"Branding Trust" by Jennifer Black

Advertising has been part of the American scene since the beginning. Jennifer Black, in her new book, "Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America," points to ads at the time of the American Revolution by "a growing contingent of Americans who expressed their classed identities through the goods they purchased."But things really got going in the 1800s as the American commercial marketplace began as a chaotic, unregulated environment in which knockoffs and outright frauds thrived.As early as the 1830s, printers and manufacturers started working on ways to advertise goods.By 1870, visual elements, design and entertainment efforts had ushered in the advertising age that we still live in today. As Black explained to Steve Tarter, the development of lithography, the printing of images, spurred an interest in art and nature in the public but it also presented a whole new world for advertisers.Black details the rise and fall of trade cards that carried an advertiser's brand along with a pretty picture.Advertising continued to develop into the 20th century. Black pointed to brand images that have stood the test of time such as the Quaker man for Quaker oats, initially established in the 1870s. But there were also ad mascots that didn't last such as the bug-eyed Josh Slinger, who served as the "spokesman" for Hires root beer  from 1914 to 1918.