Selling Themselves: The Emergence of Canadian Advertising

Johnston's coverage of approximately 50 years of Canadian advertising history has left a few underdeveloped areas. These stem from ambiguities that begin with the author's title. While Selling Themselves refers to ad workers, The Emergence of Canadian Advertising connotes a discussion of advertising as a communicative mechanism, a means for endowing commodities with more transcendent qualities. The strength of works such as Roland Marchand's Advertising the American Dream (1985)--one of the inspirations for Johnston's research--is the author's use of advertising campaigns as well as industry background to show how advertising workers were at once "apostles of modernity" and mediators within that process, bringing North Americans into the modern consumer society (Marchand, 1985, p. 1). Here, Johnston's intention to provide this analysis is present, but his implementation is less convincing. He indicates that advertising participated in the construction of a Canadian society "increasingly homogenized to fit an anglophone, liberal Christian, middle class" and that "advertising played upon the anxieties of readers by suggesting that specific products would help them to achieve the status or acceptance they desired" (p. 17). However, the only advertising campaigns discussed in great detail are those that promote the advertising industry itself. His brief discussion about the pitfalls of content analysis (p. 10), while relevant, does not excuse the author from providing evidence from Canadian advertising campaigns that would only strengthen the claims made in this book. Another intriguing element calling for additional examination is the author's discussion of the uneasy relationship between Canadian ad workers and their colleagues in the United States. While openly embracing the practices and themes of American advertising, Canadian ad workers expressed concern about losing their jobs due to the northern incursions of American advertising agencies. However, apart from one recounting of a group of Canadian advertising practitioners appearing in Scottish garb at an industry convention, Johnston does not highlight any other attempts by Canadian ad workers to distance themselves from their U.S. counterparts. Here again, some examples of how Canadian ad workers may have integrated Canadian folklore and imagery into specific advertising campaigns in order to demonstrate their knowledge of the distinctiveness of the Canadian market would have bolstered this area of Jo