For Americans who came of age in the second half of the twentieth century, public-service campaigns such as Smokey the Bear (“Remember: Only YOU can prevent forest fires”) and McGruff the Crime Dog (“Take a bite out of crime”) were familiar sights. Smokey and McGruff appeared in television advertisements, while actors dressed as these characters often visited schools to remind children to be responsible citizens. These were creations of the nonprofit Ad Council, an analysis of which is the most significant revelation in Dawn Spring's Advertising in the Age of Persuasion: Building Brand America, 1941–1961. Spring traces how advertisers who had gained a foothold in the political and economic system during the Second World War worked to remain prominent in the subsequent US boom years. She demonstrates how advertising, business, and the government collaborated to develop an evangelical approach toward promoting US-style free-market capitalism in the postwar years. In doing so, this coalition helped create a peacetime infrastructure for public diplomacy and the dissemination of persuasive information that has become an integral part of the US government and national security apparatus.

In 1941, advertisers conceived a strategy to prove their relevance after more than a decade of decline. In a meeting of media groups, advertising agencies, and corporate advertisers, adman James Webb Young helped create a “strategy for free enterprise practitioners to use in persuading the public” (19). Out of Young's vision emerged the Ad Council, a public–private partnership. Spring argues, “The war created a network of American advertisers, broadcasters, and brand-name manufacturers working together to advance all their self-interests and agendas” (20). The Ad Council was – and continues to be – composed of a committee of prominent advertisers and marketers. Its initiatives helped create a common culture based on consumerism, religion, and history. In its early years, it gained access to the highest rungs of power: President Dwight Eisenhower, for instance, addressed the council seven times.

Smokey the Bear and McGruff the Crime Dog might be the most familiar of the Ad Council's creations, but they were not the only public-service campaigns run by it and like-minded organizations. At times indistinguishable from domestic propaganda, campaigns such as “The Miracle of America” sought to interpret US history to Americans themselves, but airbrushed controversial issues such as civil rights. “The Freedom Train,” for example, was a traveling exhibit of American cultural mementos that stopped in every state in 1947–48, allowing millions to tour the patriotic displays. The “Religion in American Life” campaign helped conflate evangelical Christianity at home with the ideological fight against “godless” communism. Not incidentally, as Spring writes, these “national and international campaigns helped blend evangelicalism with the American brand” (88). These campaigns also represented the fusion of specific American ideals with Cold War imperatives.

The Ad Council worked with overseas American efforts such as Radio Free Europe, marking “the success of the council at connecting advertisers to the US national security apparatus and further spreading the free enterprise mission” (112). Spring brings her analysis into the twenty-first century with a discussion of public diplomacy during George W. Bush's presidency. However, because the bulk of the book is focussed on the 1941–61 period, she is by necessity forced to race through four decades of public diplomacy rather hastily. The work loses a little coherence as a result. In addition, this study would benefit from greater international context. For example, how do the tactics of public diplomacy compare with early BBC efforts to reach out to subjects of the British Empire or in its Cold War foreign-language broadcasts? Also, how did American initiatives contrast with Soviet internal and external propaganda?

Spring is on surer footing when analyzing the domestic campaigns run by the Ad Council, the Brand Names Foundation, and others, than when focussing on their links to international public diplomacy. Although Spring's analysis of the Ad Council is well executed, the links between its mission and fellow-traveling groups sometimes are not as clear as they could be. What is also less clear is how much these advertising pioneers were motivated by a genuine desire to spread the gospel of free enterprise rather than by the less high-minded, but perhaps more logical, simple drive for profit. Her work is cogently written, but it is plagued by consistent typos – ranging from missing periods and words to misspellings. Nevertheless, this study provides an incisive examination of the early initiatives and organizations that laid the groundwork for later persuasive information campaigns by the US government and its corporate allies.