Selling Themselves: The Emergence of Canadian Advertising

Robert W. Sexty is a professor of commerce and business administration
at Memorial University of Newfoundland and the author of Canadian
Business: Issues and Stakeholders.

The Canadian advertising industry is composed of several components: the
advertisers with goods and services to sell, agencies that prepare the
advertising message, the medium that carries or displays it, and the
consumers who purchase the goods and services. Tracing the evolution of
Canadian advertising in the period 1900–30, this book has three major
goals: to establish the professionalism of the advertising agency, to
outline the contemporary transformation of the publishing industry, and
to illustrate how Canadian agencies followed American advertising
practices.

The history begins with a review of the relationships among advertisers
and agents at the end of the 19th century. The author reviews the
careers of several advertising agents in Toronto during the first part
of the 20th century to arrive at an explanation for how their trade was
crafted. Another chapter is devoted to describing how the agents and the
advertising medium—at that time, the print media—reconfigured the
publishing industry in the period 1900–20. Copywriting, psychology,
and the science of advertising also changed the presentation of
advertisements, and toward the end of the period, market research was
provided by the agencies. During the period, most initiatives of
Canadian agencies followed the American industry. The evolution of the
agency with the publishing medium had a major impact on the development
of Canadian consumer magazines since advertising largely paid for these
publications.

The themes of this comprehensive and objective study are well developed
and documented from primary and secondary research sources.