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The 1990s in America

Advertising

by Julia M. Meyers

Definition Written or verbal information directed at individuals or a group with the intent of influencing their behavior as consumers

Advertising during the 1990’s affected greater numbers of individuals and began to have a much stronger impact as a result of increasingly intrusive advertising methods.

In general, advertisements are intended to promote the use of particular services or products through certain, specific images (brands) and to take advantage of the human tendency to form product-related habits of taste (brand loyalty). By the 1990’s, advertising agencies had successfully penetrated nearly every form of communication in order to promote their clients’ services or products. From magazines to newspapers, radios to cinema, television to the Internet, and billboards to video games, increased consumption was the message intended to permeate every facet of life in the 1990’s.

In William Dean Howell’s novel The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), the titular hero becomes wealthy after announcing the benefits of using his mineral paint by having advertisements painted on the sides of barns. This ancient form of advertising—wall painting—has continued to exist even in a modern, technological society. Although fondly remembered in the form of advertisements painted on the sides of brick buildings, such wall paintings changed over time into the more temporary billboard. The 1990’s introduced a new twist on the traditional billboard—the so-called mobile billboard. When large-format digital inkjet printers made large-scale banner printing possible, advertisers saw a way to reach consumers who were increasingly able to avoid television and radio advertising. By printing graphics and text onto banners that were then plastered onto both sides of ten-by-twenty-foot panels installed on flatbed trucks, advertisers created billboards that could be moved from one location to another for maximum public exposure. By 1995, mobile billboards were a regular fixture on the streets of major cities. That year, Delroy Cowan took advantage of the trend by inventing mobile advertising trucks that had triangle-shaped panels (“trivision”) that could be rotated every six or seven seconds and introduced two of his special trucks in Miami.

Magazine and Newspaper Advertising

Like billboards, printed texts such as magazines and newspapers have a long history as advertising media. Printed flyers distributed on the streets in seventeenth century England often carried advertisements, and the first paid ads appeared in the French newspaper La Presse in 1836 in order to allow the publisher to lower its price and increase its circulation. The 1990’s, introducing the Internet as a medium for printed texts, witnessed the birth of a new flexibility for advertising and gave additional momentum to the “dot-com” boom. Some corporations, such as Worldshare, provided Internet access to users willing to donate time to view promotional advertisements. The Web sites FreeRide and Greenfield Online offered coupons for free products and even cash to anyone willing to read sponsors’ ads. During the 1990’s, many of these companies were able to exist solely by generating advertising revenue.

Radio and Television Advertising

Radio and television advertising existed since the first radio and television stations used commercial messages to encourage the consumer purchase of radios and television sets. Both pieces of technology were initially costly, and, not coincidentally, both introduced their form of advertising through commercial sponsorship of popular dramas and news programs. By the 1990’s, the advent of cable television and satellite radio allowed increasingly specific markets of viewers to whom the advertisers could direct increasingly specific marketing. Ironically, cable and satellite providers in the 1990’s also gained popularity by promoting “ad-free” television and radio programs, a development that reflected a rise in consumer disgust for intrusive advertising and necessitated the development of more covert forms of advertising such as product placement in films and television series and product endorsements spoken in the context of talk radio hosts’ monologues.

Talk radio had long allowed the announcement of sponsors’ names and products on air, but the 1990’s particularly emphasized the use of personal endorsements by talk-show jockeys such as Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh. These endorsements were intended to sell products without explicitly acknowledging that the celebrity was making an advertisement. Scenery and costuming in films included literal product placement to silently and visually advertise the use of prominent products. The television series Sex and the City explicitly advertised products through the female characters’ worship of such brand-specific shoes as Christian Dior, Manolo Blahnik, and Jimmy Choos.

One developing trend started during the 1990’s was the use of computer-generated images to advertise products. Computer graphics could be placed strategically on blank billboards and television screens included for that purpose in the background scenery of a film or television show. Theoretically, these product placements could be changed depending on the needs of the advertising sponsor.

Loosening Restrictions

Another trend born in the 1990’s was the loosening strictures on advertising for a number of previously controlled products on television and in print media, such as alcohol and certain prescription drugs. Hard liquor and prescription medication had been previously controlled in how they were allowed to be portrayed; alcohol manufacturers voluntarily restricted advertising to media where 70 percent of viewers were over twenty-one years old and content was directed specifically at adults, while prescription drug manufacturers kept their advertisements vague in content.

Relaxed social mores caused for looser self-regulation. In the late 1990’s, Captain Morgan was suggested as the chosen beverage of the “cool” dentist, and Senator Bob Dole hawked erectile dysfunction drug Viagra for Pfizer. These changes—along with, ironically, tighter regulations on the use of tobacco advertising—reflected changes in social mores. Drinking, in a tasteful context, was allowed for even the harder liquors such as Seagrams whisky, and the frank discussion of prescription medications on television became the norm. On the other hand, Camel was punished for using a cartoon character to sell cigarettes. Socially, smoking was considered more and more a social evil to be kept from children and adolescents, while social drinking lost some of its stigma.

Alternative Advertising

Other trends in advertising begun in this decade were simply new uses for existing technology. In 1998, cell phones began to have downloaded advertising as a new part of existing update software. The computer became host to a variety of ad-laden, product-sponsored software, from public-service antidrug announcements (observed initially in the opening and closing screens of video-game machines such as Pac-Man) to the self-promotion of computer game expansion packs. The old tradition of sandwich boards was updated by lighting up sandwich boards with neon tubing. T-shirts printed with advertising images and slogans continued in popularity, but the 1990’s updated the media by changing the preferred creator and subject from street vendors and soft drinks to prominent clothing designers.

Advertising for Its Own Sake

The 1990’s also witnessed the beginning of an unusual trend toward the creation of advertisements intended to be viewed as a form of art or entertainment. Taster’s Choice introduced a kind of miniature teledrama in the 1990’s that starred British actors Sharon Maughan and Anthony Head as new neighbors whose romantic encounters encouraged viewers to watch succeeding commercials more so than to drink the coffee. Commercials created specifically for broadcast during the half-time show of the Super Bowl vied for position in a televised vote by viewers for “Favorite Commercial.”

Many advertisers regarded their work as art. Television commercial creators had their own awards for the best and most popular advertisements in a variety of categories. The long-standing Clio Award was joined in the 1990’s by the Golden Drum Award and an Emmy created in 1997 for “Outstanding Commercial,” won by Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn for “Chimps (HBO).”

Impact

The impact of 1990’s intrusive advertising cannot be overrated. The developing trend in advertising to inundate the population with requests to purchase brand-name products seemed to have desensitized individuals to the presence of commercials. Television and film viewers made use of technology to allow them to remove commercials from a recording of a favorite film or television show. Advertisers, in response, instituted embedded advertising to make consumer removal impossible.

By the 1990’s, advertising had become so ubiquitous through daily life that—even should one eschew television, cinema, and broadcast radio—one could not escape the implicit messaging of mobile billboards, sandwich signs, T-shirt slogans, and “word-of-mouth” advertising that associates a brand name with a specific product (such as Kleenex instead of “facial tissue,” Xerox in place of “photocopy,” and Coke in place of “soda”). This quality of omnipresence was fully intentional on the part of advertisers. Ironically, many ads became either mere background noise or the subject of debate more for their plots and characters than for their commercial content.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Meyers, Julia M. "Advertising." The 1990s in America, edited by Milton Berman, Salem Press, 2009. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=1990_1003.

APA 7th

Meyers, J. M. (2009). Advertising. In M. Berman (Ed.), The 1990s in America. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Meyers, Julia M. "Advertising." Edited by Milton Berman. The 1990s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2009. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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