“A Fascinating Show for John Citizen and his Wife”: Advertising Exhibitions in Early Twentieth-Century London

Abstract

One late November morning in 1920 crowds began to gather outside White City in Shepherd's Bush, lured by what had been billed as "London's brightest event this winter." 1 At noon, with what the Daily News reporter thought must be "among the longest queues ever seen even in London" assembling outside, a speech by President of the Board of Trade, Sir Robert Horne, opened the International Advertising Exhibition. 2 Nine thousand people passed through the turnstiles in the first hour, keen to experience a range of attractions including a model Shopping Street, a Poster Street featuring a collection of the best examples of the art, and a lucky dip competition with 100,000 prizes. The press described it as "one of the jolliest shows that has ever been held at Shepherd's Bush." 3 This exhibition was the largest in a succession of shows beginning in 1899 designed to improve the reputation of advertising, enhance the collective identity of the industry, and drum up business. 4 Tackling the public image of advertising became a pressing need from the late Victorian years. Facing an organized pressure group, the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, formed in 1893 to secure legislation protecting the environment from advertising, and a public discourse in which advertising was frequently cast as vulgar, dishonest, and wasteful, advertisers began to coordinate a response. 5 Taking the lead were advertising agents, who were growing in number and importance in the late

“The Penguins Are Coming”: Brand Mascots and Utopian Mass Consumption in Interwar Britain

“…At each of the three major Advertising Exhibitions held in London in 1920London in , 1927London in , and 1933, members of the public could meet famous characters in person, an opportunity always met with great enthusiasm. 35 At the 1927 show at Olympia, for instance, a Palace of Beauty presented the Ovaltine Dairy Maid, the "original" Lyons's Nippy, the Kodak Girl, and other well-known poster starlets in a series of tableaux vivants. 36 In a striking demonstration of what Michael Saler terms the "ironic imagination," patrons took an active enjoyment in imagining the life-worlds of these fictional characters, even as they knew that they did not really exist.…”