Looking westwards and worshipping: The New York ‘Creative Revolution’ and British advertising, 1956–1980

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which developments associated with the ‘creative revolution’ in New York advertising in the 1950s and 1960s were imported into the United Kingdom, helping to reshape advertising practices in London. In locating the development of UK advertising within this history of commercial exchange, this article explores the modes of transmission and the material conduits through which innovations in advertising practice crossed the Atlantic. It also focuses on the role played by a distinctive 1960s formation of practitioners who used an organisation called the Design and Art Directors Association to champion the new idioms of US advertising. Their rise to influence helped to legitimate a new set of criteria for evaluating advertising which placed ‘creativity’ above ‘research’ and the ‘science of selling’ as the principal measure of good advertising. In exploring the exporting of the ‘new advertising’ to the United Kingdom, this article develops a particular understanding of how Anglo-American advertising relations worked to shape UK advertising practices. This foregrounds the way the US ‘creative revolution’, like other forms of US advertising, was adapted, hybridised and indigenised in its importing to Britain. This article shows how the ‘new advertising’ pioneered in New York was reworked and combined with more local cultural influences. Out of this emerged distinctive styles of British advertising in the 1960s and 1970s.