YANKEE ADVERTISING IN BUENOS AIRES

Abstract

In an effort to assess the question of Americanization in a South-American modern context, this article examines the activities of American advertising company J. Walter Thompson in Buenos Aires (1928–1935). This appears as an instance of the early exportation of American advertising know-how to South America and also of the production of new knowledge about the region's consumer markets. Although advertising men carried to Buenos Aires the assumption that consumer wants were universal, with time they learned to use ‘national culture’ (which they encountered already emblematized in the figure of the ‘gaucho’) in order to promote modern products and make international firms more acceptable to locals. ‘Gaucho’ stories served to promote foreign meat-packing firms, cattle-ranching ‘estancias’ helped to sell American cars, and the prestige of British punctuality was suddenly used in connection with ‘national’ traditions. Yankee advertising men used modern consumer surveys in order to measure consumer preferences. By doing this, they entered into intimate question-and-answer games with local consumers. Their market studies divided the population according to income level and preferences: only the wealthy Littoral provinces and its upper-income groups would be target of American advertising. The company also carried out a study (presumably for the American State Department) aimed at measuring the degree of anti-Americanism in the Argentine press. The study pointed out that even conservative newspapers carried some dose of anti-American rhetoric. Yankee advertising men came to examine the peculiarities of the Argentine market, ‘discovered’ minor or superficial differences in Argentine consumer preferences, and hence concluded that their earlier assumptions were valid: consumer wants were universal. Only in persuading local or national consumers did the use of local traditions and values provide additional value. In the new periphery of consumer desire, American advertisers learned that it was possible to present the ‘foreign’ as the ‘national’, suspending or minimizing the criticism of foreign firms and the growing hegemony of American technology and material culture.

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