 You probably didn't know anything about that you're gonna know a lot more in a few minutes. I'm Jay Fidel. This is think tech and history is here to help and our regular host Carl Ackerman is here with us and his special guest, Clark Hulquist, and Carl is going to introduce Clark. Carl, would you try to hold it down to two hours? Okay. We don't do an hour and a half only. So. Okay, I'll do an hour and a half only. So, you know, um, Professor Clark Hulquist went to Hulquist went to the University of Cincinnati. He got his MA and his doctor at Ohio State University. And just as a side Clark, one of my friends, the guy who wanted to hire me was for a long time the Dean of the. School of letters and science guy named Kermit Hall. I don't know if he was there when you were there. But he became a great offer at the University of Tulsa and I said, why? Tulsa, I don't think so. Why, but anyway. His research is on French advertising, but if you read his wonderful dissertation, he begins talking about Fernand Brudel and the structures of everyday life and. You know, he is a social historian. And the way I know Professor Hulquist is he is my boss. Every year at the AP reading and he fulfills that George Arioshi slogan. Quiet and effective and Clark for your interest, George Arioshi was one of our great governors in Hawaii. And he won with that slogan quiet and effective, which tells you as much about Hawaii as anything else. I think. And when you say quiet and effective, Carl, it does sound like it does sound like George Arioshi, but actually it doesn't sound like you at all. No, I'm describing my my colleague. Nice job, Clark. You really created something. Okay, you're out of time, Carl. Let's go. Let's go to the substance of the show. We're going to talk about advertising with no more further ado. The wonderful Professor Clark Hulquist. Thank you, Carl. Thanks so much for having me. And of course, I don't know if you just want me to start. No, no, we have to stay within our God rails. I am sorry. It treated as a defensive of dissertation. Okay. I enjoyed that very much. I think when you got through it, that's the important thing. And Clark, you know, what is the difference between French advertising and American and I thought we had a lock on that corner of the world. Well, we did. I mean, French advertising and when we're thinking about this a 150 year period since the 1870s, that in some sense American and French advertising were relatively even but in the 1890s French advertising especially we would call it fantasy Echola the end of the century in terms of poster advertising to lose the track, etc. But American advertising and some people may not want me to say this catches up that American advertising modernizes a lot faster than French advertising and of course what does modernization mean but the American economy becomes the number one economy of the world in 1900. We have the largest big businesses in the world. We have the largest media in the world. And France, because of the Great War really starts to fall behind France had actually the largest movie industry in the world they had the largest automobile production in the world in 1900. The Second World War really sees them sort of fall behind the United States takes off in the roaring 20s. American advertising pulls incredibly ahead in terms of its, the print capabilities the print quality. Eventually photography being brought into advertising, what we would eventually call market research, the application of psychology into advertising in the 1920s. Advertising on the surface was wonderful from the 1890s through the 1930s but American advertising basically is better though some people might critique me for saying that. No, we will not hear. My view of it, and I don't know how you feel Carl, my view of it is that French advertising advertising the French culture and all that is largely a question of advertising French products, a lot of which are devoted to women and the Oates Couture, the perfume, and you know other elements of womanhood as celebrating the woman, which I think French culture does do that it celebrates the women. So how much of French advertising goes to celebrating products that extoll the French woman. I would say a lot but of course it also depends what time period we're discussing. In general, from an American perspective, what most French advertising we see is as you correctly said luxury goods luxury products the biggest luxury firm in the world is Louis Vuitton, Moet Hennessy Bernard Arnaud is the owner or CEO. It depends upon what time of the day that either he or Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in the world is worth about $160 billion. And so we will see in the United States a lot of advertisement for a lot of their products, but in France obviously they have to advertise a lot more than products luxury goods so they've a fully developed advertising system, you know for automobiles for personal products for food. Movies, radio, etc. So from our perspective we don't really see it on a daily basis the sort of average French advertisements they're aimed at everyone. We do see J is and you're very correct the sort of luxury goods that really celebrate women. I told you before the show began I'm a former Franco file. I study French in every level of my education, and not only the language but the literature what I did not study was the French history and was only later that I became, you know, more familiar with French history. And I found, and a part of this is the American media and the French media the films that have been made about what happened in World War Two, and around anti semitism and you know if you study French advertising you have to study Bluestine Blanchette and his adventures. But if you do that then you have this kind of strange intersection between advertising and anti semitism. And I have trouble reconciling that it does not make me more of a Franco file. It makes me less of a Franco file. What are your thoughts about that intersection. Well, I'll give a brief summary of French anti semitism operative word is being brief and so there's an incredible resurgence of it in the 1860s and it always had been under sort of a lobsimmer. The 1790s actually gives probably the first time anywhere in Europe full civil rights to French Jewish citizens, but in the middle of the 19th century as France begins to urbanize quote unquote modernize industrialize. There becomes a horrible press a press system newspapers that with the help of advertisers begins to advertise basically anti semitism. And Bluestine Blanchette's Bluestine Blanchette's family as part of this in the 1860s, a lot of Eastern European Jews from Russia or the pale of settlement in Eastern Europe would begin to emigrate to France. They're perceived by a number of French especially middle class as the other. They're not like us they don't talk like us they have a different religion. And so French anti semitism, or the last 30 years of the 19th century increases and of course the Dreyfus case is the worst example of this and I probably shouldn't give a lecture on the Dreyfus case right now. So yes that you are correct about this, right before the great war franchise anti semitism actually was higher than German anti semitism. The German historian Richard Evans and his three volume work on the third right says in 1910 and this is one of these counterfactuals. But if one had thought which country in Europe might be responsible for a mass execution of thousands to millions of Jews it might likely be France and not Germany. Oh, okay Carl time for you to react to all of that. Did you know that. And if you didn't, what effect did it have on you to find out today. Well, I didn't know the latter but you know, I read as our hope that's dissertation with great, great pleasure. And what I'm interested in in finding out is, how did Marcel Bluestine for forgive my pronunciation. How did you overcome the French disillusionment with advertising because as you mentioned, you know, they were really afraid of advertising because of the false claims of the pharmaceutical industry. And I hope that you will tell Jay and I the story of how he first got on the radio and use the Soviet Union to do so that those are two wonderful things I'm going to be quiet because you're the expert there. Just like the United States in the same period of time in terms of the sort of birth of advertising there's no advertising controls, you know, today we have the United States is called the triple a the American Association of advertising agencies they tried to act this self policing group for sort of honesty and truth and advertising I know I won't comment on the effectiveness of it, but it's certainly better to have these sort of standards than none at all. So United States, there is tremendous amount of snake oil sales you look at old stores and magazines, various curatives and curals and oils and pills I'll spare you you're all naughty. You know what I mean and so for us really wasn't any different than United States in this that a lot of these products were incredibly cheap because they didn't cost anything to make. And the more the one advertise the more potentially that people could buy that. So I don't know if that really answers your question or not, but French advertising explodes in the 1920s just like ours does they have their own version of the 20s. The newspapers and magazines and there's really an economic recovery from the Great War. There's also a mass amount of urbanization during the 1920s. France is in the process of not being a country of peasants. So there's a 1900 in the United States happy American population was rural path was urban. France doesn't hit that rate roughly until 1930 for the 1920s starts to see a lot more people live in the cities. They want to buy products that acculturate them to living in the city, a sort of spare you perhaps potentially what that means. Is that good enough on this first part of your question. Let me go. Let me go back to the original thought I had. And that is, how did Marcel Bloustine Blanchet Blanchet, whatever. How did he cope with the anti Semitism he's building an empire around advertising and yet advertising always includes a certain amount of propaganda and propaganda always includes a certain amount of disinformation. How did he cope with that how did he build an empire. When what he was doing included anti Semitic propaganda. I think and again I don't know if I have a perfect answer for this. A lot of what we know about him is actually his various memoirs and the 1970s and 80s. He begins to publish sort of a three volume sort of survey of his life. He's not too much really written about him from a scholarly perspective. Another difficulty in terms of sources on him is that public sees their main office on the Champs Elysees a burn to the ground in a fire. And so almost all the records are gone. So part of it is sort of piecing things together from what people wrote about him. And what trade journals wrote about him what he wrote about himself and certainly I think we can believe most of it but he is an advertising man and he might want to sort of oversell himself. I'll use a comparison in terms of what he was somewhat like a younger audience man I know this person but Richard Branson. He was an adventurer. He was a self promoter. Both of them basically were. So I don't know how much he really overcame anti Semitism. The one thing I will mention French anti Semitism existed. But on the other hand, there was a lot of toleration for Jewish people during the 1920s the 1930s in the era which he lived. And so certainly he faced difficulties he faced struggles. He perhaps in some sense had a lot of help early on when he first starts his advertising agency, both his parents and his aunt and uncle own furniture stores. And that certainly gave him his first sort of simple primitive accounts I mean, perhaps 100 francs a week sort of rolled in. Sort of as energy. Carl knows something about his charisma just like Richard Branson has a lot of charisma he basically sold himself in the 1920s and the 1930s. You have to be able to sell yourself to be successful in advertising my experience in meeting people who are involved but but Carl, can you talk about his charisma. You know, I want to go back to that question about how, you know, he was able to do things and, you know, from reading your dissertation. Professor Holocaust, one of the things that really struck me was how he went to radio quickly. And, you know, like the, you know, the people with the internet who saw the internet and then made millions because they saw that likes the case. Or Steve Jobs rather. But I think that's very interesting. So I want you to talk about that and the Soviet story about the radio really caught my attention. Can you tell our readers this because you know Jane I know about it but our readers do not. And I think it's just hilarious. I will. So radio was in its infancy during the 1920s. And so the 1930s to begin to pick up partially as I mentioned before is the rise in consumer culture. So 1924 there wasn't much of a radio industry because most people didn't have and couldn't afford radios. But with economies of scale radios start to become, you know, I'll say less expensive, maybe three to $400 for a sort of, you know, model you would put, you know, in your living room everyone would listen to it if they could. And perhaps 30 to 40% of French consumers or French families, I should say, might have had radios in the 1930s. Blist on Blanche was looking for other ways to advertise the radio at this point had not been deeply penetrated by advertisers or advertising agencies. And the idea was to buy a radio station with himself with money from others and perhaps family members, change it into a modern radio station whatever a modern means so he had met David Sarnoff who's sort of the father of NBC and RCA Blist on Blanche two years later went to the United States in the 1930s. Certainly from what I know is English wasn't very good so he's likely had a translator with him and he sort of learned at the knee of Sarnoff who's perhaps 15 years older than Blist on Blanche the importance of radio. So when he returned to Paris he was able to get a little bit of money to buy a French radio station he renamed it radio city or city radio or radio city. And what was it's transmitter trans the transmitting transmitting number that had and I would assume it would be our version of AM was very weak it could only reach a couple of miles. This would not produce a very large audience for him. There was a radio station in the Soviet Union in Bessarabia that had a radio transmission number that he hoped that he could use that he could buy basically from the Soviet Union. When he traveled to the Soviet Union I want to say 1937 1938 he had an interview with someone and of course they weren't really interested in selling one of their sort of ways to reach their own people. And so basically the Soviet Union said no, he returned to France. At that point he was very well connected as it became wealthy became a French millionaire in the early 1930s and so he had contacts within the French government. A French minister basically said well how did it go. In other words how to getting the radio transmission frequency and he said it went great. And of course, the French government minister assumed that meant the deal went through. And so blue stone blanche ended up just using semi illegally that radio frequency for the next seven years or next four years to broadcast to the French people. And so you would say that that was an example sort of entrepreneurial boldness to sort of get what he wanted. Indeed, indeed. So we've examined a little bit about you know the fact that he was very outgoing the fact that he was comporting with French culture and luxury items and ladies items and all that. But I have another thought I want to throw at you and see what you say. So I would imagine that French advertising was a celebration of the entire spectrum of French culture. In other words, the language, the music, the way of doing artful presentations. And it was visual media. In other words, perfect French and really appealing graphics had to be part of it because I think that's part of the French culture and emanating from the 19th century, from all those posters you were talking about it carried forward. So we can't compromise on any of that and this is what the French people were most affected by am I right. You are. I had a disclaimer about this is that in the 1920s and 1930s reproductions of both magazines and newspapers were quite primitive. And so in theory, a lot of the advertisements look very beautiful but the practice is they didn't come out so well. The poster ads continue in the 1920s and 30s to be glorious reproductive techniques for posters were tremendous. You may recall that there's a great great poster and I cannot remember the artist and I should for the 1930s. And it's a great frontal view of the ship, sort of steaming into your line of sight. And so they're very good doing those types of advertisements in terms of the visual image, but mass reproduced advertisements not quite so good. It's not until the 1950s that French reproductive techniques for magazines and newspapers basically catches up with the United States. And Bloustine Blanchet probably attended to that by taking the most current technology, whatever was available at the time, and as a good entrepreneur he was right at the cutting edge using that sort of thing. And so it goes to another question I want to ask you. And so today, this is really interesting. Today we have a very highly developed Madison Avenue all across the country, advertising sector and industry. A lot of people make their lives and get rich doing advertising for sure in an active economy. But what about in France? Is, are the French doing what he was doing that is grabbing the latest technology? Are they using social media? Are they using cable TV and YouTube types of presentations? Are they with us behind us or ahead of us? Well, it depends. I would say they're with us and maybe even ahead of us, but it depends. And so advertising is a global business. It really becomes so in the 1960s. The largest ad agency in the world was an American firm, J. Walter Thompson, that in some sense they conquer the globe with their advertisements in the 40s, 50s and 60s. And I wrote about this, and it's also in my dissertation, but a separate article I've written quite a few years ago. And so publicity certainly mimics and models that, but this is not in my dissertation. So this is a secret from Carl, that from the 60s to the present, publicity grows even faster. So today they're the third largest advertising agency in the world. They own advertising agencies in the United States. Oftentimes they will buy them and they don't change their name. So you may be familiar with the Chicago ad firms called Leo Burnett. They're the ones who created the Marlboro, Marlboro man in the 1950s. They still let Leo Burnett agency practice under their name. And so Jay, when you asked, are they sort of with us ahead of us behind us? They are us, if this makes sense, that French advertising, I don't even know in some sense if it exists other than in France to French people that their advertisements basically all over the world will certainly look a lot like our advertisements. You know, say all over the world, more and more becomes clear, there are French speaking countries and areas that maybe used to be colonies, you know, who knows what the evolution was for any one of them, but they're French speaking, they speak French. And you would expect that any advertising agency centered in France would be reaching out to all of those French speaking societies everywhere. So the question is, do they, do they reach French speaking countries with their advertising? Do they reach other languages with their advertising? Oh, certainly they reach because they advertise in other languages. So they probably advertise that 140 languages will office all over the world. So they have offices in India, so they're going to advertise in India. They have advertising agencies that they own in Japan, and I'll spare you that. And so yes, so within Africa there's some perhaps 60 million people who speak French, maybe even more. And so certainly they will advertise in French to them plus their local languages. So yes, so there are global brand and they advertise at 150 languages because they want to reach as broad of an audience as they possibly can. Hmm, selling anything, not just French products for women. Because they're going to sell products, if they haven't had age C in Japan, they're going to be selling Japanese products. Certainly multinational. So I have one more question, Carl, but I want to give you the opportunity to express whatever is on your mind, whatever question is on your mind now. You know, the really the beauty of this dissertation is that, you know, what will happen, what will happen to Bluestine is that he will get his, he will leave France two days before the invasion of Paris. And then he will, he will fight for, you know, to galls of France and exile and become a pilot. This guy is the perfect man for a movie. And so I wanted to just ask Professor Holkbuss, a sort of a double edged question. One is, are you going to make this into a monograph or maybe you've done that already. And second of all, you know, would you be interested in someone from Hollywood picking this up because it has all the earmarks, and you can have a byline about Mad Men, which was such a popular show in in the United States. So that's my double edged question for you. Well, yes. So if you know anyone on Netflix, and they need a historical advisor, I come cheap. So it is an amazing story. How he escapes through Spain, you know, sort of two steps ahead of the Nazis in 1940 and makes his way to London if they're free French and of course, what why that is helpful that it buys him credibility at the end of the Second World War. And again, where we have a minute so I won't say any more than that. But in terms of my own scholarly work, I don't know if I'm going to turn this into a monograph. I know I hope next fall to go on sabbatical and work on this V sheet here at advertising. So we'll see if I come full circle there. I'll give Jay the last question with 50 some seconds left. I like to, you know, second the motion that Carl made. We don't know enough about what happened in Europe. Outside of Germany and there's so many movies and documentaries about the Germans and their war. But we don't know that much about Vichy. We don't know much about Spain. This last night I was watching a television program. Fewer American television programs that are coming online right now because of the strike was watching a Spanish program called Jaguar. And it was a revelation to me about how Nazis after the war came to Spain under the protection of Franco and enjoyed a very nice quality of life in public announcing their connection with the Nazi Party. And I didn't know about this. And I was gratified to see that somebody was covering it. And the same thing about Vichy and Vichy's relationship with, you know, that whole affair in Spain, Germany, we don't know enough about it. So from an historical point of view, especially on this show, history is here to help. We need to know more. So I second Carl's motion and your inclination. Okay, but my last question is this Clark. Why this? Why this topic? Why did you write your dissertation about this and stay with it? You're still on it. You're still thinking about it. In retrospect, was it the right decision? Totally the right decision. You know, briefly as an undergrad, I sort of dabbled as a business major. But also my father was involved. He was an advertising person, but he was, we'll call it a sales rep. You may have heard of the Kroger company, the largest grocer in the world, and he was interested in terms of promoting their product. They're sort of a family interest. And so even before I started this dissertation, I was interested in sort of the advertising world and the creativity here. But then in graduate school, I was a French historian, I knew I was going to write something on France and my advisor who was very, very helpful in terms of in a topic. He sent me to this, but he steered me away from things like Napoleon, the Great War, things that were overdone so much, and very, very little had been done in consumer culture, at least when I started my work in the late 80s and early 1990s. And so things have sort of came together. And again, it's a much longer story, but I hope that gives you a sort of an idea. I sort of stumbled into it, but I just love it. The intersection of modernization and Americanization, consumer culture, everything sort of coming together, because the 1920s and 1930s are both France and the United States. And someone like our world, I mean, I don't want to live there, but if you time transported me back there, I would, I would see a lot of things we're familiar with. And I think Carl was correct when he was talking about the media age, the 1920s, the 1930s, being somewhat similar to our information age in terms of the internet. Remind me of that movie with Woody Allen. Midnight in Paris, I think it was. Yeah. It'd be great to live there, but just for a few days. Exactly. I want to come back. So Carl, let's hear your, your, your closing remarks on this. What have we learned? What is history learned here? And you might also include how it was to work for Clark. You mentioned that. And what kind of a boss was he, you know, be candid. Okay. First of all, what a pleasure it is to hear from Professor Clark Holt quest in terms of his work in social history in terms of French advertising in the early parts of the 20th century, you know, ranging all the way to the post war period. So, you know, that was, you know, particularly interesting and, you know, focusing on one particular admin. And what he was able to do in building a company was particularly interesting. And of course, as Jay focused on, you know, this is just a prelude to the Holocaust and so blue steam blanchetta has to has to blanchet has to worry about all of this but you know, I think it's, it's, it's this sort of a social history that Fernand Brudel had talked about in the structures of everyday life and social history just fills out so many gaps and things like this. And to conclude with, you know, I was particularly happy and I remember sending him a message by email. And then Clark Holt quest became the chief reader, which is an enormous task with hundreds of different people all of whom, I, you know, I think responded people. But it's an enormous task a great responsibility because every European every kid that takes European history is entrusted to Clark and his predecessors as chief readers to do a good job but he's a very mild guy and I, I appreciate that and you know, Jay and I you know, I'm a mild I think, by by temperament but I do appreciate although when I'm in my professional life I tend to be very mild and the students I tend to be very mild but I think that it's really a pleasure to work with someone who embodies that word kind, which is something that's become increasingly important to me as this Oscar Ashkenazi ages. Thank you for putting us in touch with Clark and Clark. I only have three words for you in closing. One of them, of course is a lot of one of them is abby and toe. And the third one is that to tell us. Thank you very much. Thank you Jay for this opportunity. Thank you Carl for the invitation I very much enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much for watching think tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out our website think tech Hawaii.com. Mahalo.