Hard Sell: Advertising, Affluence and Transatlantic Relations, c. 1951?69

Focusing on advertising's relationship to the mass market housewife, Hard Sell shows how advertising promoted new standards of material comfort in the selling of a range of everyday consumer goods and, in the process, generalised a cross-class image of the 'modern housewife' across the new medium of television. Nixon shows how the practices through which advertising understood and represented the 'modern housewife' and domestic consumption were influenced by American advertising and commercial culture. In doing so, he challenges the way critics and historians have often understood Anglo-American relations, and shows how American influences across a range of areas of advertising practice were not only a source of inspiration, but were also adapted and reworked to speak more effectively to the British consumer.

Hard Sell offers a major new analysis of the techniques of advertising in the decades of post-war affluence and advertising's relationship to the social changes associated with growing prosperity.

Sean Nixon is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of Essex, UK.