Eva Frey

Postwar Advertisement Image Production. The Genesis of the Advertisement Image between Scribble and Camera-ready Copy

The "intricate elaborative process" of the production of advertisement images has largely been neglected by the history of advertising, art history, cultural and media studies. This project is concerned with modes of postwar advertisement image production in Germany and Switzerland. It captures a range of image production modes: from the research-based, bureaucratized image production in full-service advertising agencies in the 1950s and 1960s to the so-called creative-expressive image production in creative advertising agencies in the 1960s. With regard to the former: The careful planning and execution of advertisement image designs was an integral business tool for modern advertisers and advertisement image design was subjected to discourses and practices of business strategy and psychological research. Analyzing the topos of the 'designer as psychologist and business man' requires to take a closer look at the sub-processes of advertisement image production in full-service agencies (e.g., planning, designing/producing, controlling, distributing): On the one hand, this concerns the contents and motives of negotiation and cooperation between researchers, managers, and advertisement image designers in an agency. On the other hand this concerns the objects of negotiation – mainly pictures and forms –, such as scribbles, proofs or advertising plans/advertising strategies that were produced for an advertising campaign. Focusing on the production sites, i.e. the offices of ad agencies, and the processes of production allows reconsidering the question of what constitutes an advertisement image; in particular: What is the practical knowledge of advertisement design? What types of pictures were produced in the processes between planning and designing ads and what were their functions? What differing views on value, function and aesthetics of ads circulated in networks of an agency and how were they negotiated? And finally: To what extent have psychological and physiological concepts of the eye and the gaze interacted with or been incorporated in the actual production of advertisement images?