What goes up, must come down.

The Great Depression was the worst financial crisis in history,  with a large portion of the world population out of work people were unwilling (or unable) to make any unnecessary purchases.
Advertisers had finally learned in the 1920s the concept of using targeted advertising in all media to push sales harder than ever before but in the 1930s the advertising industry was going to have to turn away from selling to gender roles, despite all the progress that the 1920s had made in the way of defining targeted marketing the Great Depression came like a wave to wash it away.
Women had to return home to keep the family together and men were sent out to search for work, naturally, advertising companies had to cater to the new status quo.

As most of Europe and the U.S. settled into the worst of the Great Depression in 1932, there was enormous pressure on newspapers and magazines to cut their rates, resulting in rate wars and widespread distrust of circulation claims by advertisers. Lord & Thomas made it a matter of policy that any invoice received from a publication must come with a statement of circulation for the previous 30-day period.

Advertising at this time may have had more depiction of women at home rather than out living a leisurely life and men at work or in a suit rather than driving a shiny new ford but its actual style of design didn’t change a great deal from the previous years.
There was still a decent amount of text and one significant image, however, the rate of advertising had definitely slowed right down!

This slow down of advertising was would be prolonged by WWII coming, although unknown to people at the time the way we advertised was about to take a sharp turn once again…