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Contents - Winter 2009

Vol. 2 No. 1

Persuasion on the Prairies

By Cameron Zimmer

With typical bravado, Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan once claimed “Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and the most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.”

While some may have found McLuhan’s statement too audacious to consider seriously, former University of Saskatchewan Library employee Neil Richards and project staff from the University Archives and Library took it as a challenge.

Though the team knew websites on advertising history existed, they could find few that focused on a narrow geographic area and none based on the Canadian Prairies.

“We thought we’d like to give this a test and see whether you could tell the story of a region through the advertising it used,” says Richards. “We wanted to examine how people persuade each other both to spend money and also to accept ideas.”

With a grant from Canadian Heritage’s Canadian Culture Online (CCOP) Memory Fund, the team created the online exhibition Persuasion: Print Advertising and Advocacy on the Prairies.

The Persuasion website presents more than 600 prairie advertisements produced over the last 125 years, found in the collections of the Diefenbaker Canada Centre, University Archives, and University Library’s Special Collections department. The team’s research into prairie advertising led to some unusual documents that presented odd glimpses into prairie history.

For example, the exhibition includes a postcard from 1945 with a small but bold postal cancellation stamp calling on the recipient to “Stamp out Syphilis in Saskatchewan.”

The stamp was part of a public campaign against venereal diseases afflicting Canadian armed forces and others during the Second World War. It’s intriguing, says Richards, to find the government so publicly acknowledging a taboo problem in what has been considered a sexually conservative era.

Beyond merely cataloguing strange insights into prairie life, the Persuasion gallery intertwines advertising themes such as immigration, agriculture, politics, social causes, and sports with educational essays on the historical context surrounding ads.

Putting ads in perspective is vital, says Richards, since marketers have not necessarily provided the comprehensive historical picture McLuhan predicted they would.

“It’s certainly clear that there isn’t any subject that you can’t study through advertising and promotional material, but some of the subjects you need to examine very critically to understand what isn’t depicted and what isn’t advertised,” says Richards.

There were obvious omissions, Richards says, such as ads aimed at homosexual and Aboriginal audiences that didn’t become established in prairie advertising until the 1990s.

Less obvious were the motivations behind many of the older ads’ boastful claims. In one case, Richards found an immigration ad from 1910 promoting Vonda, a small Saskatchewan community, which declared, “The citizens are White and will use you White if you will present the opportunity.”

Throughout the website, visitors are called on to examine advertisers’ tactics from years past and how they are still being exploited by advertisers today.

“We wanted to show how pervasive manipulation was. We were thinking about younger students using the site,” says U of S archivist Cheryl Avery, who collaborated with Richards on the gallery. “We want to get school students thinking a bit more about how people are trying to influence them in various aspects of their life.”

To help younger visitors, the exhibition dedicates a section to resources for teachers. This fall, high- school media-studies teachers are using the site to ask students to take a more critical look at the marketing messages bombarding them.

In the end, Richards says the hundreds of hours spent scouring archives were well spent if students and the website’s other visitors take a closer look at the ads assailing them.

“We intended it to be provocative,” he says. To explore Persuasion: Print Advertising and Advocacy on the Prairies, visit http://scaa.usask.ca/gallery/persuasion/.

“We couldn’t believe that [statement], but … if you look in a dictionary you find that the term ‘white’ at that time could just mean helpful, welcoming, or a person who has a good spirit. We had to go back to see what the word may have meant 80 years ago,” says Richards.

In other cases, no interpretation was needed since it was clear advertisers simply neglected to tell the whole truth. To illustrate, Richards points to immigration posters that once convinced hundreds of thousands to head west by suggesting it was always warm and sunny on the Prairies.

As striking as deception in immigration posters and many of the online gallery’s other older ads appear, David Williams, a U of S associate professor of marketing, says their ploys are remarkably similar to those used by advertisers today.

“I think we forget that some of the tactics haven’t changed. We think they’re more well executed because they’re modern—‘Oh, it must be better because it’s modern’—but some of the techniques are basically the same,” says Williams. “Even with technology and social marketing, it’s all about elements of persuasion. That’s why I think it’s useful to see what happened in the past.”