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“An Honorable Place”: The Quest for Professional Advertising Education, 1900–1917

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Quentin J. Schultze
Quentin J. Schultze
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Journalism, Drake University
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Abstract

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw various advertisers embark on a concerted effort to create professional instruction at American universities. They had two objectives. They thought that such instruction might help individual firms determine precisely how advertising worked in the marketplace — and thereby create a science of advertising — and they hoped that university education would transform their business into a full-fledged profession. Yet these efforts brought mixed results. As such instruction came into being, advertisers found that they had little influence over the education they had sought to promote, and they found that such training had chosen to follow one of two divergent paths, neither of which the industry thought wholly acceptable. Even more to their dismay, advertisers found that this education did not in fact convert their business into a profession.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , Spring 1982 , pp. 16 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1982

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References

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36 The seeds for the case-studies approach were evident in Cherington's book, which was “mainly a compilation of the experiences and ideas of others.” See the review in the Journal of Political Economy, 21 (December 1913), 966–967.

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38 Such psychologists included Albert Poffenberger at Columbia, Edward K. Strong at Stanford, Harry Hollingworth at New York University, and Daniel Starch at Harvard.

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