ABSTRACT
Advertising in public spaces is the norm in most of Europe and North America. This chapter aims to understand the theoretical marginalization of outdoor advertising by considering psychology’s role in the development of advertising practice’s rationale for influencing the consumer in the 1920s. It argues that the way in which advertising practice nevertheless handled the question of how to influence consumer behaviour ruled out the possibilities of outdoor advertising. The chapter shows that the struggle for professionalism on the part of people in advertising, most visible in big campaigns and in the development of advertising theory, had a negative impact upon the status of the illustrated poster. The differentiation between illustrated outdoor advertising and an exceptional artistic poster is symptomatic of the retreat of outdoor advertising from the centre of strategic advertising theory. In the Netherlands ‘psycho-technicans’ misunderstood what the essential problems of advertising were during the 1920s.
