Why Study Advertising in the United States?

Abstract

Let’s start at the beginning of advertising education, as we know it. The basic philosophy underlying advertising education was best expressed by Charles H. Sandage who was the first head of the Department of Advertising at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. I will paraphrase his call to arms rather than quote him. Sandy, as he was known, believed that advertising was a noble profession that rose to the level of a social institution much like the church. He believed that it served several functions (information, persuasion, and education) that consumers required to make purchases of products and services and to decide what ideas they were to believe in, for example, Smokey the Bear’s admonition to protect the nation’s forests from fires. And, he believed that the profession needed “practitioners of a high order” who were educated in the appropriate skills and sense of social responsibility to move the profession forward. This purpose, he argued, was the job of “leading universities”; therefore, the idea and philosophy of advertising education was born. Sandy’s philosophy and vision appeared in the book The Promise of Advertising in 1961. This solid foundation was the early impetus that was shared by major universities in the Midwest resulting in some of the first advertising programs at Northwestern University, University of Missouri and Michigan State University, with Chicago’s advertising industry at the epicenter. Sandy had a long-term view of the future of advertising that would take at least two decades to take foothold across the United States as graduate programs were established to educate the future teachers of advertising. This was the 1970s, and for those