Project Details
Projekt
"Hold the future in your hand" - Advertising for radios, television and record players in Luxembourg, Germany and France in the 1960s
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Valérie Schafer
Subject Area
Modern and Contemporary History
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 285228642
In a programme produced by the ORTF in 1964 and entitled Le Magazine féminin (French INA-Archiv), a woman presented a table in which a television, a radio and a record player could be placed. This hidden advertising illustrates the technical development of media, as well as the efforts to sell these devices. The aim of our study is to examine the advertising for these three media devices in three European countries (Germany, France and Luxembourg) and to shed light on the golden age of advertising in the 1960s. The comparative dimension of the subject is a novelty. For example, it may allow us to see how advertising by Siemens, for example, could be distributed and adapted to the national markets of several European countries and whether these strategies differed in terms of volume and marketing investment for an product and from one country to another. Similarly, the distribution of advertising at the European level can be considered transnationally, not forgetting US manufacturers and their advertising campaigns designed for Europe. The comparison between these countries will also make it possible to link consumer markets, communication between manufacturers and local suppliers, media and national developments, and to examine several dimensions and scales (local, national and European). This media history and history of advertising which also strongly relates to consumption studies, allow us to analyse the segmentation and imaginary that are gradually taking shape and passing through the market, and to further study the emergence of a media market targeting teenagers or which is more and more gender-oriented. This project is located at the intersection of several central fields of the Popkult project like seriality, materiality of artefacts or generational devices. This research will use quantitative and qualitative methods to illustrate the way in which transistor radio, television and record players, as consumer objects, have become more widespread in households in the 60s. The creation of a database of print and audiovisual advertising in the three countries is to be supplemented by qualitative studies, in particular a semiotic analysis of communicative content and the representation of women and teenagers in the advertising of print media. In this way, serial and qualitative analyses of press and audiovisual content will be combined and computational tools from Digital Humanities used.
DFG Programme
Research Units
International Connection
Luxembourg
Partner Organisation
Fonds National de la Recherche
