Printing, pre-press, publishing and photography services – yesterday, today and tomorrow

Contents:

1. Introduction
2. Creation of a Legacy
3. A Legacy Transformed
4. The Virtues of a Middle Class
5. Vested Interest
6. Trading on Conventions
7. Institutionalism Triumphs
8. Lasting Images
9. Conclusion

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF DRUG ADVERTISING AND PROMOTION

With only a few years left in the twentieth century, a multiplicity of controversies encompass drug advertising and promotion. Have marketing techniques regarding pharmaceutical drugs, proprietary medicines, alcohol, and tobacco really changed over time and disrupted the value structure of society? Past, present, and future affect people; not one aspect of time, but all aspects, bear upon the present. Drug advertising and promotion has maintained vitality and robustness through time by promoting the public's desire for a continuity of familiar and traditional health values. By using the nature of a perpetually changing environment, advertising has advanced drugs as symbols of health. Such symbolic activity has provided hope to people regarding their own power and control over pain and illness. Through time, drug advertising became institutionalized.

Introduction

Issues of drug advertising and promotion have social traditions which reach back through the centuries. By its own definition, the American Advertising Museum (1986) located in Portland, Oregon, "preserves the history of an industry that has informed, influenced and entertained people for centuries." Since the development of the printing press in fifteenth-century Europe, advertising flowered into a fundamental method of public communication for available goods and services. But it wasn't until the advent of entrepreneurship and the salesman during the eighteenth century when American advertising found its full-flowered voice. The discovery of advertising's ample expression was involved with the onset of the drug industry as known in the late twentieth century. A review of American drug advertising history and the culture in which it has flourished provides insight to the social standards and choices that have encouraged the promotion of alcohol, tobacco, prescription, and proprietary drugs.

From the initial advancement of the printing press to the appearance of salesmen, many processes occurred to enable American drug advertising to develop into a primary means of public communication. Time, change, and adaptation have been vital ingredients which contributed to the nature of advertising and promotion. Influential factors such as social organization, religion, political structure, technology, as well as economic organization accorded opportunities for the progress of drug advertising. Dramatic cultural transitions such as war, or simple, as in the case of living and dying have affected the mechanisms of change and how people responded to it. Related dynamic processes have included transportation improvements, expanded markets, and communication advancements.