Madison Avenue and the Color Line

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These two photos are from an AMAZING book I checked out of the library called Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry.

On Mad Men, currently set in 1963, Pete Campbell independently arrives at the concept of targeted race-based marketing demographics, but, in fact, these pictures prove that the concept was, at the least, well researched by the mid to late 1940s.

Tide Magazine was a major advertising trade magazine in the decade - and their publishing a story about the Negro market as a cover piece in 1947 was bold and groundbreaking. Marketing directly to potential African-American consumers did not become a widespread practice until the advent of Ebony and Jet magazines, in 1945 and 1951, respectively.

INTERESTING!

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