Let’s celebrate the mundane and every day! Reflections on a trip to Stockholm

Amongst marketing historians, attention is increasingly being turned toward the 1970s and the 1980s, and especially the extent to which marketing discourse embraced the neoliberal turn. That is, an examination of the rise of consumer culture whereby marketing propositions were increasingly framed relative to how inanimate goods might allow individuals to achieve self-fulfilment and meaning in life. Extending into the 1980s and 1990s, consumption reached into new personal and societal spaces.

One outcome of such speculation will be an edited volume on marketing and consumer culture in the late twentieth century (under contract with Routledge). I am pleased to have been invited to contribute a chapter exploring shifting approaches in UK consumer advertising from the 1950s through to the end of the 1980s.

As part of the development of this important volume, I was invited to attend a workshop at Stockholm University in June to discuss and develop ideas. My attendance was generously funded by the Royal Historical Society and the Ridderstads Stiftelse.

Initially writing the chapter proposal, and drawing on sources held at HAT, there seemed to be clear evidence to support the thesis propounded by others that British advertising through the 1970s and 1980s experienced a “creative revolution”. However, as I drafted my chapter ahead of the workshop, and dived into HAT collections more comprehensively, the argument started to unravel.

Without doubt, there were some ground-breaking, avant-garde campaigns through those decades wonderfully captured in D&AD award winner annuals, but it is important to place those in context and see these as the exception rather than the norm. This is where the value of one of HAT’s most recent acquisitions, the Ebiquity Collection, comes into its own. The c.4 million items which make up that collection, the workaday advertisements diligently clipped from newspaper and magazines, offers an extraordinary insight into the mundane and every day, those advertisements of the highest frequency to which consumers were most exposed and arguably had the greatest impact.




A search for and focus on exceptionalism in the study of history is typically poor practice. Thank goodness then for the History of Advertising Trust, “celebrating” advertising, but also committed to capturing the transitory and disposable, the ephemeral. The job is not yet done, this volte-face in my thesis is, without doubt, a set back but a reappraisal pushing back against the exceptionalism of a “creative revolution” I hope will allow the full range and evolution of British advertising practices in the late twentieth-century to be revealed.

 Dr David Clampin FRHistS SFHEA

« All News Articles