Bob's Java Jive, photograph by John Margolies, 1979, Library of Congress Free to Use and Re-Use Collection.

CA 531 examines the history of advertising with a focus on the rise of strategically designed commercial messages and the growth of advertising agencies. As powerful hubs for the innovation of new and increasingly targeted creative and consumer research practices, ad agencies embedded messages in the landscape and in successive waves of new media forms to sell branded products. These embedded messages fostered a new way of life that was centered on directed patterns of consumption.