Rethinking Harlow Gale: The Psychical Influences on His Contributions to Advertising and Their Enduring Reverberations

Abstract

Harlow Gale is often depicted as the first experimentalist in advertising thought. This positioning elides influences which impacted upon his thinking. In this article, we outline Gale’s involvement with psychical research and its implications for advertising. These narratives are situated within a genealogy of subliminal processes across advertising and marketing theory from the late nineteenth century through to social cognition studies today. Gale’s connection with psychical research, in conjunction with early practitioner reflections on the unconscious, formed the enabling conditions for his major contributions to advertising. Psychical scholarship spotlighted the centrality of the “multiplex self” to human functioning. While psychical framings scaffolded Gale’s empirical, conceptual, and theoretical work, it also limited greater engagement with his insights. However, subsequent modifications of advertising theory and practice are underwritten by levels of continuity and discontinuity that facilitate the identification of psychically indebted bodies of thought from Gale’s time to the present day. Taken together, these analytic associations provide a substantive reorientation of historical and contemporary accounts of advertising theory and practice.