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John Eighmey
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
PHOTO BY TIM RUMMELHOFF
Harlow Gale
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY
OF MINNESOTA ARCHIVES
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Professor
John Eighmey first came across the name “Harlow Gale” in December
2004, while preparing materials for his spring 2005 Psychology of
Advertising class. A reference to a 1900 manuscript entitled “On
the Psychology of Advertising” and authored by Gale caught Eighmey's
attention, since he had never heard of the author or his manuscript,
written well before scholars began examining advertising techniques
and their effects.
Eighmey, who holds the SJMC’s Mithun Land Grant Chair in
Advertising, was also surprised to see that the manuscript was published
in Minneapolis. Could Gale have been associated with the University
of Minnesota? “At about light speed, I called U of M archivist Lois
Hendrickson,” Eighmey says, “and asked if there were any holdings
for Harlow Gale. She replied, ‘we have four boxes of his papers.’”
Within 48 hours, Eighmey and SJMC graduate student Sela Sar were
in Andersen Library reading the materials, which describe Gale’s
work on the psychological effects of advertising at the turn of
the 20th century. They discovered that Gale, who taught psychology
at the University of Minnesota from 1895 to 1903, was the first
scholar to undertake experimental studies on the effects of advertising.
“Gale’s work prefigured a number of critical concepts in advertising
evaluation that are still very much in use,” Eighmey says.
Although Gale’s scholarship is more than a century old, Eighmey
found it relevant enough to bring into his classes—literally. Last
fall, Eighmey involved his Psychology of Advertising class in a
full-scale re-enactment of one of Gale’s experiments on advertising
effectiveness. To re-enact the study, Eighmey found and scanned
copies of magazine ads Gale listed in his 1900 manuscript, put the
scans in a PowerPoint presentation, and used a video projector to
show each ad in a particular sequence and for a particular amount
of time, just as Gale had done with subjects in a darkened room,
a lamp, and cutouts of the ads over a hundred years earlier. “At
the end of each exposure sequence, I polled the class to see which
advertising elements they could recall,” Eighmey says. “The results
were then tabulated on the marker board as we continued through
the re-enactment. Remarkably,” he says, “the results pretty much
paralleled those of Gale.”
There’s an important lesson there regarding historical perspectives
on the study of mass communication, says Eighmey, who has now co-authored
a paper with Sar entitled “Harlow Gale and the Origins of the Psychology
of Advertising.” “When reading the earliest research, we often find
that our predecessors had particularly acute powers of observation
and expression,” Eighmey says. “Concepts and ideas flow from generation
to generation. You really can’t fully understand the larger
context of an idea unless you appreciate the full meaning and implications
of those original voices.”
By Ami Berger
Reprinted with permission from the summer 2006 edition of Murphy
Reporter, a publication of the School of Journalism and
Mass Communication.
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