education within the academic sphere, and her collaboration with others in the academic community including Robert Crawford at RMIT University.
Jackie Dickenson was interviewed about her advertising career by Siobhan Fitzgerald for Gabberish magazine.
Coming Soon: A History of Consumer Credit in Australian Retail
The Poster Ball in Australia
In August 1900, a new type of charity event – the advertising poster ball – was introduced to Australia. The event brought together a range of pre-existing cultural forms to promote mass market brands, facilitated by a new, visual advertising culture. Over the next forty years, the poster ball was adopted by community groups, becoming a regular feature on the social and fundraising calendar. By harnessing people’s innate longing for creative expression and shared social activity to the promotion of commercial brands, the poster ball linked these brands to pleasurable social events, helping embed them in Australian cultural memory.
Jackie Dickenson, “‘Living Advertisements’: The Poster Ball in Australia” published online in Australian Historical Studies, June 2020.
More Than a Glass and a Half: A History of Cadbury in Australia by Robert Crawford
This richly illustrated survey of Cadbury’s in Australia includes the story of famous products like Freddo Frogs, Dairy Milk chocolate, Cherry Ripes and Bournville Cocoa. It reveals Australians’ experience of Cadbury during peacetime and war, depression and prosperity. There’s a lot in it for chocolate lovers and for history buffs. Also insights into market leadership, and a record of how the brand earnt and maintained the trust and affection of millions.
The checkered and creative careers of Cadbury’s competitors add drama to the narrative. In his balanced survey of highs and lows, Robert Crawford explains how the British parent company founded its first overseas factory, in Tasmania, and how that later helped to launch Australian innovations in China, America and other countries. After a hundred years manufacturing in Australia, Cadbury’s renown is hardly surprising. But this book goes further back, to find Cadbury already a household name in Gold Rush times. It describes distribution hubs Cadbury’s operated in Australian colonies, while representatives covered the country, even travelling the outback with camels.
Cadbury’s current ethos of care for the environment and social equity is traced back to the Quaker origins of the British and Australian enterprises. It’s interesting to read of the moral concerns that made Cadbury wary of being identified with the war effort and Sydney’s Gay Mardi Gras. But most interesting in this book is what it reveals about generations of Australians, their memories, and their place in the world.
advertising education history
Edward Perugini (1882–1956)
The Ad-Club-Mag 1.1 (June 1914), p. 11. National Library of Australia
Edward Perugini and advertising education in Australia
Jackie Dickenson’s 2019 article in History Australia explored the steps taken by the Australian advertising industry to improve its efficiency and reputation in the interwar period. These steps included restricting entry to the industry by means of a national accreditation system based on standardised courses and examinations. The article examined the development and application of this system by tracing the background and career of Edward Charles Perugini (1882–1956), Australia’s leading advertising educator and the architect of the industry’s scheme. It found that, under Perugini’s guidance, the industry tempered its embrace of the ‘science’ of advertising – the dependence on research and sweeping psychological ‘insights’ – with attention to the individual human craving for beauty.
Australian advertising art between the wars
In the November 2018 issue of RMIT Design Archives Journal, Jackie explored Perugini’s impact on Australian advertising art. After tracing the place of art and the artist in the Australian advertising industry between the wars, as the industry responded to unprecedented technological change, the article examined Perugini’s role in the establishment and application of the Australian Advertising Association’s art education programme, arguing his experiences as an art student in turn-of-the-century London helped to shape advertising art education and practice in Australia for more than half a century. Also in this issue, Robert Crawford examined the history of the Melbourne advertising agency, Barry Banks Blakeney.
globalising the magic system
The project ‘Globalising the Magic System: a History of Advertising Industry Practices in Australia 1959-1989’ aimed to shed light on the complex relationship between advertising and Australian society by recording, for the first time, the impact of globalisation on the work practices of this significant but under analysed industry. Most advertising studies concentrate on the analysis of the end product, the advertisements. This project was significant because it examined the processes through which these advertisements are produced, including hiring practices, agency hierarchies, client/agency relations, and technological change.
The research team conducted 120 interviews with advertising practitioners who worked in the advertising industry between 1959 and 1989.
The Australian Research Council (DP120100777) funded the research, which resulted in two monographs, symposiums and workshops, and numerous scholarly articles.
Click through to hear the interviews
advertising and the left
Recent studies of consumer culture have warned against viewing the formation of the modern consumer as a linear process. As Frank Trentmann writes in The Making of the Consumer (p. 18):
Rather than presuming a zero-sum exchange between consumer and citizen and locating each in separate systems of commerce and politics, it is useful to ask about the flow of knowledge between these systems, the iteration and overlap between ideas and practices of consumption and citizenship, and the multiple forms of identities arising therefrom.
The Australian labour press presents an ideal site for the study of this ‘iteration and overlap’. From its foundation in the 1890s the operations of the labour press straddled commerce and politics, promoting an alternative conception of Australian citizenship from that promoted by the mainstream press alongside the commercial appeals of various products and services. By Jackie Dickenson (Paper delivered at the ASSLH Conference, 2015).