Explaining the Origins of the Advertising Agency

Abstract

This study reopens the investigation into the origins of the advertising agency in the 1840s. It reviews the historical logics of explanation implicit in previous studies and argues that agency-based, functionalist, and evolutionary approaches fall short of offering compelling explanations. By approaching the origins of the advertising agency from the perspective of sociological institutionalism, new sites of historical exploration are identified. Volney B. Palmer began the first agency in Philadelphia in 1842, but little is known about the events that precipitated the agency. By examining the practices, procedures, rules, norms, symbol systems, and cognitive scripts that came from other institutional settings, the study concludes that Palmer's work in the canal business played a direct role in launching his ad business.

Notes

Edd Applegate, “Palmer, Volney B.,” in History of the Mass Media in the United States: An Encyclopedia (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), 491; Donald R. Holland, “Volney B. Palmer: The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 98, no. 3 (1974): 353–381; Holland, “Volney B. Palmer (1799–1864): The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man,” Journalism Monographs 44 (1976).

Ralph M. Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency: N. W. Ayer & Son at Work, 1869–1949, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949); Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

For more on the “logics” of explanation, see Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), and William Hamilton Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Laird, Advertising Progress.

Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).

C. Edwin Baker, Advertising and a Democratic Press (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Philip M. Napoli, Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” Political Studies 44, no. 5 (1996): 936–957; Theda Skocpol, Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

David M. Kreps, A Course in Microeconomic Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3.

Goodin and Tilly, The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis; Craig Parsons, How to Map Arguments in Political Science (New York: Oxford Press, 2007); Sewell, Logics of History.

Parsons, How to Map Arguments in Political Science, 3.

Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 44.

Parsons, How to Map Arguments in Political Science, 12.

For more on legitimation, see David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1991); Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2012).

For example, F. Allen Burt, American Advertising Agencies, an Inquiry into Their Origin, Growth, Functions, and Future (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940); Holland, “Volney B. Palmer (1799–1864): The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man”; Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising; Frank Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1929); and Juliann Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998).

Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency, 6.

Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising, 205.

Terence H. Qualter, Advertising and Democracy in the Mass Age (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991).

Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising.

Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency; T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

Burt, American Advertising Agencies, an Inquiry into Their Origin, Growth, Functions, and Future, 244.

Holland, “Volney B. Palmer (1799–1864): The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man.”

Ibid., 10.

The agency logic of explanation can also be expressed as a form of functionalism (see the next section on functionalist approach to explanation). Agent- or actor-centered functionalism explains institutional outcomes in terms of the intentions of actors who most benefit from the eventual institutional arrangements. This seems to be the approach for claiming industrial advertisers brought about the advertising agency; however, this actor-centered functionalism also seems to be reflected in arguments by Burt and Holland that the advertising agency reflected the intentions and designs of Volney Palmer. For more on actor-based functionalism, see Pierson, Politics in Time.

For critiques of functionalism as historical argument, see Jon Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Parsons, How to Map Arguments in Political Science; and Skocpol, Vision and Method in Historical Sociology.

George A. Huaco, “Ideology and General Theory: The Case of Sociological Functionalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, no. 1 (1986): 34–54; Martin Mahner and Mario Bunge, “Function and Functionalism: A Synthetic Perspective,” Philosophy of Science 68, no. 1 (2001): 75–94.

Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising, 35.

This is a functional logic because the elemental bits of the explanation being offered are disequilibrium and the needs this disequilibrium brings about. A structural logic emphasizes how social actors have their agency bound based on the physical and social environment in which they work and think.

Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency, 9.

Burt, American Advertising Agencies, an Inquiry into Their Origin, Growth, Functions, and Future, 243.

Qualter, Advertising and Democracy in the Mass Age, 12.

Mahner and Bunge, “Function and Functionalism: A Synthetic Perspective,” 89.

Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising.

Here, again, the contrast with a structural logic should be clear. Unlike the functionalist logic, the structural logic emphasizes how rationality is bound by the structural environment.

Parsons, How to Map Arguments in Political Science, 25.

Kreps, A Course in Microeconomic Theory; Parsons, How to Map Arguments in Political Science.

Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising, 114.

Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency, 7.

Kreps, A Course in Microeconomic Theory.

Parsons, How to Map Arguments in Political Science, 25.

Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers.

Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency: N. W. Ayer & Son at Work, 1869–1949, 10.

Lears, Fables of Abundance, 89.

James Playsted Wood, The Story of Advertising (New York: Ronald Press, 1958), 137.

Hall and Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms.”

Ibid., 948.

Ibid., 949. The reason this kind of institutionalism is called sociological institutionalism is that institutions are seen as socializing forces. Institutions have a culture—a set of values, atttitudes, ideas, and ways of doing things—that influence how social actors think and act.

Craig Parsons, “Showing Ideas as Causes: The Origins of the European Union,” International Organization 56, no. 1 (2002): 47–84. It should be apparent from this description that sociological institutionalism borrows from an ideational or cultural logic. Culture and ideas influence individuals, but culture and ideas are mediated through social institutions.

Hall and Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” 950.

Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

William Hamilton Sewell, “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (1992): 1–29.

John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, ed. Walter W. Powell and Paul DiMaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 41–62.

Michael Schudson, “The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism,” Journalism 2, no. 2 (2001): 149–170.

Paul Pierson, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics,” American Political Science Review 94, no. 2 (2000): 251–267.

Holland, “Volney B. Palmer (1799–1864): The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man,” 6.

Skocpol, Vision and Method in Historical Sociology.

“Notice,” Rhode-Island American and Providence Gazette, April 14, 1826.

Early histories, all of which use nearly identical language, identify the first agent as Orlando Bourne; however, this appears to be incorrect. The only Orlando Bourne located during this time period is a ship by that name. George M. Bourne, on the other hand, ran newspaper ads in late 1826 and early 1827 announcing he would collect debts and deal in subscriptions and advertisements in New York City for any newspapers willing to do business with him.

“George M. Bourne,” Rhode-Island American and Providence Gazette, June 27, 1826.

See Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising; W. David Sloan, The Media in America: A History, 7th ed. (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2008); Hrolf Wisby, “Modern Advertising Methods,” The Independent, February 4, 1904.

Benson J. Lossing, History of New York City, Embracing an Outline Sketch of Events from 1609 to 1830, and a Full Account of Its Development from 1830 to 1884 (New York: G. E. Perine, 1884).

“George M. Bourne,” Rhode-Island American, May 22, 1827.

“Death of a Remarkable Woman,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 8, 1856; [Untitled], Burlington Mirror, October 21, 1818.

[Untitled], Burlington Mirror, October 21, 1818, 1.

E. W. Huffcut, Elements of the Law of Agency (Boston: Little, Brown, 1895).

See Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency.

See Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977).

“Accounts,” Public Ledger, January 26, 1846.

“Accounts,” Cincinnati Weekly Herald and Philanthropist, February 11, 1846.

“At V. B. Palmer's United States Collection Agency,” North American, 1847.

See Gerald W. Gawalt, “Massachusetts Legal Education in Transition, 1766–1840,” in Essays in Nineteenth-Century American Legal History, ed. W. Holt (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 650–673; Robert Bocking Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Union, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2001).

History of Schuylkill County, Pa. (New York: W. W. Munsell, 1881).

Gawalt, “Sources of Anti-Lawyer Sentiment in Massachusetts, 1740–1840.”

Ibid.

“List of Nominations for Congress and Electors,” Washington Whig, September 27, 1828.

Gawalt, “Sources of Anti-Lawyer Sentiment in Massachusetts, 1740–1840.”

History of Schuylkill.

See Holland, “Volney B. Palmer: The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man”; Holland, “Volney B. Palmer (1799–1864): The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man.” It was Burt, American Advertising Agencies, an Inquiry into Their Origin, Growth, Functions, and Future, who asserted that Palmer had worked as an ad agent for his brother's paper.

Holland has the Palmer brothers moving to Pottsville in 1830; other sources put them there in 1829. See, for example, History of Schuylkill; “Report on the Coal Trade,” Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania, April 19, 1834.

“Report on the Coal Trade,” Hazard's Register of Pensylvania, April 26, 1834.

Ibid.

“Report on the Coal Trade,” Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania, April 19, 1834.

Ibid.

“Report on the Coal Trade,” April 26, 1834.

“Deferred Article,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, January 2, 1836.

“Minute Book of the Manager, Susquehanna Canal Company, July 8, 1835–January 9, 1867” (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania State Archives, 1835).

“Deferred Article,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, January 2, 1836.

“Tidewater Canal Company” (Wilmington, DE: Hagley Museum & Library, 1837).

Ibid.

See Ronald E. Seavoy, An Economic History of the United States: From 1607 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006).

See Glyn Davies, A History of Money: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994).

Ibid.

“Report of the Susquehanna and Tide Water Canal Co. to the Governor of Maryland” (Annapolis, MD: House of Delegates, 1842).

“Tidewater Canal Company” (Wilmington, DE: Hagley Museum & Library, 1840).

“Report of the Susquehanna and Tide Water Canal Co. to the Governor of Maryland” (Annapolis, MD: House of Delegates, 1842).

“Tidewater Canal Company” (Wilmington, DE: Hagley Museum & Library, 1841).

“V. B. Palmer,” Public Ledger, January 4, 1841.

Holland, “Volney B. Palmer: The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man”; Holland, “Volney B. Palmer (1799–1864): The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man.”

“Schuylkill Coal Office,” Public Ledger, July 24, 1841.

“Coal Office,” Public Ledger, August 22, 1841.

US House of Representatives Report No. 184, 35th Cong., 2nd, 1859.

“Coal Office Opposite the Park-Tribune Buildings,” New York Tribune, January 16, 1845.

See Edd Applegate, Personalities and Products: A Historical Perspective on Advertising in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998). Applegate states that Palmer opened his real estate office in 1841 and added the coal office in 1842. Palmer did both, from the same address, in January of 1841. “V. B. Palmer.”

Holland, “Volney B. Palmer: The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man”; Holland, “Volney B. Palmer (1799–1864): The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man”; Applegate, “Palmer, Volney B.”

“Building Lot in Kensington for Sale,” Daily Sun, June 10, 1847.

“$3000,” Public Ledger, January 27, 1844; “Rare Opportunity of Investment in Real Estate,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 1841; “Superior Water Power, Mills, Houses, Land, Etc. for Sale,” Public Ledger, August 11, 1845; “Valuable Farm,” Public Ledger, January 4, 1844.

Lancaster County Historical Society, Historical Papers and Addresses of the Lancaster County Historical Society, vol. VIII (Lancaster, PA: Lancaster County Historical Society, 1904).

Archibald McElroy, McElroy's Philadelphia Directory (Philadelphia: Isaac Ashmead and Company, 1842).

See Ronald E. Shaw, Canals for a Nation: The Canal Era in the United States, 1790–1860 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990).

“$25 Only for a Homestead,” Daily Ohio Statesman, April 3, 1851; “Farm Wanted,” Broome Republican, February 13, 1850; “Grand Opportunity,” New York Herald, September 6, 1856; “Only $25 for a Homestead,” New-Hampshire Gazette, April 29, 1851.

Gawalt, “Sources of Anti-Lawyer Sentiment in Massachusetts, 1740–1840.”

“Wonders of Steam,” Public Ledger, November 8, 1845.

“For Passage,” Public Ledger, July 22, 1847.

“Academy,” North American, September 18, 1847.

“New York Commission Agency,” Delaware State Reporter, September 4, 1857.

McElroy, McElroy's Philadelphia Directory; “New Facilities to the Business Community,” Public Ledger, March 17, 1842; “Newspaper Agency,” Baltimore Sun, March 12, 1842.

“Report.”

See James Weston Livingood, The Philadelphia-Baltimore Trade Rivalry, 1780–1860 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1947).

Ibid.

“New Facilities to the Business Community,” Public Ledger, March 17, 1842, 4.

Ibid.

“Advertising in Country Newspapers,” Public Ledger, February 5, 1844; “Advertising in Country Papers,” Philadelphia Inquirer and National Gazette, March 23, 1844.

[Untitled], Public Ledger, March 13, 1844.

For more on the role of advertisers in promoting advertising to reluctant businesspersons and the discursive strategies of doing so, see Tim P. Vos and You Li, “Justifying Commercialization: Legitimating Discourses and the Rise of American Advertising,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 90, no. 3 (2013): 559–580.

“Systematic Advertising,” Norfolk Democrat, August 4, 1848.

Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed. (London: C. Knight, 1835).

“Chit-Chat of the Hour,” Home Journal, December 26, 1846.

S. M. Pettengill, “Reminiscences of the Advertising Business,” Printers’ Ink, December 24, 1890.

Other histories suggest Palmer had not opened four offices until 1846. Holland, “Volney B. Palmer (1799–1864): The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man”; Holland, “Volney B. Palmer: The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man.” See “V. B. Palmer's American Newspaper Subscription and Advertising Agency,” Public Ledger, December 25, 1844.

Mansel G. Blackford and K. Austin Kerr, Business Enterprise in American History, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990); Thomas Childs Cochran, Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

Other histories have stated that he used the label “advertising agency” for the first time in 1849. See Applegate, Personalities and Products, 40. “V. B. Palmer's American Newspaper Subscription and Advertising Agency,” New York Tribune, January 16, 1845.

Pettengill, “Reminiscences of the Advertising Business.”

Ibid.

For example, “Mr. V. B. Palmer,” New-Hampshire Patriot, September 19, 1844; “V. B. Palmer,” New London Morning News, July 25, 1845; “V. B. Palmer,” Macon Weekly Telegraph, March 11, 1845; “V. B. Palmer, Esq.,” Huntingdon Journal, May 11, 1842.

McElroy, McElroy's Philadelphia Directory; “New Facilities to the Business Community.”

“To Our Agents,” The War, November 14, 1812.

“Cash,” Democratic Republican, April 16, 1816; “Publisher's Notices,” National Era, October 14, 1847.

“Publisher's Notices”; “Territorial Scrip,” Arkansas Gazette, December 7, 1824.

“To Our Agents.”

Pettengill, “Reminiscences of the Advertising Business.”

Ibid.

“S. R. Niles,” Boston Daily Courier, January 13, 1859; “V. B. Palmer,” Lowell Daily Citizen and News, March 10, 1858.

Pettengill, “Reminiscences of the Advertising Business.”

“Messrs Mason & Tuttle,” Daily Atlas, October 3, 1844.

“Terms of the Age,” The Age, May 7, 1847.

George Presbury Rowell, Forty Years and Advertising Agent, 1865–1905 (New York: Franklin Publishing, 1926).

Cochran, Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America.

Blackford and Kerr, Business Enterprise in American History.

Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency; Laird, Advertising Progress; Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising. This is a form of agent or actor-based described above.

Laird, Advertising Progress.

Edd Applegate, “The Development of Advertising, 1700–1900,” in The Media in America: A History, ed. W. David Sloan (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2008), 267–286; Burt, American Advertising Agencies, an Inquiry into Their Origin, Growth, Functions, and Future; Holland, “Volney B. Palmer (1799–1864): The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man”; Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency: N. W. Ayer & Son at Work, 1869–1949; Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing; Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising; Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising; Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising; and Wood, The Story of Advertising.

Applegate, “Palmer, Volney B.”; Holland, “Volney B. Palmer: The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man”; Holland, “Volney B. Palmer (1799–1864): The Nation's First Advertising Agency Man.”

Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation.

See Skocpol, Vision and Method in Historical Sociology. She argues that an institutionalist explanation is not conducive to any kind of storytelling.

Palmer's actions do not suggest he set out to accomplish what ultimately came about—a restructuring of how the advertising business would be conducted. This challenges the actor-centered functionalist logic. As Pierson notes, even powerful actors cannot necessarily anticipate the effects of their actions. See Pierson, Politics in Time.