Happy Saturday, folks! I was searching for the Sunday digest and came across this question by /u/acidmine. If you're still here, /u/acidmine, I hope you can chew on this for a little while. If you have any further questions after digesting, let me know!

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Many old print advertisements, especially those in the early-to-mid 20th century, prominently make statements like "Easy to Digest!" or "Digestible!" when selling food. Why was this practice common? Why was this something an advertiser felt they needed to convey?

This is a fun question, and the answer is much more complex than one may initially think. Broadly, advertisers used terms like “digestible” to highlight the anxieties of modern life that afflicted many American consumers during the 1920s.

Background on Early twentieth-century Advertising

It is first necessary to examine the rise of modern advertising. I’ll be discussing periods roughly between 1880-1930 here, although much of the practices you refer to came to be during the 1920s. The United States in the 1880s saw tandem innovations in the mass production of branded consumer goods and advertising. Advertising existed in the US before (since the seventeenth century), but these organizations were new. To simplify things, let’s say that this new form of advertising was the mass promotion of a branded good to a specific target audience. No longer would advertisers market their products “in-house,” but rather outsource the advertising to professional agencies, many of which, by the 1920s, found their home on Maddison Avenue.

However, a stigma still existed against advertisers, who many still saw as akin to the snake oil salesman and other traveling fraudsters. As a result, advertisers, at first, attempted to promote their product with “sincerity.” During the first half of the twentieth century, advertisements could be pages long, urging consumers to buy products based on a rational pitch of various uses and benefits of a particular good. For example, see this Campbell’s soup ad from 1918. The soup is promoted as “rich with real nourishment” and then lists the cares that went into creating such a soup, as well as the various ways consumers could prepare it. It was hyperbolic in some ways, but the pitch was rational: you, the consumer, need an easy meal, we are providing it to you cheap, and here are all the different ways you could prepare it. In other words, everything in the advertisement was explicitly related to the soup.

Contrast Campbell’s promotion with advertisements after WWI. America’s entry into the war caused the need for a propaganda department, the so-called “Committee of Public Information.” Many advertisers staffed this agency, and their work during the war led to two major ideological shifts related to the role of advertising. First, advertisers became acutely aware that ideas could be presented to consumers just as effectively as products could. Couple this with the studies in the emerging field of psychology, and we see how advertisers, now armed with a new way to sell products, shifted their marketing to promote lifestyles, feelings, and promises of success. No longer would advertisers promote their product “sincerely” but rather with a message that sounded true.

The second major innovation is related to the onset of modernity in American life. Now, modernity is a topic that one could prattle on about for pages, but I will keep it short here. For our purposes, let’s highlight three aspects of modernity related to advertising: a compression of time and space (people, goods, and messages can get places quicker), a growing belief in the inferiority of humans, and a growing emphasis on mass consumption. It was important for advertisers to have a proverbial finger on the pulse of American culture better to promote their goods and lifestyles to their audience. A post-WW1 America was rife with anxieties about modern life. Cars, airplanes, telephones, radio, and urbanization were all new and quickly changing aspects of day-to-day existence. Americans needed something to combat these developments, and advertisers were right there, with nearly any product someone could need, willing and ready to help the consumer live a healthy and happy life. This was the most crucial development-- Americans began to trust advertisers to bring them the good news of products to combat the ails of modernity.

By the early 1920s, advertising agencies hit their stride. They were responsible for nearly all national advertising. They had become a multi-billion dollar industry, in part thanks to expanded access to new mass communication channels like the radio, which presented new and exciting opportunities for marketing products and ideas to consumers.