Woodard Marketing

Marketing Modernity: The J.
Walter
Thompson Company and North American
Advertising in Brazil, 1929 – 1939
James P. Woodard
In 1929 the J. Walter Thompson Company ( JWT), a leading North Ameri-

can advertising agency, opened an office in São Paulo. JWT’s founding of a
Brazilian subsidiary emerged from a decade’s worth of discussion of how to
increase North American exports and of what role advertising would play in
this expansion. Manufacturers, advertising executives, and representatives of
key sectors of the U.S. government took part in these discussions through arti-
cles in the nation’s leading trade publications and participation in conferences
on the subject. These businessmen and bureaucrats envisioned exports and
overseas advertising as a way to guarantee the nation’s future prosperity, pro-
tect and extend North American economic power, and raise backward regions
to the economic and cultural level of the United States, then immersed in the
triumphalist consumerism of its Second Industrial Revolution.
The General Motors Corporation (GM) was an early adherent to the
expansionist creed, establishing assembly operations in São Paulo in 1925 and
a Brazilian advertising department the following year. In 1927 GM and Thomp-
son signed an agreement that would make JWT the first major U.S. advertis-
ing agency to open offices in Brazil. The modern advertising agency, having
served the U.S. corporate economy at home since its inception, would now
serve the emerging multinational arm of this economy abroad.1
This article and its author have benefited from the insight, advice, and encouragement of
Louis A. Pérez Jr. Thomas E. Skidmore gave the penultimate draft a careful read and made
valuable suggestions for revision. Thanks are also due to John Charles Chasteen, who read
and commented on an earlier work containing much of this material, and to the HAHR’s
anonymous reviewers.
1. For the emergence of the U.S. advertising agency in this context, see T. J. Jackson
Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America ( New York: Basic
Books, 1994), pt. 2; and Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for
Modernity, 1920 –1940 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), chaps. 1– 2.
Hispanic American Historical Review 82:2

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258 HAHR / May / Woodard
With the opening of the São Paulo office in 1929, Thompson executives
hired former employees of the General Motors advertising department, pro-
fessionals already attuned to North American methods and modalities. The
advertising men also began to cultivate new clients and initiated the first sur-
veys of the Brazilian market, research that not only afforded them greater
insight into local business and the lives of Brazilian consumers but that also
provides historians with the opportunity to examine North American attitudes
toward Brazil during this period. Finally, the new office conducted the work
for which it was founded: the creation and dissemination of advertising for an
array of complementary products, thus promoting a certain vision of moder-
nity that was to be assembled in Brazil.
The JWT experience had, in turn, far-reaching effects on Brazilian soci-
ety. With Thompson’s entry into the Brazilian market, other North American
agencies were forced to follow. These agencies, along with JWT, provided the
training that created a new group in Brazilian society, a group of Brazilian
advertising men who formed part of a larger professional-managerial elite that
looked increasingly to the United States as a model for their own country. The
expansion of JWT and its subsequent competitors also led to an increase in
advertising; this increase stimulated the expansion and professionalization of
Brazilian media, with a consequent growth of dependence on advertising rev-
enue on the part of media outlets. Finally, advertising’s appeals reached the
men and women of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, who received and inter-
preted these appeals in different ways.
Envisioning Overseas Advertising
By the 1920s, U.S. industry had reached unprecedented levels of production.

Increasingly, exporting and advertising were looked upon as the means to
ensure future prosperity, contain European competition, and carry out the
Americanization and modernization of host countries. At a 1925 convention,
no less an authority than James A. Farrell, president of U.S. Steel, urged his
colleagues to increase their exports, “an increasing element in the prosperity
of our country,” in order to keep up with the production capacity of U.S.
industry.2 The previous year, a contributor to Printer’s Ink, the leading adver-
tising trade publication, called for greater overseas sales, writing that export-
ing “is and has been a policy of economic necessity, an answer to the urgent
2. James A. Farrell, “U.S. Steel’s President on the Export Outlook,” Printer’s Ink,
25 June 1925, 154, 165.

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Marketing Modernity 259
demand for markets which will absorb production and keep factories hum-
ming.”3 Government officials agreed, including Henry H. Morse, chief of the
Specialties Division of the Department of Commerce, who saw exporting as
the “foundation” of future U.S. prosperity.4
The enthusiasm for exporting extended to overseas advertising. Charles
Fischer, the foreign manager of Standard Brands — a JWT-Brazil client from
the 1930s through the 1980s — called for more advertising abroad because “it
costs us approximately fifty percent more to advertise in foreign countries. . . .
But the returns of today is [sic] not our yardstick; it is the returns our money
is building for tomorrow from those new markets [we are] in the process of
making.”5
Advertising was seen as a particularly effective means of countering the
commercial advances of European nations as their economies recovered from
war. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce Director Julius Klein
warned that in “Japan, China, South America, and other parts of the world,
British, French, and German interests are now making every possible effort to
undermine American prestige.” North American advertising, however, could
serve to counter these efforts as “the American manufacturers who are making
the most headway against the foreign handicaps are those who are advertising
and merchandising their products on the sound basis of high quality and rea-
sonable price.”6
Businessmen, increasingly concerned with export advertising, agreed. At
the 1926 National Foreign Trade Convention in Charleston, J. W. Sanger of
Frank Seaman, Inc., declared, “In today’s international competition for free
trade, America has the distinct advantage of superior initiative, larger plant
capacity, greater reserves of capital, more open-mindedness, and last but not
least, more faith in and better knowledge of modern advertising. Of these
weapons, the most patent one at our command, is advertising.”7
Seven years earlier, Sanger had traveled to Brazil to study the country’s
advertising conditions for the U.S. Department of Commerce. In Brazil he
saw a lack of advertising on the part of European interests and called for
3. Dana Hubbard, “The Road to Export Sales,” Printer’s Ink, 27 Mar. 1924, 49.
4. “Export Service Step by Step,” Printer’s Ink, 26 July 1923, 74.
5. Charles Fischer, “Let’s Sell Yeast Abroad,” Advertising Abroad, Nov. 1929,
31 (emphasis in original).
6. “Present-Day Handicaps to Foreign Trade,” Printer’s Ink, 21 Jan. 1926, 113 –14,
116.
7. J. W. Sanger, “Three Questions Which Exporters Must Answer,” Printer’s Ink,
6 May 1926, 41.

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advertising, a “distinctly American idea,” to be “used in Brazil as one of the

most potent forces at our command and with but little fear of European com-
petition of like character.”8
If advertising was envisioned as a means of protecting and extending U.S.
influence in the face of European competition, it was also seen as part of a
larger, mutually beneficial exchange between the United States and backward
regions such as Latin America. In the minds of its practitioners and devotees,
advertising occupied a favored position in a rational, liberal, modernizing proj-
ect that would benefit all the nations of the world. This idea was based on a
number of deeply held beliefs: (1) a universalistic belief in advertising, in the
idea that advertising and — by extension — North American consumer culture
held the same appeal to all people; (2) a quasi-messianic faith in advertising as
a central component of the “American way of life,” one which assumed that
“Americanism” and advertising were by nature progressive influences; and (3)
the conviction that advertising was a social and economic force in its own
right. In this discourse, “Americanization” and “modernization” emerged as
synonyms. Advertising, as both product and promoter of emergent North
American corporate and material culture, was to be spread worldwide and
usher in universal prosperity.
In 1924 the universalist doctrine was summed up by the Printer’s Ink cor-
respondent to the London Convention of the Associated Advertisers Clubs of
the World: “Just as advertising has long been a common denominator of inter-
est for progressive business men in America, it is being proved that better
sales, advertising, and distribution methods speak all languages.”9 Following a
seven-month trip through Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru, Louis D. Ricci
of the Foreign Advertising and Service Bureau reported that the “public is
stirred by a new desire to learn things, to follow the fashion, to live as the rest
of the world is living.”10
Advertisers and advertising men were unswerving in their faith in the pro-
gressive character of North American life and society, and of advertising as a
progressive force therein. The editor of Nation’s Business projected that a
“future historian” would write, “About 1930 advertising itself began to under-
8. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce,

Advertising Methods in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, by J. W. Sanger, Special Agent Series,
no. 190 ( Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1920), 95 – 96.
9. Roy Dickinson, “London Discusses Advertising’s Place in World Selling,” Printer’s
Ink, 17 July 1924, 10.
10. Louis D. Ricci, “Latin America Today Offers an Outstanding Market,” Advertising
Abroad, Nov. 1929, 5.

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stand more clearly its responsibilities as an era of civilization’s advance [sic].

And this new conception rapidly spread to the four corners of the earth and
increased by leaps and bounds the standards of living of millions of people.”11
James D. Tew of B. F. Goodrich, the Brazilian accounts of which JWT was to
handle beginning in late 1929, remarked that the “history of American com-
merce is inseparably linked with the history of advertising as a progressive ele-
ment in merchandising.”12
The conception of advertising as indispensable to North American moder-
nity and the related emergence of “modernization” and “Americanization” as
synonyms were particularly prevalent in the discourse of the 1920s. JWT
President Stanley Resor was an early adherent to the creed. As one of his
employees remembered, “his belief in advertising as an essential component of
American culture was persistent and devout.” Resor believed “[m]ore and more
American technicians in advertising, selling, transportation, and manufactur-
ing were to live and work throughout the world, helping local people develop
their skills in various fields.”13
Louis D. Ricci commented on advertising’s advance in South America:
“About half the advertising in the more prominent newspapers and periodicals
in South America has its origin in this country. The public has become air-
conscious, road-conscious, home-conscious, health-conscious — and luxury-
conscious. American automobiles, American cigarettes, American cosmetics
and toilet goods set the fashion here. Americans are supplying the materials
and equipment for public improvements — electric power, telephone systems,
railways, new automobile roads.”14
North American triumphalism was frequently accompanied by the even
uglier racism of the period. As one Printer’s Ink contributor recommended,
“South Americans must be shown that we bear only a disinterested goodwill
and they will soon forget their decadent mother culture in a surging rush of
Americanism.”15
The General Motors Corporation was associated with the expansion of
exporting and overseas advertising throughout this period. In 1921 a South
11. Merle Thorpe, “Advertising’s Present Opportunity,” Printer’s Ink, 5 Dec. 1929, 80.
12. James D. Tew, “Does Advertising Need a Continual Defense?” Printer’s Ink,
14 Mar. 1929, 105.
13. Russell Pierce, Gringo-Gaucho: An Advertising Odyssey (Ashland, OR: Southern
Cross Publishers, 1991), 20, 21.
14. Ricci, “Latin America Today,” 5 – 6 (emphasis in original).
15. S. Pereira Mendes, “That Mysterious Continent to the South,” Printer’s Ink,
11 Mar. 1926, 124.

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American Sales Division of the General Motors Export Company was estab-
lished.16 In 1925 the company opened an assembly plant in São Paulo.17 The
following year, General Motors established an advertising department along-
side its assembly operations. Founded with five employees, the department
was initially responsible for the production of pamphlets, car cards, and a
GM-Brazil house organ, as well as the organization of North American-style
car shows and cooperative campaigns with local dealers.18 By the end of 1926,
the department had begun producing and placing advertisements. In 1927 a
specialist from the United States arrived to lead the department and teach
“modern advertising” along North American lines. As automobile sales
increased, the department grew to 34 people in 1928.19 GM was not the only
foreign interest to develop a Brazilian advertising department; other North
American companies also established house agencies, most notably General
Electric. However, GM’s department was widely recognized as the “most pro-
fessional and able of the time,” and its employees would later be sought after
by U.S. advertising agencies entering the Brazilian market.20
While GM’s advertising department was being staffed and trained in São
Paulo, the automobile manufacturer and JWT were extending contacts. In
1927 these contacts were formalized such that Thompson became GM’s
advertising council for all markets outside of the United States and was com-
mitted to opening a local office everywhere that GM had an assembly plant,
including São Paulo.21 In Brazil, ties between the advertising agency and the
16. Arthur Pound, The Turning Wheel: The Story of General Motors through Twenty-Five
Years, 1908 –1933 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, & Company, 1934), 247.
17. Carl H. A. Dassbach, Global Enterprises and the World Economy: Ford, General
Motors, and IBM, the Emergence of the Transnational Enterprise ( New York: Garland, 1989),
143; and Pound, The Turning Wheel, 248.
18. Ricardo Ramos, História da propaganda no Brasil (São Paulo: Univ. de São Paulo,
1972), 31; and Fernando Reis, “São Paulo e Rio: A longa caminhada,” in História da
propaganda no Brasil, ed. Renato Castelo Branco, Rodolfo Lima Martensen, and Fernando
Reis (São Paulo: T. A. Queiroz, 1990), 306.
19. Reis, “São Paulo e Rio,” 307.
20. Augusto de Angelo, “A longa jornada da institucionalização,” in Castelo Branco,
Martensen, and Reis, História da propaganda no Brasil, 25.
21. On the agreement, see Henry C. Flower, interview by Colin Dawkins, Greenwich,
Conn., 16 Oct. 1979, 102, J. Walter Thompson Archives (hereafter JWTA), Duke Univ.,
Durham, N.C., Colin Dawkins Papers (CDP), Oral Interview Series (OIS), Transcript
Subseries (TSS); unsigned memorandum on General Motors, 25 July 1928, JWTA, James
Webb Young Papers ( JWYP), International Branch Notebooks (IBN), box 1, fol. 6; Robert
T. Colwell, The One World of Sam Meek ( New York: By the author, 1964), 25; L. T. Steele,
“Driving Wedge for the Global Client,” in Advertising: Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow, ed.

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automobile company were so close that one advertising man would later
remark that “We moved with General Motors; we were the advertising depart-
ment of General Motors.”22
The J. Walter Thompson Company do Brasil
North American advertising, enlisted by business and government, was now to

be exported to Brazil. In mid-1929 JWT opened its office in São Paulo, invest-
ing in it all of the perceived modernity of its profession. While at one level, the
opening can be seen as an episode in the larger expansion of U.S. commercial
influence in Brazil in the interwar era (as can the preceding growth of local
General Motors operations), the establishment of the São Paulo office also
marked an important milestone in the corporate and cultural history of the
city.23 The founding of the first subsidiary of a U.S. advertising agency intro-
duced to Brazil a company that produced advertisements for many compa-
nies — some of them even domestic — and presented a distinct vision of itself,
of its craft, and of what its role should be in society. This vision, transmitted to
employees and others, was reflected in its advertisements, its clients, its studies
of the country, and its earliest organization and staffing.
In May 1929, after opening an office in Buenos Aires, Henry Corwin
Flower Jr. was met at the port of Santos by J. Maxwell Kennard, who had been
sent directly to Brazil to assist in the opening.24 Kennard, the son of a North
Printer’s Ink ( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 208; “J. Walter Thompson Company,”
Fortune, Nov. 1947, 220; and Pierce, Gringo-Gaucho, 37.
22. Henry Flower, interview by Colin Dawkins, Greenwich, Conn., 20 July 1979, 23,
JWTA, CDP, OIS, TSS.
23. U.S. direct investment in Brazil increased from $193,606,000 at the end of 1929
to $240,109,000 at the end of 1940. See U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of
Foreign and Domestic Commerce, American Direct Investments in Foreign Countries, Trade
Information Bulletin, no. 731 ( Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1931), 18; and idem, American
Direct Investments in Foreign Countries ––1940, Economic Series, no. 20 ( Washington, D.C.:
GPO, 1942), 13. On the expansion of U.S. business in Latin America more generally, see
Thomas F. O’Brien’s pioneering The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Latin
America, 1900 –1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), which covers Chile, Peru,
Mexico, Cuba, Honduras, and Nicaragua; and idem, The Century of U.S. Capitalism in Latin
America (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1999), which, in its later chapters,
includes Brazil in a more general discussion of the entire region.
24. The opening was preceded by an initial investigation of market conditions by
William B. Ricketts of JWT-New York. See Ricketts, “What Does South America Offer
the American Advertiser,” The News Bulletin, July 1928, 31– 44, JWTA.

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American diplomat who had served in Rio de Janeiro, was enlisted for his lan-
guage skills. Flower, a banker’s son, had been educated at Harvard and risen
swiftly through the ranks at Thompson. The similarities between the two men
are telling. They were in many ways typical of the newly professionalized
managerial elite of North American advertising executives: they were born to
wealth and privilege, educated at the better schools, and now looked toward
progress abroad, as well as at home.25
São Paulo, which Flower called the “Detroit of South America,” was
selected as the site for the initial unfolding of this progress. This decision was
made primarily because General Motors was based in the city, but was also
influenced by other factors. Flower, like other North American observers, was
impressed that its “people were so much more alive and progressive.” Giving
voice to the dominant racism of the period, he also saw racial admixture in the
rest of the country as an “obstacle to its future development,” but found this to
be less true of the southeastern part of the country, the “real Brazil.”26
The advertising men set up shop in the Edifício Glória on the praça
Ramos de Azevedo and began the process of staffing the new office.27 The
New York organization specified that local employees should have “some busi-
ness experience” and “a point of view in sympathy with American methods and
ideas.”28 As an earlier investigation had suggested, the GM advertising depart-
ment was crucial.29 Its employees, soon to be put out of work by Thompson,
more than fit the description above, some having worked for the automobile
company since 1926. Oscar Fernandes da Silva, a writer for GM’s advertising
department, became JWT’s media chief. Américo Cassoli was brought over
from the advertising department as checker. Another former GM employee,
Henrique Becherini, was retained as a photographer.30 Trained in the program
and practices of North American advertising during their time at General
25. Historian Jackson Lears has written of this group: “They were the sons . . . of the
late-nineteenth-century liberal Protestant elite, and they clung to a secularized version of
their parent’s worldview: a faith in inevitable progress unfolding as if in accordance with
some divine plan.” See Lears, Fables of Abundance, 154.
26. Minutes of Representatives’ Meeting, 20 Aug. 1929, 14 –15, JWTA, Staff Meeting
Minutes (hereafter SMM), box 2, fol. 1.
27. “A Thompson no Brasil,” Propaganda, July 1969, 14.
28. “Organization of a Copy Department” (memorandum), JWTA, JWYP, IBN,
box 1, fol. 1.
29. See Memorandum by Gilbert Kinney, 7 June 1928, JWTA, JWYP, IBN, box 1,
fol. 6.
30. “A Thompson no Brasil,” 14 –15.

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Motors, these men would continue their apprenticeship with Thompson. As

JWT grew over the course of the decade, they would in turn help train others,
eventually forming the basis of a national group of professional advertising
men. “With its tremendous growth,” one Brazilian advertising agent later
wrote, Thompson “was forced to recruit and develop talent at an extremely
quick rate. To do this, [the company] instituted a system of ‘trainees,’ who
were real students of advertising, learning through a practical course of well-
planned stages in every department” of the office.31
Within the JWT organization, however, the top managerial positions
would remain in the hands of North Americans through this period. A histo-
rian of North American advertising has described the staffing and manage-
ment of the foreign offices as follows: “At Mr. Resor’s insistence these outposts
were administered like a colonial empire, staffed by natives but opened and
managed by Thompson men sent out from the U.S.”32
In August, the new office began to place advertisements for General Motors
and Flower returned to the United States. Upon his arrival in New York, he
presented his impressions of South America to a group of Thompson execu-
tives. Despite what he saw as a dismaying amount of racial admixture in Brazil,
Flower still entertained high hopes: “Brazil is the great and powerful country
of Latin America, a great sleeping giant. It is going to be slower — very much
slower — in developing than the Argentine. The Argentine has real advertising
possibilities in the next ten years. Brazil will grow more slowly but there’ll be
no stopping it once it begins.”33 Despite Brazil’s relative lack of “real advertis-
ing possibilities,” the disparity in cost of living between Brazil and Argentina
made Brazil as attractive a market in the short term: “It would be possible for
us to make a great deal more money on $500,000 worth of business in Brazil
than on $1,000,000 in the Argentine because of the difference in living costs in
the two countries. The Argentine is more expensive than the U.S. to live in
and Brazil is much cheaper so on an equal volume of advertising, we might
conceivably make money on one and lose it on the other.”34
Finally, Flower linked JWT’s entry into the Brazilian market to the larger
movement of North American business into the export field generally and
31. Rodolfo Lima Martensen, “O ensino da propaganda no Brasil,” O Estado de S.

Paulo, 20 Dec. 1975, Suplemento Centenário, 4.
32. Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and its Creators
( New York: William Morrow, 1984), 174.
33. Minutes of Representatives’ Meeting, 20 Aug. 1929, 14.
34. Ibid., 16.

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South America specifically. His discussion of business history and empire may
seem crude, and his insistence on the importance of “American brains” dis-
tasteful, but his conception of the status and intent of U.S. business abroad
provides a clear picture of expansionist thought:
To return for a minute to the question of American Imperialism: We
cannot help but realize that our foreign development is passing through
an exceptionally interesting phase. Originally foreign trade was a ques-
tion of barter; next it was founded on the buying and selling of big
importing and exporting companies; then followed the appointment of
local agents or establishment of branch offices. Now we can witness the
growth and development of still another phase: The importation of
American capital and American brains. The market is “opened” by ship-
ping in products from home; it is further developed by a market invest-
ment in the form of advertising and sales activity and then if tariff barri-
ers are thrown up, preparations are begun at once for its local
manufacture.35
While Flower commented on the progress of North American enterprise

in Brazil, Kennard and the new Brazilian staff began searching out clients.
Although the office’s close connections with General Motors would later lead
to boasting among JWT executives, at that time there was a great effort to
lessen the new office’s dependence on the automobile company. Through June
and July, the advertising men courted Frigidaire, Standard Oil, Victor, and
RCA, and managed to secure National City Bank, JWT’s bank in New York
and São Paulo.36 However, the National City Bank account was soon lost and
the other companies declined to place their billings with Thompson. It was
not until September that the company’s luck began to change as Kennard
secured the Brazilian advertising for the International B.F. Goodrich Com-
pany, the U.S. advertising of which was conducted by JWT-New York.37 By
the end of the year, the office, now led by Harold Barton, began advertising
for Blue Star Line Limited of England.38
Through the 1930s, the new office continued to pursue new clients, pro-
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Minutes of Representatives’ Meeting, 10 Sept. 1929, 5, JWTA, SMM, box 2,
fol. 2.
38. See General Reference Client Lists, JWTA, Client Lists Collection, box 6, fol. 2;
and Minutes of Representatives’ Meeting, 19 Mar. 1930, 1, JWTA, SMM, box 2, fol. 3.

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ducing a client roster that suggests certain patterns. Surviving company

records, memoirs of participants, and other sources record a total of 32 clients
through mid-decade.39 Of these companies, 16 were North American and 6
were European; of the remainder, 3 were local distributors of U.S. products or
affiliated with U.S. companies; a fourth was a distributor of Lipton teas.
Brahma and Cimento Mauá were the only major Brazilian companies whose
advertising was handled by Thompson. The preeminence of U.S. multination-
als, many of which, such as Standard Brands and B.F. Goodrich, were clients
of the parent company, was marked. Brazilian clients were most useful in
allowing Thompson to look like a domestic enterprise; as one advertising man
remarked, such clients were pursued because then “we could begin to say . . .
we’re a Brazilian agency.”40
Alongside the pursuit of new clients, the advertising men set about explor-
ing their environment. Extensive studies of marketing and media conditions
were carried out to enable the office to conduct its business and provide infor-
mation to North American advertisers contemplating southward expansion.
The advertising men had a vested interest in finding out as much as possible
about certain aspects of the country, while at the same time these explorations
required reducing the Brazilian experience of the time into words and figures
that fit their worldview.
The advertising men felt fairly comfortable with the cities of São Paulo
and Rio de Janeiro. Initial investigations began with the aim of providing the
office with more information about the rest of the country. The advertising
men were evidently in dire need of it: in September, having been in Brazil for
over three months, Kennard reported that carrying out investigations was a
formidable task “as the area of the country is greater than that of the United
States and Canada combined.”41 The media chief carried out an investigation
39. J. Walter Thompson Company ( New York), “International Advertising” (1935),

microfilm, reel no. 257, 106 – 8, JWTA; Minutes of Representatives’ Meeting, 20 Aug.
1929, 15 –16, Minutes of Representatives’ Meeting, 10 Sept. 1929, 5, Minutes of
Representatives’ Meeting, 19 Mar. 1930, 1, Minutes of Representatives’ Meeting, 5 Aug.
1930, 3, 12, JWTA,SMM, box 2, fol. 5; Minutes of Representatives’ Meeting, 23 Dec.
1930, 8, JWTA, SMM, box 3, fol. 2; General Reference Client Lists; “New Accounts for
Thompson,” Export Advertiser, Sept. 1930, 6; “A Thompson no Brasil,” 15–16; and Reis, “São
Paulo e Rio,” 311–12. These sources provide only an incomplete listing of JWT-Brazil
clients, as surviving documentation does not specify the names of all companies with which
Thompson had dealings. The data gained from these sources nevertheless offers a useful, if
unscientific, sample for JWT’s Brazilian business through the mid-1930s.
40. Flower, interview by Dawkins, Greenwich, Conn., 20 July 1979, 25.
41. The News Letter, 15 Sept. 1929, 4, JWTA.

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of the south (Porto Alegre, Pelotas, and Rio Grande), while his assistant cov-
ered the north of the country. Up to this point the office had relied on the
1920 census and information provided by Julius Klein’s Bureau of Foreign and
Domestic Commerce; with the new information Kennard was convinced that
JWT would be “envied even by the Government.”42 Other investigations
included studies of the concentration of wealth nationwide, of rural and urban
banks, and of population and car ownership. Perhaps the most important
result of the surveys was the acquisition of mailing lists of car registrations,
club memberships, bank customers, and home and property owners. These
lists included almost all potential consumers resident in metropolitan Rio de
Janeiro and São Paulo and a significant sector of the consuming public nation-
wide.43
Media studies were obviously essential for an advertising agency’s new sub-
sidiary. Contacts with São Paulo’s newspapers began in June; by early August,
professional contacts had been made with 80 papers across the country.44 Along
with these contacts, the agency studied the Brazilian media independently,
looking at urban and provincial newspapers and their readers, the geographic
and socioeconomic circulations of these papers, and the state of other media
such as magazines, billboards, car cards, radio, and moving pictures.45
In São Paulo, the advertising men found O Estado de S. Paulo most to their
liking, as it was read “by all the better class people in São Paulo city and the
richer farmers in São Paulo, North Paraná, South Minas and [the] ‘Triangulo
Mineiro.’ ” For the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the advertising men
compiled information on the readership of different publications, cataloging
them by class, age, gender, and lifestyle.46
Investigations were also undertaken at the behest of foreign interests
(mostly North American, but one British) to explore their market potential in
Brazil.47 These investigations are of interest to the historian to the degree to
42. Ibid.
43. JWT, “International Advertising,” 109.
44. The News Letter, 15 Sept. 1929, 3.
46. J. Walter Thompson Company do Brasil, “Investigation Made for Blue Star Line”
(1931), microfilm, reel no. 223, 9 –11, JWTA.
47. See JWT, “International Advertising,” 109 –110, 132; JWT, “Investigation Made
for Blue Star Line”; J. Walter Thompson Company do Brasil, “Investigation of the Face
Cream Market in Brazil,” ( July 1934), microfilm, reel no. 223, JWTA; J. Walter Thompson
Company do Brasil, “Preliminary Report on Royal Baking Powder,” n .d. [1934?],
microfilm, reel no. 223, JWTA; and J. Walter Thompson Company do Brasil,
“Investigation for Lehn and Fink” (May 1931), microfilm, reel no. 223, JWTA.

on 24 January 2018
which they represent the creation of knowledge about areas of Brazilian soci-
ety previously ignored, even, as Kennard pointed out, by the government.
They are striking in their concern with race, class, and gender as benchmarks
of consumption. In these respects, the most important of the surviving investi-
gations is one made for Lehn and Fink, the North American manufacturer of
Lysol disinfectant.
In examining Brazilian society through this investigation, the advertising
men not only came to understand what they saw through their North Ameri-
can experience but also from the point of view of where they were in Brazil;
they interpreted Brazil not only through their own prejudices, liberal world-
view, and the historical experience of the United States but also from the point
of view of members of the paulista bourgeoisie with whom they identified.
The Lehn and Fink investigation confirmed these ties: “social life tends to
establish a fairly close relationship between the foreign families [the immi-
grant elite as well as the expatriate elite to which the advertising men belonged]
and the [elite] nationals. This tendency is naturally more accented in the areas
of greatest population density,” such as São Paulo.48 These ties were more than
merely social, they were also commercial and cultural ties, as the two groups
had a host of interests and attitudes in common.49
When discussing race, the North American advertising men accepted the
myth of “racial democracy,” ruling class (white) Brazil’s image of itself.50
Although they probably would have disagreed privately with the desirability of
racial equality or admixture, the advertising men reported that “whites, blacks,
and mixtures mingle in social life without any restraint,” and that racial inter-
marriage enjoyed “every possible legal encouragement.”51 This acceptance of
the myth of Brazilian racial harmony and equality, the advertising men’s view
of Brazil from São Paulo, and their genuine interest in race in Brazil translated
into printed investigations which equated race and class, dividing the popula-
tion into “whites” (like themselves) and “natives” (the ubiquitous other).52
From the vantage point of São Paulo, the advertising men could discount
48. J. Walter Thompson Company do Brasil, “Investigation for Lehn and Fink,” 4.
49. For a discussion of this affinity, albeit one set outside of this period, see Richard
Tansey, Michael R. Hyman, and George M. Zinkham, “Cultural Themes in Brazilian and
U.S. Auto Ads: A Cross–Cultural Comparison,” Journal of Advertising 19, no. 2 (1990): 34–35.
50. For insightful commentary on Brazilian “racial democracy” during this period, see
George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888 –1988 (Madison: Univ. of
Wisconsin Press, 1991), 16, 129 –135.
51. JWT, “Investigation for Lehn and Fink,” 4 – 5.
52. Ibid., 3 – 4.

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Afro-Brazilians as on the periphery or outside of the consuming public as they

did not, to any real extent, form part of the paulistano middle or upper classes
in this period.53 This is indeed what happened, as blacks—and all nonwhites
—were conspicuously absent from the advertising of the period.
In marked contrast to the status of Afro-Brazilians, both the investigations
and the advertisements that they laid the groundwork for were profoundly
concerned with women, insofar as these women belonged to a class that could
afford to buy the goods and services of modern consumer society. Women
appeared in advertisements and were appealed to in testimonial advertising by
doctors and public figures. They were alternately portrayed as housewives and
mothers, or as society people, depending upon their age and perceived buying
power. Research focused on women as consumers and as potential influences
on their husbands’ behavior. For example, newspapers that were known to be
popular with women were favored for potential advertising, even for goods
and services that demanded decision-making deemed to be outside of women’s
traditional sphere, such as travel to Europe.54
The advertisements themselves were perhaps the most important, and
certainly the most visible, of JWT’s activities. Thompson became the first
company in Brazil to produce and disseminate advertisements for a variety of
products and, through those advertisements, present to its audience a distinct
vision of consumer culture and life.
In the advertising of the 1930s, JWT focused on reaching select sectors of
the Brazilian public. Literacy rates and poverty automatically placed the vast
majority of the population beyond the reach of print or radio. The advertising
men further limited their audience. Advertisements were created to appeal to a
relatively small number of families in the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo metro-
politan areas further divided into two groups: “class A” and “class B.” Adver-
tisements were designed to appeal to these two groups — and men and women
within each group — in distinctly different ways. All of the era’s advertising,
however, shared a common worldview, the liberal developmentalism of the
1920s and 1930s, and a common design, the promotion of a distinctly North
American ideal of modernity and consumer culture, one in which science,
medicine, and technology were unified in the pursuit of efficiency.
The advertising men brought with them a scale for measuring consumer
income. On the basis of “apparent income and standard of living,” people were
placed in classes A, B, C, or D. In Brazil, the classes were broken down as fol-
53. Andrews, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, 126.

54. JWT, “Investigation Made for Blue Star Line,” 11.

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lows: class A made upwards of 24,000 milreis per year, class B over 12,000, class
C over 5,000, and class D under 5,000.55 Industrialists, owners of big commer-
cial houses, large landholders and coffee planters, and the upper reaches of the
liberal professions made up class A, while class B was made up of more mod-
estly prosperous merchants and farmers, other liberal professionals, and upper-
level civil servants.
The advertising men chose to concentrate on classes A and B as “it is
probable that a more satisfactory net profit can be secured by concentrating on
the small, wealthy section of the population.” These two groups were esti-
mated to number 125,000 families in the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo mar-
kets. When opened up to include the states of Minas Gerais, Bahia, Rio
Grande do Sul, Pernambuco, Santa Catarina, Paraná, and Espirito Santo, this
number was raised to 193,244 families, 20 percent of the total number of liter-
ate families. The remainder of the country’s population was excluded from the
marketing of modernity.56
Luxury automobile advertisements clearly reflected the projection of dis-
tinct needs and wants — a distinct consumer culture — onto the elite audiences
targeted as class A. Advertisements for LaSalle touted the automobile’s “Dis-
tinction, Luxury, and Mechanical Perfection.” The 1929 Cadillac Phaeton
Sport was sold on the basis of its “Security and Comfort.” The two cars were
“preferred by people who desire comfort, luxury, and security.”57 A 1935 Buick
advertisement invited the reader to come and see the new Buick, the “best-
selling luxury car,” the interior of which “was notably improved to satisfy peo-
ple of demanding tastes for comfort and elegance.” The text was set off against
a picture of society men and women in top hats and gowns standing by their
cars watching a plane fly overhead in the night sk y. Below the text was a list of
private companies and prominent individuals that had recently purchased
Buick automobiles.58 A similar Buick advertisement announced “the continua-
tion, in 1935, of its elegant style, proven superiority, and prestige.”59
Advertisements for travel and tourism shared this preoccupation with
prestige, leisure, luxury, security, and comfort. Campaigns for Blue Star Lines,
like the campaigns for luxury automobiles, were directed at what the advertis-
ing men called the “smart, wealthy and somewhat snobbish set of Brazilian
55. JWT, “Investigation of the Face Cream Market in Brazil,” unpaginated.

56. JWT, “Investigation for Lehn and Fink,” 4, 8 – 9, 17, 25.
57. O Estado de S. Paulo, 7 Aug. 1929, 7; and 21 Aug. 1929, 7.
58. Buick advertisement in O Estado de S. Paulo, 24 Mar. 1935, 5.
59. O Estado de S. Paulo, 10 May 1935, 5.

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society,” inviting them to participate in the lifestyle of the European and

North American rich. This sector of the population was appealed to through
advertisements in the leading “better class” periodicals of the cities of Rio de
Janeiro, São Paulo, and Santos.60 Blue Star Line’s first São Paulo campaign
began with an advertisement, the main caption of which read, “Travel . . .
without leaving behind the comfort/environment [ambiente] which you are
accustomed to.” Photographs of the ships’ cabins and sitting room were
framed by the text below:
The “elite,” for whom luxury and comfort are a habit, for whom the
company of people of the same means is indispensable, choose for their
travels a steamship, which provides them with this same ambiente in
which they are accustomed to live. Pleasant hours of rest in a deck-chair!
. . . The comfort of a cabin made for the most refined tastes . . . Good
music . . . Good company . . . Impeccable service . . . The ships of the
Blue Star Line are exclusively for the people of culture and of the social
“elite.” 61
This marketing of “class” as an integral part of “comfort, service, and

security” appeared regularly in Blue Star Line advertisements, both for busi-
ness and recreational travel. One such advertisement offered class A audiences
the opportunity to “Choose your traveling companions”:
The people with whom you associate — that you find at the country
club, at the Jockey Club, at the Municipal Club, people of culture,
well-traveled, interesting — are without a doubt the ideal companions for
a cruise, whether it be for pleasure, or for business. For a cruise to be as
pleasurable as possible, it is not only important that your fellow travelers
be of the same rank [meio] and have the same tastes and habits. It’s
indispensable that you have the comfort, luxury and the service to which
you are accustomed. Blue Star Line is the line chosen by the “elite” of all
countries for their cruises.62
Advertisements for nonluxury automobiles also illustrate many of the

most important themes directed at the second tier of audiences, although
many class B consumers probably could not afford to buy automobiles. Pres-
60. JWT, “Investigation Made for Blue Star Line,” 5 –11, 18.
61. Advertisement in O Estado de S. Paulo, 5 Jan. 1930, 7.
62. Advertisement in O Estado de S. Paulo, 19 Jan. 1930, 9.

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tige was still used as an important draw by advertisers, but it was of a different
sort. For example, the 1929 Chevrolet was the “Mirror of your personality,”
and would “Impress your friends” and “fill you with pride.”63 More often,
advertisements for Chevrolet relied on an appeal to emulation of luxury cars
and luxury car owners. A front-page advertisement in O Estado de S. Paulo listed
the improvements of the new model, improvements that gave it “all of the
characteristics of a high-priced car.” A drawing detailed the inside of the car,
the “quintessence of good taste and comfort.”64 Five years later, another front-
page advertisement announced the arrival of the 1936 model, the “only fully
loaded car in the low-price class,” a car “made to provide a new comfort never
before seen in a car of its class.”65
The appeal was not necessarily comfort or luxury, but the idea of luxury as
prestige, now within the reach of the less wealthy for a “moderate down pay-
ment” through the importation of automobile financing. Nowhere was this
more evident than in testimonial advertising, the power of which had been
noticed early by the advertising men.66 Testimonial advertising played on the
perceived emulation of class A consumers by class B audiences. A Chevrolet
advertising campaign that ran in 1934 featured testimonials from famous
liberal professionals, industrialists, and society people along with discreet
reminders of the GM financing plan.67 One such advertisement featured
industrialist Raul Crespi: “Few opinions of the 1934 Chevrolet could be more
valid than those given by Sr. Conde Raul Crespi. A large industrialist of
national renown and a person of importance in the social circles of São Paulo
— as well as a dedicated sportsman — his comments on the acção de joelho of the
new Chevrolets are very significant.”68
Although automobile advertisements directed at class B audiences did
offer them luxury comparable to that enjoyed by their social betters, they did
not sell leisure in the same way as advertisements for the higher end automo-
biles. Neither was there an advertiser comparable to Blue Star Line, in terms
of advertising leisure activity outside of the home. Instead, those members of
class B that could afford it were offered the opportunity to spend more time
63. Advertisement in O Estado de S. Paulo, 9 Nov. 1929, 7.

64. O Estado de S. Paulo, 25 Sept. 1930, 1.
65. O Estado de S. Paulo, 14 Dec. 1935, 1.
66. See “Policies Regarding Repetition of Advertising” (memorandum), 6 Apr. 1931,
JWTA, JWYP, IBN, box 1, fol. 5.
67. See, for example, Chevrolet advertisements in O Estado de S. Paulo, 1 July 1934,
3; 22 July 1934, 3; 12 Aug. 1934, 5; and 2 Sept. 1934, 5.
68. O Estado de S. Paulo, 22 July 1934, 3.

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within the home. One such advertisement called for the reader to “Enjoy
more of your family’s company, at home, leaving later and getting home
sooner. And put an end to the inconveniences of streetcars and buses! It would
be easy, if you had an affordable car like the new Opel. Owning an Opel is a
pleasure that’s within your grasp these days.”69
Automobile advertisements clearly touched on the issues of thrift and effi-
ciency that dominated so many appeals aimed at middle-sector groups. Prices
figured much more prominently in advertisements for Chevrolets or Opels
than for Cadillacs, LaSalles, or Buicks, where prices were rarely listed. Chev-
rolet dealers offered test-drives so that potential customers could see the auto-
mobile’s “perfect performance and low maintenance costs” for themselves.70
Testimonial advertisements called the readers’ attention to the economy and
savings of the Chevrolet.71
Other advertisements aimed at class B audiences had similar themes, no
doubt influenced by the economic environment of the era. A 1932 Sul America
advertisement offered the fable of the ant and the cricket. The ant was a “pre-
cious symbol of foresight and diligence. He struggles and works, full of confi-
dence in a future of peace, love, joy.” The cricket, on the other hand, was a
“lazy bohemian who sang, played, and danced, careless as a child, without
thinking of the uncertain future.” With the end of the fable, the reader was
urged to think of the future to ensure the success of the ant.72 Not only did the
fable push the product (life insurance), it also assured the well-off reader that
poverty was the result of sloth and carelessness, just as prosperity was the
result of hard work and foresight, a comfortable position for the desired audi-
ence.
Distinctly different appeals were also made to class A and class B female
audiences. In large part, differences in appeals were based on the particular
experiences of the two groups as perceived by the advertising men. For exam-
ple, investigations revealed that class B women did their own housework and
gardening, and were more likely to work outside of the home, whereas class A
women usually did not work, inside or outside of the home. Class A women
were likely to drive, whereas class B women were not. The “wealthier classes”
69. O Estado de S. Paulo, 30 Aug. 1933, 8.

70. See, for example, Chevrolet newspaper advertisements ( Jan. and Apr. 1931),
microfilm, reel no. 41, JWTA.
71. O Estado de S. Paulo, 29 Jan. 1935, 5.
72. O Estado de S. Paulo, 5 June 1932, 5. Brian P. Owensby discusses similar Sul
America advertisements in his recent Intimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-
Class Lives in Brazil (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999), 92 – 94.

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traveled abroad and “most Brazilian women [of class A] were educated in
France,” while the “poorer classes” (classes B and C) did their own house-
work.73 Advertising directed at class A audiences emphasized recreation and
leisure; women were appealed to as society people and offered products not
offered to class B audiences. Advertisements directed at class B women
appealed to woman as wife and mother, as the purchasing agent of the house-
hold. Luxury was more often than not offered in escapist terms of emulation,
in products that promised to make them as perfect as the North American
starlets featured in the advertisements.
Advertisements directed at the wealthiest of women featured themes
markedly similar to those directed at men of the same position. Class A
women were offered luxury automobiles like the LaSalle. One such advertise-
ment centered on a picture of a woman smiling at the reader from behind the
wheel of an automobile. Above the picture was a line drawing of a woman in a
long dress riding a bicycle and the slogan “Other times, other ways.”74 Auto-
matic transmission was marketed directly at women; the “starterator” was a
“radical solution” to stalling out in traffic. Woman’s commercial liberation as
modernity was touted as a means of selling automobiles as the text of the
advertisement continued on to offer elegance and comfort.75
A distinct model of motherhood, one that included servants and nannies,
predominated in advertising directed at class A women. A 1935 Blue Star Line
advertisement strategically placed next to O Estado de S. Paulo’s society column
brought the ships’ “Beautiful ‘Playroom’ ” to the reader’s attention. The text
read: “Blue Star Line remembered Mother and Father. Completely remod-
eled, its ships now have ample ‘playrooms,’ perfectly ventilated and especially
equipped for children to play in. The little ones stay here under the care of
skillful governesses. And the parents can now dedicate themselves to the ships’
diversions, confident in the protection that the Stars give their children.”76
Class B women were offered a distinctly different model of life in the
advertisements of the period. Advertisements for Refinazil’s Maizena Duryea,
a cornstarch, and for Royal Baking Powder offered their products to “good
housewives” (as boas donas de casa).77 The kitchen was to be modernized — and
73. JWT, “Investigation for Lehn and Fink,” 5, 16.

74. O Estado de S. Paulo, 9 Dec. 1934, 3.
75. O Estado de S. Paulo, 12 Feb. 1933, 5.
77. Maizena advertisement, microfilm, reel no. 41, JWTA; and Royal Baking Powder
advertisement in O Estado de S. Paulo, 26 Nov. 1932, 5.

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standardized — along North American lines as Brazilian women were offered

the same products as 100,000,000 other housewives.78 Advertisers tried to
instill fear in housewives, insisting that certain products be used for the sake of
their children.79 “Feminine pride” (o orgulho femenino) was to be had with the
use of Royal Baking Powder: “Every housewife is proud to serve a variety of
appetizing dishes. Her pride is satisfied when guests enthusiastically exclaim,
‘What delicious pudding! What perfect dessert!’ . . . And then they’ll ask for
the recipe.” The secret was simple: “It’s easy to get these accolades using Royal
Baking Powder. Its success is guaranteed and it will save you expensive ingre-
dients.”80
Advertisements that promised the magical transformation of appearance
and enhanced appeal through the use of certain products were also directed at
class B women. These advertisements beckoned to Brazilian women to join in
the latest fashions of the United States and Europe. Northam Warren invited
Brazilian women of means to “Be in Style” by using Cutex nail polish and lip-
stick of the same color.81 The offer of personal transformation and bliss came
as advertisers offered female readers the opportunity to “Make this moment
unforgettable.”82 Advertisements for Lever soap —“the soap of the stars”—
were based around the testimonials of Hollywood starlets like Barbara Stan-
wyk, Kay Francis, Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, and Carole Lombard.83 Using
the testimonials as a springboard, the advertisements promised the transfor-
mation of appearance through the use of the soap: “In Hollywood, the irre-
sistible starlets use Lever, the soap known and respected worldwide for con-
serving the smoothness of the skin.” The advertisement continued: “Assure
yourself of this captivating charm! Make your skin perfect and radiant with
beauty like those stunning faces of the screen. It’s so easy! Do as the stars do
and take care of your skin with pure and fragrant Lever soap, which has con-
quered the world and guarantees you the charms of your favorite actress.”84
Some products and advertisements were aimed at both audiences, class A
and B, and at men and women within each group. Yeast, cornstarch, and beer
78. Royal baking powder advertisement in O Estado de S. Paulo, 24 Feb. 1933, 5.

79. Johnson and Johnson advertisement, O Estado de S. Paulo, 14 Dec. 1934, 2; and
Maizena advertisement, O Estado de S. Paulo, 6 Apr. 1933, 4.
80. O Estado de S. Paulo, 12 Nov. 1932, 5.
81. O Estado de S. Paulo, 20 Sept. 1935, 4.
82. Coty advertisement in O Estado de S. Paulo, 14 Dec. 1935, 5.
83. See Lever advertisements in O Estado de S. Paulo: 7 June 1935, p. 4; 28 June 1935,
5; 12 July 1935, 5; 26 July 1935, 5; 9 Aug. 1935, 5.
84. O Estado de S. Paulo, 7 June 1935, 4.

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were endowed with powers that gave any user new strength and vigor. Kodak
cameras advertised during this period were within the reach of either intended
audience. More important, however, were the messages of certain advertise-
ments directed at anyone who read the newspapers. In the 1920s in the United
States, advertising assumed the role of selling “belief in the business and the
business itself.”85 JWT-Brazil, emerging from the same intellectual milieu,
could not but do the same. But while in the United States this ideological proj-
ect belonged to a domestic professional-managerial block that included impor-
tant sectors of industry, government, and the professions, in Brazil JWT’s
advertising represented a small clique of a few foreign corporations and even
fewer domestic advertisers. In the case of multinational corporations, the
problem was not only to sell the idea of business but also to sell the idea of for-
eign business.
This concern is reflected in JWT’s earliest advertisements. Within a week
of the São Paulo office placing General Motors advertisements, an advertise-
ment based around an exaggerated rendering of the domestic assembly system
was featured in O Estado de S. Paulo. “Only those products that Brazil does not
produce are imported from the United States,” the advertisement proclaimed,
before pointing out domestic assembly’s “innumerable advantages” to the
Brazilian consumer.86
As advertising campaigns proceeded, they became increasingly concerned
with appealing to the local pride of paulistas and portraying GM as a valuable
agent of modernization and commerce. One early advertisement proclaimed
“For the progress of São Paulo” next to the city crest and above a photograph
of a fleet of Chevrolet trucks used by the city’s paving service. The text extolled
the “meaningful badge of the Prefeitura of a city whose progress is one of
Brazil’s greatest glories,” linking GM with that progress through the paving ser-
vices’ use of Chevrolet trucks.87 A week later, another advertisement sold the
importance of the trucks in bringing produce from the interior into the markets
of the city with a caption that read: “For the provisioning of São Paulo.”88 Dur-
ing the 1932 Constitutionalist rebellion, JWT ran advertisements for Nestlé’s
Leite Moça with the slogan “Send a can as a gift to the soldiers.”89
85. “Advertising Promotes Economic Peace,” Printer’s Ink, 31 Dec. 1925, 143.
87. O Estado de S. Paulo, 19 Jan. 1930, 5.
88. O Estado de S. Paulo, 21 Feb. 1930, 5.
89. O Estado de S. Paulo, 5 Aug. 1932, 5. See also Nestlé’s newspaper advertisement
(18 Aug. 1932), microfilm, reel no. 41, JWTA. An advertisement from this campaign is
reprinted in Maria Helena Capelato, O movimento de 1932: A causa paulista (São Paulo: Ed.
Brasiliense, 1981), 81.

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The use of local and national linkages and the fashioning of unique
appeals to be directed at different sectors of the population characterized
much of the advertising of the period. The dominant theme of the period’s
advertising, however, clear in many of the examples cited above, was an ideal-
ized vision of efficiency to be attained through the triumph of medicine, sci-
ence, and technology over nature. The advertising men strove to link their
appeals and the advertisers’ products to an often semimystified science. These
advertisements were not only selling consumer products, they were also selling
a secular doctrine of mass efficiency, both as modernizing concept and way of
life. In the pursuit of modernity along North American lines, efficient and
rational progress was to be extended into the workplace, the home, and even
the body.
Once again, automobile and auto-related advertisements epitomize this
dominant theme in the advertising of the 1930s. Two advertisements, one for
the Buick-Marquette and the other for Atlantic Motor Oil, illustrate this ten-
dency: the automobile’s efficiency was “proven” by laborious testing and the
gasoline was so efficient that it burned to the last molecule.90 In advertise-
ments for commercial vehicles the doctrine of efficiency was even more marked;
newspaper advertisements for GMC and Chevrolet trucks constantly featured
the words economia, econômico, and economisar, not only to sell the products’ low
cost but also to appeal to efficiency and reason. The Chevrolet truck was
touted as the symbolo da economia for both its “minimal cost” and its “maximum
mechanical perfection.”91 Economia also became synonymous with financial and
fuel efficiency. Advertisements for GMC trucks promised the customer that
the truck would save (lhe economisará) enough to make up for the cost.92
Another Chevrolet advertisement combined the ideal of economia/efficiency
with the triumph of science and technology over nature: the text claimed that
the truck had the “Power to haul a full load on rough terrain, speed and, there-
fore savings/efficiency of time [economia de tempo], easy handling, minimal
expense, and the most recent improvements.” The truck’s ability to haul on all
terrain represented a victory over the vagaries of nature; speed and low cost
represented economia; and the most recent improvements represented the pin-
nacle of the modern.93
90. Buick advertisement (late 1929) and Atlantic advertisement (13 Feb. 1931),
microfilm, reel no. 41, JWTA.
91. Chevrolet advertisement (1 Nov. 1930), microfilm, reel no. 41, JWTA.
92. GMC advertisement (mid-1930), microfilm, reel no. 41, JWTA.
93. Chevrolet advertisement (20 Mar. 1930), microfilm, reel no. 41, JWTA.

on 24 January 2018
The pursuit of efficiency was by no means limited to mechanical prod-

ucts. In advertisements for Refinazil animal feed, texts addressed the potential
customer draped in science and appealing to reason. A “set percentage of pro-
tein” in the feed was the “secret that produces the desired result, that is,
greater production of milk,” which meant “larger capital returns, [and] a
greater profit.” Another advertisement claimed that the product was so potent
that it could be more efficient at lower levels than other feeds on the market.94
Efficiency also worked its way into the home. As in the United States, the
house was to increasingly resemble a factory through the introduction of sci-
entific management. Standard Brands’ Royal Baking Powder was character-
ized as the most “healthy and nutritious” and “[s]implifies your work, elimi-
nates worries, and doesn’t fall short.”95 In preparation and consumption, the
product was to produce the best possible results at the lowest expenditure of
effort, in the same way as Atlantic Motor Oil or Refinazil animal feed.
Advertisements also offered the regeneration or perfection of the individ-
ual. Personal efficiency, in both diet and hygiene, were to improve life in a
variety of ways, frequently draped in the pseudo-science found in advertising
in the United States during this period. Nestlé’s Leite Moça was described as a
“precious reserve of energies.”96 In making appeals like these, the advertising
men often counted on the collusion of medical professionals. Maizena Duryea,
for example, was endorsed by Dr. Aresk y Amorim, who declared “Maizena is
part of my daily prescriptions” and praised its “notable energetic power.”97
Maizena and products like it were possessed of powers that would drastically
improve people’s lives. Fleischmann’s Yeast would deliver people from an
invented condition (“intestinal fatigue”), making people’s lives fruitful and
their days efficient. In one advertisement, an anonymous speaker confessed, “I
suffered headaches, lack of appetite and lethargy caused by intestinal fatigue.
Today I live in great spirits.” The speaker attributed his new energy to Fleisch-
mann’s tablets and invited the audience to “start to enjoy life today” as a “new
man, with a great disposition.”98 In promoting this “new man,” the advertising
men were also hawking a new efficiency that promised to improve life by
defeating an invented vagary of nature (intestinal fatigue), allowing men and
women to work at a new and youthful pace.
94. O Estado de S. Paulo, 16 Jan. 1931, 5; and Refinazil newspaper advertisements ( Jan.
and Mar. 1931), microfilm, reel no. 41, JWTA.
95. Royal Baking Powder advertisement (n.d.), microfilm, reel no. 41, JWTA.
97. Maizena advertisement (Aug. 1932), microfilm, reel no. 41, JWTA.
98. Fleischmann advertisement (Mar. 1934), microfilm, reel no. 41, JWTA.

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Advertising in Brazil in the 1930s and After
By the end of the decade, the advertising men had produced and placed thou-
sands of advertisements. The staff of the São Paulo office had grown to 25,
while the Rio de Janeiro suboffice, opened in 1931, now had 10 employees.99
Many others had worked at JWT and taken their training to the newly opened
local branches of other U.S. advertising agencies or gone on to found their
own agencies. The JWT client pool had grown to include other multinational
corporations and, to a lesser extent, national advertisers, lessening Thompson’s
dependence on General Motors and providing the company with a Brazilian
veneer. Looking back from 1935, the parent company in New York could
make the following claims: “The São Paulo office is equipped to carry out full
agency functions. In this respect and as regards experience and resources, the
office is better situated than any other agency in Brazil. In spite of continuous
economic instability and repeated political upheavals in Brazil, the Company
has made excellent progress in winning the confidence of local advertisers on
the basis of actual results obtained.”100
During this period, JWT’s advertisements were seen by at least 90,000
people per day during the week and 105,000 per day on Sundays in O Estado de
S. Paulo alone.101 In addition to Portuguese-language advertising in scores of
newspapers, the São Paulo office set advertisements in German and Italian,
while Japanese-Brazilian publishers set advertisements in their mother tongue.
The newspapers of the Anglo-American expatriate communities of Rio de
Janeiro and São Paulo also ran Thompson advertisements.102
The significance of JWT’s success was not lost on contemporary
observers. Thompson’s role in the expansion of advertising in Brazil, and the
degree to which this expansion formed part of a larger cultural and economic
advance on the part of North American interests, was made clear by the U.S.
Trade Commissioner in Rio de Janeiro:
Brazil affords a fertile field for intelligent advertising, and it may be said
that American products sold in Brazil have benefited to the greatest
extent from this almost indispensable aid to merchandising. The present
era in advertising in Brazil had its inception a decade ago, coincidental
with the expansion of imports of American specialties and the subsequent
99. Robert F. Merrick, untitled article, Propaganda, July 1969, 39.

101. Circulation figures can be found in Joseph L. Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian
Federation, 1889 –1937 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1980), 91.

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appearance of the first branch of an American agency, which introduced

modern technique in a field which had, up to that time, been devoid of
any appreciable development.103
With Thompson serving GM in Brazil, the Ford Motor Company was

forced to import its own advertising agency. At the behest of Ford, N. W. Ayer
& Son opened a São Paulo office in 1931, an office similar to Thompson’s in
that it was headed by a North American but staffed with Brazilian veterans of
GM and JWT. Advertising men such as Oscar Fernandes da Silva, JWT’s first
Brazilian employee, soon found work with the new subsidiary.104
Ayer was especially important in the expansion of radio advertising. Ayer
clients Ford and Gessy sponsored radio dramas (novelas), as well as news and
music, on stations such as Radio Cultura and Radio Record of São Paulo, and
Marink Veiga of Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian entertainers, including Carmen
Miranda, Francisco Alves, and Mário Reis, were put on the Ayer payroll as
early as 1933 and 1934.105 Ayer also expanded market surveys of the country,
the most impressive of which was carried out for the National Department of
Coffee. This survey, the first to gauge personal preference and consumer
habits on a national level, reached 12,000 consumers and 3,000 retailers in 19
states.106 Following the survey, the office produced advertisements featuring
the testimony of North American scientists, doctors, athletes, and trainers,
touting the “Beneficial effects of coffee on man’s health and well-being.”107
For Ford, the new office placed advertisements comparing the luxury-
class Lincoln-Zephyr to an ocean liner and urging Brazilians to “Travel in the
modern style.”108 Advertisements for General Electric brought a host of prod-
103. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce,

Advertising in Brazil, Trade Information Bulletin, no. 838 ( Washington, D.C.: GPO,
1937), 1.
104. Ralph M. Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency: N. W. Ayer & Son at Work,
1869 –1949, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949), 141– 44; and Ramos, História
da propaganda, 43.
105. Ramos, História da propaganda, 38, 43; and Carlos Roberto F. Chueiri, “E, no
princípio, era a verba” in Castelo Branco, Martensen, and Reis, História da propaganda no
Brasil, 269.
106. Ramos, História da propaganda, 43; and Octavio da Costa Eduardo, “O
desenvolvimento da pesquisa de propaganda no Brasil,” in Castelo Branco, Martensen, and
Reis, História da propaganda no Brasil, 99.
107. See, for example, O Estado de S. Paulo, 1 Jan. 1935, 20.
108. Lincoln-Zephyr proofsheet, N. W. Ayer Collection (hereafter NWAC), Archive
Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., box 224, fol. 1.

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ucts to the attention of Brazilian readers. Proper light was not only “the light
of your eyes,” it was also a means for attracting (female) shoppers into a store
or exacting the maximum efficiency from (male) workers. Just as General
Motors promised a car “for every purse and purpose,” GE made refrigerators
“for every need and home.” Other Ayer-advertised consumer products included
hot water heaters, electric clocks, sewing machines, electric stoves, light bulbs,
radios, and lamps.109
McCann-Erickson also entered the Brazilian market during this period,
opening an office in 1935 to serve Standard Oil. It became the first North Amer-
ican agency to be headed by a Brazilian, Armando de Moraes Sarmento, who
had worked for Ayer and founded his own company before joining McCann.110
Perhaps the most obvious result of the growth of JWT and these other
companies was the slow but significant increase in advertising space and
sophistication. Photography became an increasingly important element of
print advertising.111 As Thompson and other North American agencies began
to place more and more advertisements of better quality, unrelated companies
began to advertise and established advertisers improved the appearance of
existing campaigns. On 21 March 1931, an advertisement for the new Buick
covered the entire front page of O Estado de S. Paulo. Similar cover advertise-
ments for the new Chevrolets ran the following month.112 A full-page cover
advertisement by a national advertiser appeared three months later.113 With
the premiere of King Kong in 1933, cinema announcements moved from the
back of newspapers to the front, where an advertisement heralded “The great-
est film of the century!”114
As advertisements proliferated, with a commensurate rise in advertising
revenue during a period of economic depression, newspapers could not but
have become more dependent upon advertisers. O Estado de S. Paulo began
advertising for advertisers: “As everyone’s paper, in the home and office, it is
for this reason the ideal newspaper for advertising. . . . Try placing your adver-
tising in this newspaper and see the results.”115 At the time, advertising made
109. See General Electric proofsheets, NWAC, box 242, fol. 1– 2.

111. For JWT’s role in the growing use of photography rather than line drawing in
advertising, see Reis, “São Paulo e Rio,” 311; and “A Thompson no Brasil,” 15 –16.
112. See Chevrolet newspaper advertisements, O Estado de S. Paulo, 3 Apr. 1931, 7 Apr.
1931.
113. O Estado de S. Paulo, 19 July 1931.
114. O Estado de S. Paulo, 28 May 1933.
115. O Estado de S. Paulo, 12 Apr. 1935, 10.

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up an estimated 35 to 45 percent of total space in Brazil’s ten leading daily

newspapers. This advertising revenue was overwhelmingly North American:
64 percent of all advertising space in the country’s leading newspapers and
magazines was devoted to products from the United States.116 The needs of
these advertisers became a larger and larger concern for newspaper editorial
boards. As one observer remarked, the spread of North American advertising
led to a situation wherein “newspapers, magazines, and other published media
have found it necessary to improve their physical make-up and general appear-
ance in order to meet the more exacting requirements of advertisers.”117
Glossy magazines like O Cruzeiro (“the magazine that accompanies the rhythm
of modern life”) proved receptive to the appeals of advertisers, creating “copy
and images [that] reflected the lifestyle of modernly prosperous . . . middle-
class families enjoying the fruits of a consumer society.”118 At the same time,
media studies such as those carried out by JWT enabled advertising agencies
and advertisers to choose which newspapers to advertise in; eventually this led
to a situation wherein media outlets had to monitor their coverage to appeal to
certain advertisers.119 As the 1930s went on, the circulation of metropolitan
newspapers expanded outward from cities like São Paulo and into the interior
with the expansion of roads, bringing more and more Brazilians into contact
with North American advertising’s efficient and rational visions of the good
life.120
The growth of newspaper circulations, however, paled in comparison with
the expansion of a new advertising medium, radio. São Paulo’s first radio sta-
tion was founded in 1924. By 1937, the state claimed 28 of Brazil’s 63 radio
stations. The expansion and diversification of radio stations coincided with the
spread of radio sets from an estimated 190,000 in the entire country in 1931 to
between 150,000 and 192,000 in the greater São Paulo area alone by 1937.121
116. U.S. Department of Commerce, Advertising in Brazil, 10, 17.

117. Ibid., 1.
118. Owensby, Intimate Ironies, 111.
119. For a discussion of this situation, albeit one set almost 30 years later, see
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “Associated-Dependent Development,” in Authoritarian
Brazil: Origins, Policies, and Future, ed. Alfred Stephan ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1973), 144, 146.
120. U.S. Department of Commerce, Advertising in Brazil, 12 –13.
121. Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 92; U.S. Department of Commerce,
Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Broadcast Advertising in Latin America, Trade
Information Bulletin, no. 771 ( Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1931), 30; and U.S. Department
of Commerce, Advertising in Brazil, 4.

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During the same period, the amount of radio advertising increased dramati-
cally as well. In 1931 only one North American automobile company was
advertising on the radio. By 1937 Brazilian radio was being used to advertise
several North American automobile lines, as well as North American refriger-
ators, petroleum products, and even radio sets themselves.122 The spread of
radio meant the dissemination of North American broadcast advertising not
only to the elite audiences targeted by advertisers but also into regions and
homes overlooked as potential markets. Indeed, as one researcher pointed out
while reflecting on JWT’s growth from the 1930s through the 1950s, the
spread of advertising stimulated the expansion of all media: “In countries like
Brazil, which in those years did not possess a press, radio, or television of
national scale, the advertising network laid the foundations for the integration
of the market.”123
By the end of this period, the North American trade commissioner could
claim that due to the influence of North American advertising agencies the
Brazilian consumer “has been educated to expect attractive and original adver-
tising, and his buying habits are influenced accordingly.”124 Later Brazilian cri-
tiques would also focus on the consumer and claim that North American
advertising had fundamentally reshaped the population’s mentality.125 The his-
torian must be more circumspect in looking at the reception of advertising.
First of all, despite the impressive growth of radio, the bulk of the advertising
produced during this period was in print, which automatically limited its
appeals to the literate, only 35 percent of the population of São Paulo state in
1937, according to one estimate.126 Second, to fall back upon a model of pas-
sive acceptance of North American consumer values by Brazilian audiences is
to stamp a wide sector of the population as hapless receptors of North Ameri-
can commercial designs, allowing for no dissent within consumer culture. At
the same time, however, one cannot overlook the fact that the idea behind
advertising and related forms of merchandising, that of hoisting new wants
122. U.S. Department of Commerce, Broadcast Advertising in Latin America, 10; and
U.S. Department of Commerce, Advertising in Brazil, 29 – 30.
123. Armand Mattelart, Advertising International: The Privatization of Public Space, trans.
Michael Chanan ( New York: Routledge, 1991), 4.
124. U.S. Department of Commerce, Advertising in Brazil, 1.
125. See, for example, Claudio de Arauju Lima, Imperialismo e angústia: Ensaio sôbre as
bases de uma sócio-psiquiatria da classe média brasileira na era imperialista (Rio de Janeiro:
Civilização Brasileira, 1960).
126. U.S. Department of Commerce, Advertising in Brazil, 5.

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onto unthinking audiences, is fundamentally undemocratic, as historians of

consumer culture in the United States have pointed out.127
Clearly, the group of Brazilians most affected by the apparatus of North
American advertising were those in closest contact with it, the men that were
hired and trained by JWT, the North American agencies that followed, and
the advertising departments of other U.S. firms — new professionals who
absorbed the dominant North American modalities along with the methods of
the trade. These men formed the basis of an emergent professional-managerial
elite in Brazil, with their own institutions and agencies.
The formation of this professional-managerial elite began with the train-
ing of “experts” along North American lines. A member of GM’s advertising
department later wrote: “Advertising made greater progress in the decade
1929 –1939 than in the previous hundred years. Specialists were created, writ-
ers emerged. . . . There emerged as well the designers, the ‘layout-men,’ the
‘mediamen’— all types of experts, created by this new business . . . Advertis-
ing.”128 Thompson played a preeminent role in this process, forming “the
largest center [for the] training of advertising . . . before the opening of any
advertising school.” As a result of this success, JWT’s “trainee” system was
adopted by all the larger agencies.129
The new professionals subsequently founded their own institutions to
promote their trade and consolidate their expert status. Trade organizations
were founded along the lines of the ( North) American Association of Advertis-
ing Agents. In July 1937, a committee that included alumni of both Ayer and
Thompson founded the Brazilian Advertising Association (ABP) in Rio de
Janeiro.130 Among ABP’s central tasks was the promotion of advertising, “to
spread the idea that advertising is not an expense, but rather fosters the
progress and prosperity of the country.”131 In September 1937, JWT employ-
ees were among the founders of the São Paulo Advertising Association (APP).
In December of the same year, the new professionals celebrated the first
national Advertising Day. The following year, the first national advertising
conference was held.132
127. See William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New
American Culture ( New York: Vintage, 1993); and Lears, Fables of Abundance, pt. 2.
128. Propaganda, Apr. 1944, quoted in Reis, “São Paulo e Rio,” 309.
129. Martensen, “O ensino da propaganda no Brasil,” O Estado de S. Paulo, 20 Dec.
1975, Suplemento Centenário, 4.
130. Ramos, História da propaganda, 40; and Angelo, “A longa jornada,” 26, 29.
131. Ibid., 26.
132. Ibid., 26 – 29; and Ramos, História da propaganda, 40.

on 24 January 2018
The Brazilian advertising men also began publishing their own periodi-
cals. In 1932 Propaganda was founded in Rio de Janeiro as a four-page tabloid.
Although it did not last, the marketing of the tabloid offers insight into how
this professional-managerial elite was beginning to think about itself and
the modernity brought from abroad. The founder, Ivo Arruda, published
Propaganda under the pseudonym Pete Nelson, later explaining that “At that
time, [the perception was] that there were not any Brazilian ‘experts’ and I
thought that no one would believe the proclamations made by any paper, if
that paper was not headed by a foreigner. From this came the birth of this Pete
Nelson, who put on airs of a North American.”133 The nascent managerial
elite, heirs to a North American cultural project, demanded U.S. prestige.
A more successful magazine by the same name was published beginning in
1937 by an editorial team that included Thompson, GM, and Ayer alumni.
In 1940 Publicidade was founded in Rio de Janeiro. Renamed PN in 1947, it
would become the most successful trade publication of the immediate postwar
era.134
Alongside the founding of trade associations and specialized publications,
some of the new professionals left the North American subsidiaries and
opened their own businesses, eager to capitalize on their expertise and spread
the ideals they had embraced under North American tutelage. One such
advertising man entitled a short reminiscence of this period, “The Foreign
Agencies Brought Modernity, the National Ones Learned Quickly.”135 In 1930
Francisco Teixeira Orlandi and Aldo Xavier da Silva, both formerly of the GM
advertising department, founded the Emprêsa Nacional de Propaganda, which
Orlandi proudly called the “first Brazilian agency to employ American meth-
ods.” The company failed due to a lack of capital, however, and the two men
went to work for Ayer.136
Columbia University-educated Cícero Leuenroth was more successful. In
1933, he founded his own agency, taking the name “Standard” because of the
prestige of a North American name among advertisers and publishers.137 In
133. Quoted in Fernando Reis, “Sobre o colunismo publicitário e as publicações

especializadas,” in Castelo Branco, Martensen, and Reis, História da propaganda no Brasil,
63 – 64.
134. Ibid., 64.
135. Armando de Moraes Sarmento, “As agencias estrangeiras trouxeram
modernidade, as nacionais aprenderam depressa,” in Castelo Branco, Martensen, and Reis,
História da propaganda no Brasil, 20 – 24.
137. Ibid., 40; and Reis, “Sobre o colunismo publicitário,” 63.

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the 1960s, Standard would emerge as one of the national advertising agencies
that would begin to displace the North American agencies that had trained
their founders.
Another such agency was Inter-Americana, founded in Rio de Janeiro in
1929 as Armando D’Almeida Publicidade. Founder Armando D’Almeida had
worked for the General Electric advertising department before founding his
own agency, which provided local representation for Foreign Advertising and
Service Bureau, a small New York export agency. Described by one author as
an “unconditional admirer of matters and institutions North American, to
which he was always connected,” D’Almeida, along with JWT, did propaganda
work for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs during
World War Two.138 A 1940 article subtitled “Advertising and National Devel-
opment” outlined the philosophy of the agency, renamed Inter-Americana in
1938: advertising was to “create needs, awaken desires, understand, deepen,
exploit, and consolidate markets” in order to “create new habits” and “stimu-
late the demand for comfort and civilization,” thereby contributing to Brazil-
ian development.139
While Inter-Americana and Standard were the most visible and successful
of the agencies founded during this period, a number of other Brazilian agen-
cies were founded in the 1930s. By the end of the decade, there were an esti-
mated 56 agencies operating in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo,
according to the leading trade publication.140
In learning their trade and organizing themselves along North American
lines, the emerging professional-managerial elite also absorbed the values and
ideology brought to Brazil by agencies like Thompson. While the existing
documentation precludes exhaustive discussion of this process during this
period, ample impressionistic evidence for the transmission of the North Amer-
ican cultural program exists (some of it clear in the above). The career of adver-
tising man Renato Castelo Branco serves as an additional brief illustration of
this more general process. Like many of his colleagues, Castelo Branco started
out as an author before joining Ayer as a copywriter in 1935. He would go on
to work for McCann-Erickson, then for JWT, eventually becoming the first
Brazilian to head the subsidiary. He was also a founder of the Brazilian Adver-
138. Reis, “São Paulo e Rio,” 305 – 6.

139. “A S.A. Inter -Americana de Propaganda e seus clientes e amigos — a publicidade
e o desenvolvimento nacional,” Publicidade, Sept. 1940, 7, quoted in Owensby, Intimate
Ironies, 111.
140. Propaganda, June 1939, cited in Reis, “São Paulo e Rio,” 334.

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tising Association, the São Paulo Advertising Association, and the São Paulo
Museum of Art’s School of Advertising (founded in 1951), as well as a member
of the American Chamber of Commerce of Brazil’s Advisory Committee on
Public Relations.141 Throughout his professional career, Castelo Branco
retained a belief in advertising as an “educational force — an activating force.”
In this regard, he emerged as a national intellectual heir to the liberal modern-
ization project envisioned by the North American advertising men who
brought the profession to Brazil in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1975,
reflecting on his 40-year career and the development of the profession in
Brazil, he would write:
The fact is that advertising, as a technical instrument of promotion and

development, took its first steps in the 1930s with the establishment of
the first North American agencies in Brazil. . . . Advertising created, in
urban areas, the indispensable incentives for industrial expansion. And
only through advertising can we create, in immense areas of Brazil still
apathetic/indolent [apáticas], the stimulant that will awaken them and
make them participate effectively in the economic life of the country.142
Although more sophisticated than the claims made on advertising’s behalf

by its advocates in the early part of the century, Castelo Branco’s analysis
shared the same basic set of assumptions upon which the North American
advertising men based their convictions. The words “development” and
“industrial expansion” took the place of “modernization” and “Americaniza-
tion,” but the intent remained largely the same: the uplift of Brazil or parts of
Brazil along North American lines through the redeeming power of advertis-
ing. Brazilian advertising men not only adopted the tools, techniques, and
organization of the North Americans that preceded them, they also absorbed
the ideology that undergirded advertising’s popularization and saw themselves
as the point men of a modernization project that would finally bring their
country to the industrial and commercial level of the developed world.
Beyond the small group of executives exemplified by Castelo Branco, the
influence of advertising on Brazilian society is more difficult to ascertain.
However, in looking at those classes to whom the advertisers intentionally
appealed, the development of certain modes of thought suggests correlative, if
not causal, links between advertising and larger cultural changes. There can be
little doubt, for example, that North American advertising played some role in
141. See JWTA, Biographical Files, box 3, fol. 51.

142. Renato Castelo Branco, “Propaganda e desenvolvimento,” O Estado de S. Paulo,
20 Dec. 1975, Suplemento Centenário, 5.

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encouraging Brazil’s Europhile elites to look to the United States as a model.

In 1939 one observer wrote, “In general the educated well-to-do Brazilian is a
person whose cultural influence has been French. But if he is under 40, the
French background is certainly tempered and overlaid by a vast and increasing
enthusiasm for the U.S. Because he reads American magazines and books and
sees American movies, every literate Brazilian feels that he knows Americans
— how they live, what they wear, what they look like.”143 A 1943 article in Rio
de Janeiro’s Diretrizes noted the presence of a North American “sense of com-
fort” in Brazil, just one element of the “great influence” North American cul-
ture exerted on the country.144 North American advertising in Brazilian print
and radio during the 1930s clearly played a role in this slow cultural drift
northward among Brazilian elites and middle sectors.
Other broad shifts in elite and middle-sector culture beginning in this
period suggest additional correlation with the reach of North American con-
sumer culture. The explosion in the sale of radios during a period of economic
depression provides a particularly interesting illustration of the ways in which
this culture expanded: an advertised consumer durable was sold widely, this
product, once in use, disseminated additional information about other com-
modities—related and unrelated—as well as North American music and movie
news. Much the same could be said of the expansion of cinema theaters through-
out the city.145
For middle sectors specifically, advertising and advertised products were
particularly important. As in other countries, the consumption and accumula-
tion of advertised, mass-produced goods was a sign of “middle-class” status; it
provided a key element in the construction of the illusory distance between
lower-middle sectors and the upper levels of the working class at a time when
differences in income were hardly enough to do so.146 This construction paral-
leled more concrete developments, such as the growing differentiation between
middle-class and working-class residential areas in cities like São Paulo.147
Further questions, such as the relation of North American advertising and
consumer culture to changes in diet, dress, hygiene, and language await a his-
torian closer to Brazilian sources.
In looking at the reception of North American advertising by other
143. “Brazil,” Fortune, June 1939, 46 – 47.

144. Quoted in Owensby, Intimate Ironies, 113.
145. For information on the expansion of these media, see Love, São Paulo in the
Brazilian Federation, 91– 92; U.S. Department of Commerce, Broadcast Advertising in Latin
America, 30; and U.S. Department of Commerce, Advertising in Brazil, 4.
146. Lima, Imperialismo e angústia, 96–97; and Owensby, Intimate Ironies, chap. 5.
147. See Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 81.

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groups, new problems present themselves, the first and most obvious of which
is that the advertisements were never intended for the paulistano or carioca
working classes, much less the rural poor. In the case of the latter, moreover, it
is unlikely that they were exposed to advertising during this period, and even
more unlikely that they were able to interpret it — at least in the intended
manner — due to mass illiteracy. It is much more likely that working-class
Brazilians in the São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro metropolitan areas were
exposed to North American advertising. But to assume that a worker’s viewing
of an advertisement on a newsreel at the cinema translated into direct internal-
ization of the advertiser’s values is facile; it posits a view of mass communica-
tion in which the dissemination of values by modern media is more powerful
than any other form of socialization. A case might be made for this argument
in the television age, but in the 1930s it is clear that advertising’s inadvertent
appeals to the Brazilian urban poor, who had grown to adulthood before the
expansion of North American advertising, were ineffective. Radio jingles and
newspaper copy might have elicited comment and even wonder, but they almost
certainly did not involve immediate acceptance of a vision of the good life along
U.S. lines as promoted by the advertisements of agencies like Thompson.
Conclusion
From the 1930s, an important period in the expansion of corporate and con-
sumer culture in Brazil, advertising continued to grow in volume, importance,
and reception. In the postwar era, advertising’s practitioners would build on
the work of this decade as U.S. investment, uninhibited by depression or war,
grew beyond the levels imagined by earlier enthusiasts like Henry Flower and
Julius Klein. The JWT experience was reproduced in a number of other sec-
tors — public relations, publishing, the sales and marketing departments of
countless U.S. firms — as North American corporations continued to intro-
duce new methods and technology and explore new markets. The liberal
developmentalism of the 1920s and 1930s changed in style and sophistication,
if not in substance, as it was reinterpreted and adopted by a new generation of
North Americans ( Walt Whitman Rostow was perhaps the most visible) and
Brazilians (Renato Castelo Branco, for example). Developments like these
built on the growth of the late 1920s and the 1930s, when U.S. business first
reached preeminence in Brazil, aided by advertising agencies like Thompson,
who brought to Brazil the pictures and words of the interwar advertising
boom and trained a generation of Brazilian professionals.

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Marketing Modernity: The J.

In 1929 the J. Walter Thompson Company ( JWT), a leading North Ameri-

Hispanic American Historical Review 82:2

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Envisioning Overseas Advertising

By the 1920s, U.S. industry had reached unprecedented levels of production.

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advertising, a “distinctly American idea,” to be “used in Brazil as one of the

8. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce,

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stand more clearly its responsibilities as an era of civilization’s advance [sic].

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The J. Walter Thompson Company do Brasil

North American advertising, enlisted by business and government, was now to

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Motors, these men would continue their apprenticeship with Thompson. As

31. Rodolfo Lima Martensen, “O ensino da propaganda no Brasil,” O Estado de S.

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While Flower commented on the progress of North American enterprise

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ducing a client roster that suggests certain patterns. Surviving company

39. J. Walter Thompson Company ( New York), “International Advertising” (1935),

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Afro-Brazilians as on the periphery or outside of the consuming public as they

53. Andrews, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, 126.

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55. JWT, “Investigation of the Face Cream Market in Brazil,” unpaginated.

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society,” inviting them to participate in the lifestyle of the European and

This marketing of “class” as an integral part of “comfort, service, and

Advertisements for nonluxury automobiles also illustrate many of the

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63. Advertisement in O Estado de S. Paulo, 9 Nov. 1929, 7.

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69. O Estado de S. Paulo, 30 Aug. 1933, 8.

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73. JWT, “Investigation for Lehn and Fink,” 5, 16.

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standardized — along North American lines as Brazilian women were offered

78. Royal baking powder advertisement in O Estado de S. Paulo, 24 Feb. 1933, 5.

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The pursuit of efﬁciency was by no means limited to mechanical prod-

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Advertising in Brazil in the 1930s and After

99. Robert F. Merrick, untitled article, Propaganda, July 1969, 39.

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appearance of the ﬁrst branch of an American agency, which introduced

With Thompson serving GM in Brazil, the Ford Motor Company was

103. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce,

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109. See General Electric proofsheets, NWAC, box 242, fol. 1– 2.

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up an estimated 35 to 45 percent of total space in Brazil’s ten leading daily

116. U.S. Department of Commerce, Advertising in Brazil, 10, 17.

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onto unthinking audiences, is fundamentally undemocratic, as historians of