Radio Ads

The history of advertising over the air, featuring Cynthia B. Meyers, author of A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
An Now, Ladies and gentlemen, you're attentionally ephemeral as production
of I heeart three D audio for full exposure listen
with headphones. Every time humans invent a new way to
talk to each other, we reignite an age old debate.

(00:23):
There are people who predict that this communication technology will
prevent war and allow us to all communicate more effectively.
It will be great, it will solve all of the
world's problems. That's the techno utopianism. And then there's the technophobia,
where people are concerned that this new technology will harm us,

(00:44):
it will brought our brains, it will control us, or
maybe it won't harm us, but it'll harm our children.
There's always a grain of truth in all of this,
and that a new technology does have a kind of
outsized impact until it becomes part of normal life. My
name is Cynthia Myers. I'm the author of a book

(01:07):
called A Word from Our Sponsor admin Advertising and the
Golden Age of Radio, and I'm Professor Emerita at the
College amount St. Vincent in New York City. As we'll
come to see, the history of advertising and radio is
in many ways the story of radio itself and a
foundational chapter in the history of American mass media. The

(01:31):
earliest experiments with sending sound wirelessly through the electromagnetic spectrum
took place in the eighteen nineties. The first form of
it is the wireless which is a telegraph without wires,
where you could send Morse code over the air. Adding
voice and adding actual audio doesn't really happen until the

(01:53):
late teens. In World War One, it's used by the
Navy for a shift to shore communication. So after World
War One, the US government wanted to develop this fancy
new technology. They decided they didn't want to take it over,
just as they decided not to do that with telephony
and telegraphy, So they had to try to figure out

(02:13):
how to build it as some sort of business or industry.
They've created a corporation called Radio Corporation of America. The
family including r C A, Victor, rd A, Radiotron, r
D A Communications Radio Marine, r C A Instituced, and
the National Broadcasting Company, which basically stole these wireless patents.

(02:35):
They were producing and manufacturing different kinds of radio sets
and receivers and transmitters, and they're trying to figure out
how to make more money from it. R C a
created a network called National Broadcasting Company NBC Radio. NBC
was based in New York City, but they would transmit

(02:56):
programs to stations located all over the country. Musicians would
literally just play for free on the air to get
people interested in buying radio sets. This might remind you
today of how people provide free content in order to
eventually get paid for it. But they had to figure
out a way of financing the programming and the broadcasters,

(03:18):
that is, the networks and those local stations. They were
technical people. They were running a transmitter. They didn't know
how to make entertainment, and they also didn't want to
spend the money. They wanted to rent air time to
charge somebody, you know, fifty dollars for fifteen minutes on
their transmitter. But the only people who really wanted to

(03:38):
reach lots of people at one time were advertisers. Up
until this time, the advertising industry was primarily based in
print newspapers and magazines. People don't stop to thank much
about printing. It's like a drink of water. You buy
a newspaper a magazine and use it. Advertisers those are

(04:01):
the people who actually make stuff like soap or cigarettes.
They would hire ad agencies to go to the newspaper
and say we want to buy a page. The newspaper
would say, okay, well that'll be a thousand dollars. The
ad agency then would be the broker. They go back
to the advertiser and say, look, you know, don't you
want to buy this page in this newspaper to advertiser,

(04:22):
soap s only a thousand dollars. The advertiser would pay
the agency a thousand dollars and then the agency would
keep a hundred and fifty of it commission and then
forward fifty of it to the newspaper. And then the
ad agency, as a courtesy, would make the ad for
the advertiser. So they would write the words copywriting, and

(04:44):
they would make the illustrations our direction. Two major strategies
evolved from print advertising, the hard sell and the soft
Sellin hard sell advertising, it was all about the product
and product information craft caramels in bags, pocket sized bars,

(05:07):
and at candy cotters everywhere, and tended to be very
repetitive and hypopolou to crack carmos, two cracked calmos, two
crack camos. To crack garmel, you had to give lots
of reasons why to a consumer to buy the product
true caramel flavor you get only from pure sugar, with
all of the minerals, all of the protein of good
fresh milk. You would say, look, here's your problem. You

(05:32):
have dirty laundry. Here's a solution. It's rinse so laundry so. Well,
why do you want to buy rinso instead of another
laundry stuff? Well, because Rinso lifts the dirt up. Rinso
doesn't red in your hands, Rinso doesn't damage your clothing.
Rinso produces lots of SuDS. Rinso is priced really well,

(05:54):
it's an amazing so. Print advertising in the nineteen twenties
is full of a lot of words, pair a graphs,
and paragraphs. The idea was that if you provided enough
reasons why to buy one of them would convince the consumer.
Mighty Putty is not a glue, but a superpower to
POxy pulled to any shape and apply directly to most

(06:14):
any surface for an everlasting box. Rills, holds and screws
can ruin your projects. With mighty putty. You just cut,
activate and apply. Here's something you can't do with glue.
Mighty putty seals leaks instantly. It has the strength to
pull this fully loaded eighty thousand pound tractor trailer. Now

(06:35):
that's the power of mighty putty. A counter strategy was
what we now call the soft sell. Instead of talking
about the product, they've appealed to people's emotions. Go the

(06:55):
hard sell soft cell distinction. I think is really easy
to see once you know what it is. Is the
ad about the product or is the ad about how
we feel? Most ads today are about how we feel.
There's very little information about how McDonald's hamburger tastes, but
there's often a lot of imagery about people being with

(07:17):
their friends and their family and enjoying deal. And I
don't just rot to de beat, but the hard cell
was the dominant ad strategy up through the nineties, with
the print industry as their model. Advertising proponents were eager
to start selling on radio, but there was deep seated

(07:38):
anxiety that this could poison the well the industry and
regulators are worried that it would kill this brand new
industry if advertising was direct. They were afraid that people
would turn off the radio, tossed the radio set into
the trash. There's a land of sector people like Herbert

(07:59):
who Over, who was Secretary of State in the ninet
twenties suggested that radio only be an indirect advertising medium,
sort of like a public relations effort. So an advertiser
word by half an hour of time, and the only
advertising was in the name of the show. So you
have the ever Ready Hour Battery Latom get right Dated,

(08:22):
ever Ready Battery Floor Lilflife, or the Clicko Club Eskimos.
The idea was that a listener would hear the musical
show and feel very positively towards this company for providing
them with free entertainment. The music that these advertisers chose

(08:43):
to put on the air had to fit in with
their brand. Clicko Club was a ginger Ale company. They
put together a band called the Clicko Club Eskimos, which
is supposed to make you think of coolness, right, something
cool and icy, And then they played music that was
very bubbly and my favorite part are the sled dogs

(09:07):
that are barking a tune. I mean they're not really
sled dogs. This was all designed to create a brand
association and what we call sponsor identification that the audience
is listening to this perkeep music and they're like, oh,
this is Clicko Club, and they're the sponsor. They're putting
this on from me and my enjoyment. Well, next time

(09:29):
I go to the store, instead of buying Canada drygein Dreo,
I'll be sure to buy Clico Club. The program was
the ad The program was the brand image. There weren't
commercials in the sense that we understand them today. But
by the beginning of the depression it became clear that

(09:50):
advertisers wanted to do more than that, and so the
rules kind of changed. The success of our whole national
program depends of close on the cooperation of the public.
Advertisers were in a panic about the collapse of consumer demand,
and they saw radio as a way of stimulating it.

(10:11):
So what happens in the nineties is that the broadcasters
are not in charge of programs at all. They simply
rent the time, and then the advertisers have to figure
out how to fill that time. First, they would hire
people from the vaudeville industry, or the theater industry, or
the music industry. But advertisers were dissatisfied with that because
they were concerned that those people cared more about the

(10:33):
show than about their advertising. So they turned to their
advertising agencies. Now their agencies were the people who used
to buy them pages in print media. A lot of
agencies or I'm not sure that radio should be an
ad medium. They were concerned about people being turned off
by advertising and how it was invading the home, and

(10:55):
it was pervasive, it was just in the air, but
some add agencies jumped on it. A lot of print media,
we're going out of business in the depression, A lot
of newspapers and magazines shut down, and ad agencies earned
their money from charging commissions to those print magazines and newspapers.
So with the radio they had a whole new revenue stream.

(11:16):
The ad agencies essentially said, Okay, we're going to turn
this ad agency into an entertainment production company. They would
hire writers to write the scripts. Sorry, they would hire
the actors to read the scripts and play the characters.
First line product integration. They would hire music directors, producers, directors,

(11:40):
and many of those people were employed directly at the
ad agency. Some agencies got into this because they were young,
upstart agencies and anxious to break into this new technology.
Well they are all. DAR wasn't an agency like Pentenham Bowls.
Most of their business was producing radio shows like Maxwell

(12:02):
House Showboat for companies like General Foods. No matter what
your favorite entertainment is, you will always find it on
the Maxwell House Killbot. Who you are? Maxwell House, Cope
a cooling bank of ice, Macbell Health copy with It,
Fendily stimulation, it wos you up and never let you down.

(12:24):
Other agencies like J Walter Thompson and B B d
O which is short for BT and bartin Jerson and Osbourne.
How do you sell er b A T T e
n V A R t O N d u r
s t I n e O s b O r
n what. They were well established agencies. They were very
successful in nineteen twenties. In the nineteen thirties they started

(12:46):
their own radio departments and were soon producing dozens of
radio shows for their clients and ad agencies promised their
clients that the shows that they would produce would for
elect the needs of that brand image. So all of
a sudden, companies that make toothpaste were involved in entertainment gate.

(13:10):
Camel games. Read this week te that right when you
brush the morn and night we go gate dandel Grade
we do wasn't necessarily the first time that advertisers were
involved in entertainment. In the nineteenth century. There were these
things called medicine shows. They get to a town out

(13:34):
become a banjo player or tap dancer or commune, and
they gather the crowd around and they put on show
for free betters. Show coming better around, So shut up
your shoes and cout out your dope. Let come all

(13:54):
down through the show. Then they pull out the product.
In a product, it's usually a patent medicine, usually mostly alcohol.
But they were sold and promoted as curatives, claiming to
cure the food, cure constipation, cure lethargy, you know, everything
you can imagine under the sun. These are all fraudulent,

(14:17):
of course, but patent medicines were the top advertisers in
print media, and there were the top advertisers in terms
of entertainment. Now about a pain in the net. Eventually,
in the nineteen teens we got a Ritual Trade Commission
in the Food and Drug Administration to crack down on

(14:38):
this kind of fraud. But when radio comes along, there
are people who accuse it of just basically being a
high tech medicine show, and in some sense it was.
You'll find the fact that the most complete relief in adison.
You've every sure the reason is simple. Addison contained not

(15:00):
one they ativiated along for before. If later fails, your
food may remain on the justice, leaving your headache in
irritable to feel fearful and happy again. Big Carter's little liverpill.
And my doctor recommended ivory. He did all he so
condu with clanny, and that to protect the fine texture
and pours a soculd pin gently, and that to do

(15:21):
that so must be pure blultaslter is a solution when
you take it the same remating energy. Six studium mastile
solicillates is ready to go right to work and say
that there is the cree. Eight thousands of sparkling bubbles
give speed to alcidosis relifition in qualities. Yeah, I'm just

(15:47):
trying to find out how I can improve the program.
Wait a minute, Wait a minute, everybody, this maybe trouble.
Come in. Do you want an opinion? Oh you you
heard the program and it's too slow? You mean you
did not? I should bank bank bang, good bye. He
must be in a fast business. I make minute rob
so long. Okay, the sponsor wants speed, that's what he's

(16:14):
going to get now on your toes. Everybody. We have
stopped the program over, take it away, Pete, I pun
up style present and here he is, thank you, Anne,
Here she is Hello man. You can't get it any
fashion than that. With radio, we have very few recorded
programs from the thirties and forties because audio tape, a

(16:37):
format which you can edit, didn't exist before the nineties.
In fact, the Nazis helped invent it. In the networks
disallowed recordings of any kind during their network broadcasts. Everything
had to be live, every single thing, the sound effects,
the music, the acting, And that was because the networks
wanted to make sure the affiliates all those local radio

(16:59):
stations didn't just go out and buy some recorded programs
and not use the networks at all. So when advertisers
first started getting into radio, some of them more concerned
that it was too ephemeral, that the words that came
over the radio set would come and go so quickly
that the audience wouldn't catch it. So they did things

(17:21):
like they repeated their brand name over and over. Ladies
and gentlemen, this is a new pitch Bandwagon, brought to
you by the f W Pitch company makers a Pictures
Ideal Hair Tonic and Pictures Danders removing Campoo. They spelled
out their brand name r E. S p. A A Blanca,

(17:43):
cresta Blanca. It's with print. You had the advertisement on
a piece of paper. You could look at it again,
you could reread it, you could give it to somebody else.
And they're really worried that this kind of ephemerality would
make radio advertising less effective. But proponents would argue that
that efemorality wasn't a problem because radio used the voice.

(18:07):
The idea rides on the speaker's voice and his words
on how these words are articulated and pronounced and used
in language, and the voice was a much more effective
vehicle for advertising message than that dry, impersonal, voiceless print
on the page. Radio announcers usually were like the m

(18:30):
C of the show, Well your faithful friend, when muscle
they can pain dang busters. They would open the show,
they'd introduced the show, they'd introduced the characters. Sometimes they
would give the backstory. Now we present once again Mary Noble,
backdaid wife, the story of a little Iowa girl who
married one of America's more tantom actors, Larry noble matinee

(18:52):
idol of a million other women, the story of what
it means to be the wife of a famous star.
And they would also offer make the announcement the word
from our sponsor, good advice officer, it always pays to
strike the happy medium even and the like that if
you take that's why more and more people are using
Act Black. And those announcers then became really important because

(19:14):
they were embodying the brand. No matter what your favorite
entertainment is, you'll always find it on the Maxwell House
show board. You're taking admitting as always just your loyalty
the Maxwell House Coffee. The other reason they thought it
would be powerful was because people were receiving these messages
in the comforts of their home, and so they're going

(19:37):
to be more receptive, more vulnerable. We might say today
to this disembodied voice coming directly into the private emotional
center of American lives, Let's see how the broadcast gets
from the studio to your home. These ideas that radio
was a particularly powerful medium also meant that regulators are

(20:01):
very worried about it. Of course, you don't hear the
real sounds over your home radio. What you hear is
a translation of the song. The Nazis in the nineteen
thirties were using radio as a propaganda machine, and a
lot of people were convinced that radio had converted a
large part of the German population to the Nazi cause,

(20:24):
and so there was a lot of concern that radio
was too powerful a medium and we had to be
really careful that it wasn't abused. Radio waves from many
programs are being picked up by your radio all the time.
More often the networks were more concerned that advertisers would
offend audiences and then the listeners would turn off the

(20:47):
network or turn off the radio altogether. NBC had a
department called the Continuity Acceptance Department, and it was essentially
a censoring process. They would read the scripts and advance
of the broadcast and try to censor anything that they
thought would offend an audience. They called it ready ears
or your ears burning baby. So there's this very strong

(21:11):
sense that in order to serve the public interest with
this commercially sponsored programming, everything that went out had to
appeal to all ages. It had to be inoffensive and uncontroversial.

(21:31):
Henry older dad that everyone's every day experiences in the
older living room and would not cross a line into
anything that resembled propaganda. Now we have this thing in
the Constitution called the First Amendment. The federal government is
not supposed to impose prior restraint on the press, that is,

(21:56):
the news media. They can't make a rule saying you
can't cover this topic. But what happened with radio is
that because it was an uncontrolled medium, it just goes
out into the ether the air, and it can't sort
of control who gets it. Regulators decided that radio did
not have full First Amendment protection. Radio stations had to

(22:18):
serve the public interest, and that meant that they couldn't
just broadcast anything they wanted. So a radio station could
not broadcast pornography or even indecency, that is bad words.
They could get in trouble with the Federal Communications Commission
and lose their license, and their licenses essentially access to
a certain part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Today, the only

(22:42):
entities that are subject to this limited First protection are broadcasters,
people who transmit over the electromagnetic spectrum, which includes terrestrial
radio J and then linear broadcast television networks and ABC, CBS,

(23:05):
and that's about it. Everybody else, all those cable networks.
They are not subject to that limitation. They have full
First Amendment rights, and today, of course, Internet is not
at all subject to limited First Amendment protection. Two dominant networks,
both of which survived today, emerged in nine twenties. Radio

(23:27):
with fundamental differences between them. NBC was a subsidiary of
the Radio Corporation of America. Which kind of music do
you like? And it was essentially a loss leader designed
to just keep the industry moving ahead. You name it
r C A Victor's Got It the music you want
when you wanted by the world's greatest artists, sending out

(23:50):
programs in order to get people to burn more radio sets.
The philteramic antenna is featured in this X four model,
along with dual speakers that filled the room with the
best am sound ever heard. They didn't really see themselves
as an entertainment or advertising company. They saw themselves as
a technological company that wraps up our c A Victor's

(24:11):
New line of radios, good listening and good selling. This
is CBS. They cut on be a broadcasting system. CBS,
on the other hand, was designed to please advertisers because
it was taken over a buy an advertiser in the
late twenties, William Paley, so my closest friends so that

(24:32):
I was buying into a gimmick. They just couldn't understand
anybody having any doubt about the future of this media.
William Paley's family owned a tobacco company and they sold
a lot of cigars called the La Paulina cigars on
a radio show in the nineteen twenties in Philadelphia. Well, George,
so this is the place you buy those secret weapons

(24:53):
you smoke. And they realized that radio could be a
very effective selling tool. Eddie, Please, these happen to be
very fine cigars. Sure, you walk through Los Angeles smoking
those things in the poorness and rubber factory gets all
the blame. Paley basically bought these radio stations in this network,
which had been a subsidiary of the Columbia Recording Company,

(25:17):
and he builds it up into I think one of
the most effective advertising platforms in media history, because he
decides to really cater to advertisers and help them figure
out how best to reach their aciences. But the people
actually making decisions about programs were not the networks. Back

(25:40):
in the thirties and the forties, the networks were only
deciding who to sell time to. Let's have my own brand, Joe,
there's a quarter, thank you, Mr Candor here's your ten cigars.
The people making the decisions about the programs were the
advertisers and their advertising agencies. One of the top radio

(26:09):
producers was called Blackett sample Huart. Frank hummert realize very
early on that radio would be an excellent medium for
reaching housewives. Housewives to be at home sweeping the floor,
doing the dishes, and they could have the radio on
and listen to a show. Ladies, drill at the new
loveliness of your complexion, the radiant, pingling feeling that is yours.

(26:30):
After a facial with Hopper White clay Pack, Hummer decided
that the best way to keep audiences tuned into the
radio was to provide serialized stories. Well for a week
he followed the continual plotting of the Cousins against Mam
Now coutin Silvester is trying to make Faith fall in
love with him, and at the same time he and

(26:51):
his Dady doesn't it, are trying to keep Willie and
Evy out of their life. Bab newspapers and magazines had
provide serialized stories for cads. They're very popular in nineteenth
century literature. Those cereals then were like fifteen minutes a day.
They was open with an organ playing these dramatic cords.

(27:12):
And you've heard these organs sounds parodied ever since. The
Homards would create multiple programs at the same time by
creating an industrial script production process, no very noble backstage. Ye,
So the Homards would come up with a plot outline
yesterday Larry took Mary to an old roundaboo in the
hope of breaking down the barriers that have caused them

(27:35):
to live apart for the past few months. Then they
would have a script manager who would break it down
into acts and scenes. Although reconciliations seen near troubles involving
Larry's half brother Bob broke up what promised to be
a perfect evening. Then they'd have somebody else actually write
the dialogue Larry, I've got ever doing the right thing.

(27:56):
Oh no, I've made mad as worse. And they could
just churn out dozens of scripts simultaneously. The following morning,
in the dinet of Mary's Greenwich Village studio, we find
mc listen. Same actors would stand in front of the
mic and perform four different characters in four different programs,
one right after the other. Say this is the first

(28:17):
real cup of coffee I've had since we fooled ourselves
and thinking we needed a vacation from each other. Oh,
I know what that means. You want another cup? Are?
Mar Perkins? Was one of their programs. It was sponsored
by OXIDL dob and mar Perkins would be somebody who
would help solve people's problems in her community. And Ma

(28:39):
never dreamed that all her doubles come from the knot,
but right here for our thought. Then the announcer would
come on and would spend ninety seconds explaining how oxyd
Hall the Laundry Soap could solve all of your laundry problems.
Say that's a mighty white water you're hanging. You're using

(29:00):
one of those news dads. I've been hearing about something
even better. I'm using Deep Cleaning occidor Yeah, ladies, deep
cleaning out at all. It's got both talking all over
the country. Some of the other programs they produced were
The Romance of Helen Trents. Once again, we bring you
the Romance of Helen trent who sets out to prove
for herself that romance can live in life. At thirty

(29:23):
five and after Stella Dallas and now Stella Dallas, the
Shutter Life sequel is written by us to the world
famous drama of mother, love and sacrifice. In my view,
just plain Bill Blainville, Davidson, Barbara of Hockday attend the

(29:46):
real life story of people who might be your own
next door neighbor. Argal Sunday once again were then a
Goal Sunday, the story of an upen girl named Sunday
who was left on the depth of the cat and
the two old miners who raised up in childhood in
a little mining count of Pilver Creek, Colorado. These programs

(30:09):
were heavily mocked and criticized for being slow, repetitive, portentis boring,
and they were also mocked because they were designed to
appeel the housewives. Today, of course, we call these kinds
of daytime serial dramas soap operas because they were primarily
sponsored by soap companies in the nineteen thirties. You know,

(30:30):
I guess a lot of you ladies are having couple
with those halfway soap editions. What are you going to
be sure there's nothing halfway about you does, although cereal
companies like General Mills also sponsored quite a few of
these as well. I don't know why they weren't called
cereal cereals, but we ended up with the phrase soap
operas instead. For youthful regularity, you try killoggs all brand.

(30:53):
It's a double L hyphen b R and killogged all brand. Basically,
the program was hard sell ad vehicle. The soft cell, however,
was also common on radio. The agency Young and Ruby Cam,
I would say, was the top soft cell company, and

(31:13):
they believed that hitting consumers over the head with repetitive
product information was alienating and it didn't work. The way
you sold things was you tried to entertain the audience.
You tried to get their attention. You tried to be
a little funny and humorous and then once you soften
them up, and then you would tell them about the product.

(31:34):
Two of Young and Ruby Camp's top programs or the
Jack Benny Show and Fred Allen's Town Hall Tonight and now,
Ladies and gentlemen, we bring you that delicious comedian with
the locked in bank roll, Jack Benny. Jack Benny was
sponsored by the General Fried's brand Jello. Then program presented

(31:56):
by Tello and Talo pudding, flowering Jack Benny with Mary Livings,
Phil Harris, Jenna Day Rochester and Yours truly Don Wilson.
Jack Benny was a comedian out there, Thank you, thank
you Jelo again. This is Jack Benny Jelong again for
the last time. Next season it will be great nuts late.
They would interweave the Jello brand into jokes and scenes.

(32:17):
Why don't you all go down to your little old
neighborhood grocer store and say, children, we gotta into package
of Jello I'm wanting, And then the announcer would give
announcements about Jello. It was more than forty years ago, friends,
that the first package of Jello was handed across the counter,
carried home and served to a delighted family and all

(32:38):
of smiles with Red Allen, folks, thirty six hundred seconds
of fun and music. Fred Allen was another comedian who
came out of that lovable buffoon that man about clown.
What is your name again? Budd? You know me? I
I was on the program last year. One of my
favorite ways that he made fun advertising was he and

(33:02):
his announcer Harry Gonzel, had a dialogue once in which
they could not remember the name of their sponsoring brand.
Don't ever neglect the cold. At the very first time
of a cold, get after it immediately with a faster
help of sparkling. Sparkling. What's the name, Fred Allen, am, No, no, no,

(33:25):
the name of it? What it is that helps fight
cold faster? With my mind? Well, it will come. Do
you go ahead? Well, yes, yes, Or ladies and gentlemen,
there's this famous product act very quickly. Yeah, it's exceptionally
gentle And since the progress of a cold is very fast,
the greater speed of what it is I'm talking about
is especially important in fighting your cold. And that's not

(33:49):
all this. The name will come to me in a minute.
They're making fun of the fact that hard sell advertising
agencies like the Homards would just repeat the name over
and over and over again until you wanted to throw
the radio out the window. Fred, you know what I'm
talking about? I certainly, Harry, you're talking about America's outstanding
staleine action. That's a friend of the name. Is the

(34:11):
name is so many physicians recommends yes, yes to abandon
helped pride cold faster. But what is the name? Wait, Harry,
there must be somebody around here who knows if there is.
When you please tell us confidentially, that's it, sal Herpadicus.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. Another one of

(34:35):
my favorite examples is in a drama called The Gibsons,
sponsored by Procter and Gambles Ivory soaked. That's all before
the overture to the second act of the Gibson Family,
let's step back state and looking on Sally, Gibsons and Hilda,
her maid, who was helping Sally change for the next seat.
In this scene, the young lady of the house is

(34:56):
instructing her maid about the best kind of so hope
to use. Help me, what's wrong with my faith, Miss Sally?
Those red blotchers just won't go away. Nope, Probably what
kind are you using? Some beauty so by the blowy fiance,
Miss Sally, that one that promises radiant beauty, glamorous you,
irresistible loveliness. She also criticizes other advertising strategies. So you

(35:23):
can't see the pores of your skin with beauty oils,
the mysterious ingredients no and many highly perfumed, prettily colored
soap contained study acids and pre alkalies that really irritating
honder skin. But miss salent I doctor recommended Ivory. He said,
Ivory would help to keep my skin smooth and fine,
unless sallet. Do you think Henry would quick my glove?

(35:44):
Hilda is the bilt of the second day. By integrating
the ad throughout the show, they would hope that the
audience would stay attentive and by staying attentive within get
the advertising message. And this strategy has come back in
full force today. Advertisers have been working very hard at

(36:04):
integrating themselves in all sorts of ways. Because advertisers know
that they probably lose your attention once the commercial interruption
comes on. One of the most obvious ways to sell
your show and in turn your product is to put
someone famous on the payroll. Random Blue J Walter Thompson

(36:32):
was one of the top radio program producers of the time,
and J. Walter Thompson's main strategy on radio was to
use celebrities. They produced shows like Craft Music Hall with
Bing Crosby, Major Bow's Amateur Hour, which was like the
American Idol of its day. Our gift deometers are ready

(36:53):
to entertain you and to entrust their success to you
and to your votes. The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour with Rudy Valley,
who was a famous singer. Another version of it had
Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Edgar Bergen was a ventriloquist
and Charlie McCarthy was his dummy. I think we better

(37:14):
do it now. I would graded dirt tomorrow. I think
you better do it now, but I wouldn't. It doesn't
make any different what you'd rather to do, don't know.
That's another way of looking at it. It's pretty strange
when you think about having ventriloquism on the radio. By
this time, I think most of you get the idea.
But for the second move, commers, I repeat. Both male
voices you hear in this act come from the lips

(37:36):
and behind the lips of one man. They also had
a show called Lux Radio Theater from Hollywood, California. The
Lux Radio Theater presents no white than the Seventh Dwarf,
where they would take current Hollywood movies and reduce them
down to a short running time, then have the movie
stars come on and on a live broadcast re enact

(37:59):
scenes from that movie. Tells Gonave, this was a way
to not just promote the movie, but it was designed
to associate lux toilet soap, with movie stars aiding in
tonight's production. And our guest of honor is walk there's

(38:20):
me himself. Mr de Mill will step off all the
curtain in just a moment, but before he does a
word about the product that brings you this program, Lux Blake.
Lux Flakes have thousands of loyal followers all over the
world because lovely women everywhere depend on these fine gentle
flakes to keep their things dainty. It was a very
effective strategy that you see advertisers still used today. Fyance

(38:44):
sounding pepsi pepsi. The celebrity brings in a built in audience,
and so it's a way of pre buying your audience.
You're not having to build your audience from scratch. And
then you say, oh, and by the way, Being Crosby
loves Craft cheese, yeah by Mr dale Craft that this

(39:08):
ms my metho ten years on the old craft music.
Don't get smug about it if any one. So, if
you like Being Crosby, maybe a Whitecraft cheese. The downside
is if the audience turns against that celebrity. Let's say
that celebrity gets involved in some kind of scandal. Then
it's a problem for the advertiser because the advertiser only

(39:30):
wants positive associations with its brand. And this becomes a
really big problem during the McCarthy era, when advertisers begin
blacklistening performers, fearful that housewives would stop buying craft cheese
if they hired a communist actor. I get the impression
to file, you are finally an actor. I don't think

(39:50):
you have any conception of the danger of the communist part.
But by the nineties, most radio shows were lad major
stars because advertisers realized that big stars helped to build
big audiences. When I first ran into picture as an
actor was an actor? Well, what is an actor in

(40:10):
Hollywood today? He's a straight man for a set of dishes.
Another completely different strategy was institutional advertising. You're not trying
to advertise a particular product. You're not trying to get
somebody to buy your brand of soap. Instead of what
you're advertising is your corporate image. You're trying to get
people to think that your company is a good company.

(40:33):
B B Do, Baton, Barkin, Durson and Osbourne was one
of the top institutional advertising agencies. Companies hired BBDO to
help improve their image among the public, and one way
they did that was by sponsoring radio shows. Their clients
included General Electric, General Electric Theater, General Motors, General Motors, US,

(40:58):
Steel State, the Industrial family that herbs the Nation, prevent
the Hour of Mystery, DuPont makers of Better Things or
Better Living Chemistry. These are all giant corporations that had
major public image problems. They had major labor strikes. They

(41:23):
were dealing with all sorts of safety and health issues.
In particular, the chemical company du Pont, after making a
fortune manufacturing unitions for the First World War, was being
investigated under accusations of encouraging a global arms race. DuPont

(41:45):
hired b B d O to make a radio show
called Cavalcade of America. Cavalcade of America, which told stories
about American history, particularly American technological history. So they would
hire actors and dramatize moments of the past, like the
invention of the Remington rifle. When they such a demand
for your gun, you can't just say sorry, but I

(42:06):
can't take any more orders. You make more guns and
turn it into a kind of heroic drama to appeal
to audiences and to convince them that DuPont actually share
their American values. Can you make a hundred and fifty
Remington Rifles Forever? And that DuPont was accompanied leading away

(42:27):
in technological progress for more than one hundred and thirty years,
almost as long as this nation has lived, the name
of DuPont has been associated with this country's progress. So
it seems appropriate that DuPont should have the privilege of
presenting this series of episodes taken truthfully from American history,
to remind us that from the earliest days to the
present time, the American people have stood for the staunch

(42:49):
and simple qualities that form our heretic. They hired big
stars to perform in it, All the Forge, starring Ronald
Reagan as the level of Remington on the Cavalcade of America.
They hired all sorts of major writers to write for it,
and they hired historians to vet the historical accuracy. A
group of distinguished educators prominent in the American Historical Association

(43:12):
is working with DuPont to achieve the spirit of historical accuracy.
So they're spending a lot of money on essentially a
public relations effort. It is the hope of DuPont that
these stories from the pages of our country's history will
awaken in the Americans of today, are renewed by the
the Americans who went before us in the Cavalcade of America.

(43:33):
They had bpdo go do a bunch of survey research,
and basically what they learned is that it was not
a very popular program, but the people who listened seemed
to be convinced that DuPont was a good company, and
so they kept it up. A lot of chemical research
come the thousands of products that contribute to better living.

(43:53):
It was on the air almost two decades and they
turned it into a television show at DuPont Company, Maker
of Better Things, a Better Living through Chemistry presents the
dupart Cavalcade Theater dramatic stories of people who were a
part of the Cavalcade of America because they were convinced
of its value as a public relations effort. By the seventies,

(44:17):
institutional advertisers basically move over to public broadcasting, and that's
where you find companies like Mobile Oil sponsoring dramas on
masterpiece theater. Masterpiece theater has a strange effect on intelligent people.
It lures them to their television sets, and it doesn't
let them go. It's essentially the same strategy. Masterpiece Theater

(44:39):
Sunday Evenings on PBS brought to you by mobile. Amid
this variety of radio programming, there was one format ubiquitous
today that was conspicuously missing from airwaves. We didn't have
very many broadcast news pro grahams in the thirties and

(45:01):
forties because they didn't have the recording technology and the
field equipment, and because when audiences didn't like something, they
would threaten to boycott the advertiser. But B B d
O actually produced The March of Time, which was a
news docu drama which later became newsreel that people would

(45:23):
see in movie theaters, but it started as a radio show.
They would hire people like Orson Welles, who was an
unknown actor, to come in and perform news stories the moment,
Mr Phillips, so they would script them. They had a
live audience, they had a live sound effects person, and
people didn't realize sometimes that they were hearing a re enactment.

(45:44):
They re enacted the assassination attempt on President Roosevelt my
friends of and people thought they were hearing the actual gunshots.
They re enacted the burning of the Hindenburg. The same
night that it happened, they re enacted Amelia Earhart disappearing
in the Pacific and had an actress play Amelia Earhart

(46:07):
trying to make her last radio transmission. It wasn't exactly
engine trouble, it was the maracle, And then the listeners
thought they were actually hearing Emeria Earhart. I curve inman
until I found a fitable tacket. So that was news
in the early thirties. We didn't actually get broadcast news
until World War Two, and after that. World War two

(46:32):
would be a major turning point in American radio, the
dramatic story of radio at war. During the run up
to the war, there was a lot of fear that
the US government would take over broadcasting a national license.
Is Washington w a r at HL minus twenty execute

(46:53):
plan Z. Instead, what happened was the Office for War
Information had been ending out documentary style announcements about what
people at home should do to help the home front.
We've got to follow a new way of light, a
war way of life. Every home, every business, every farm

(47:16):
is in that war, every man, woman and child. They're
very didactic and kind of like instructional pamphlets. Take every
bit of scrap you have to addn official salvage depot,
pick up all sorts of rubber accessory, save the grease
from cooking. But if your local salvage committee does not

(47:36):
ask for tin cans, please do not bring them in.
Let me repeat. That is until the office was appointed
a new leader, a gentleman named Warren by Lewis, who
had been an executive at CBS and also at Geraldra.
Thompson came from this background in radio entertainment advertising, and

(47:57):
he said, you know, how about if we set up
a system where we take existing radio shows and just
ask them to integrate propaganda information into it. It was
called his network Allocation Plan, where one type of program
would be assigned to talk about victory gardens. Victory garden.

(48:17):
Victory garden was growing your own vegetables to eat your family.
We can grow food for victory in our own backyards
and even in vacant lots where perhaps only weeds flourished.
Before there was no requirement as to how they would
mention victory gardens. They could do something that sounded like
a commercial. You can have vegetables, lots of them, on

(48:40):
your table next winter. You can have your own fresh
vegetables on your table this summer if you have your
own victory garden. If it were a soap opera and
one of the characters could be growing her own victory gardens,
thank you. But the God really isn't mine. I merely
take care of it. See that everything is properly cared for. Well.
Actually anything. Any musical variety shows, they could sing a

(49:04):
song about victory gardens in the Hongcome Working in the
Old In comedy shows, they could tell jokes about victory gardens.
Roses are red, violets are blue. I know violets are
blue because I've seen her hanging them out on the
line the other day. It didn't matter as long as

(49:24):
victory gardens were mentioned during the program, and then the
next week they would be given the assignment to talk
about how to buy war bonds. Look, will you do
something for me? Take this money and buy war bonds
in my name When I come back after the war,
I can use it. Besides, I can't think of a
better Christmas present or how to recycle rubber tires, the

(49:46):
greatest name in rubber Goodyear invite you to meet America's
greatest Western star, Roy Rogers. A lot of people were
very angry about this because they thought propaganda should be
seri is and not entertaining a pragmatic mission turning a
trip into weapons for common Ridge shap We're gone. But

(50:09):
Lewis was somebody who understood that the way that you
find audiences, the way you get audience attention, and the
way you get buy in from audiences is to entertain them.
Anyone today want the freedom. That's what I'm telling any
que today. Now. Radio boomed in this period. I would
say it reached its highest popularity in terms of listenership.

(50:32):
Consumer products were not being produced in factories at this time.
The American economy was a war economy, and so you
couldn't buy a new radios, you couldn't buy television sets,
you couldn't buy a new car, and so people hadn't
do was what they had, and radio was something that
over nine of American households had the magic of radio
fridging space faster than the most powerful play. So radio

(50:55):
was the dominant medium, and the end of World War
Two is its high water mark before it lost out
to television. For a look at the early television industry.
Check out our episode on the Forgotten Network. It's called Dumont.

(51:19):
Television takes quite a while to come into American homes.
It's invented back in the thirties, but the depression in
the war interrupt its dissemination. When they start with television,
they're carrying over the radio model with dramas like General
Electric Theater or General Electric. Here is Ronald Reagan, Good

(51:41):
Evening Ladies and Gentlemen, Armstrong Circle Theater, lakers of Armstrong's
Um and Armstrong's Plastic floors. US Steel Hour. This is
the United States Steel Hour. Variety shows like the Colgate Hours.
All right, Martin, I'm Jerry Lay Texaco Star Theater with

(52:08):
Milton Borough. Gentlemen. There he is himself your Tuesday Night Finderatta.
These were all shows that were live and single sponsored,
and initially that's what everybody thought, that's what TV would be.

(52:29):
You just sort of like radio but with that little screen.
But television, of course, costs ten times as much to
produce a show. You had to have lights, costumes, you
had to have actors who learned their lines instead of
reading a script in front of a mic. Television was
too expensive for a single advertiser, so you'd buy sixty
second spot rather than a show. By the sixties, you

(53:04):
also have the networks finally realizing that they are media companies,
they're not technology companies. Following program is brought to you
in living color on NBC, and the entire industry has
to realign. While broadcasters shifted to producing their own show,
agencies narrowed their focus to the ads themselves. Open up

(53:26):
Budweiser and bore yourself the most inviting blass of beer
you've ever tasted. Television commercials turned into elaborately produced, high
budget little mini movies that appear in between the scenes
of a lot of anodyne kind of TV shows. The
programs were designed to be this easy going, flat backdrop.

(53:49):
Christmas is a wonderful time of the year. I'm gladding
to enjoy it too. She was there essentially there to
fill air time so that an advertiser can sell something
in between. Generation the ads have much higher budgets on

(54:10):
a per second basis. The ads have top talent, and
so we have this period in the sixties and seventies
and eighties where I would say that the ads become
much better produced than the shows. You're in this changes
by the time cable comes along in the nineteen eighties
let go my and today, of course things are changing

(54:34):
some more. Bonus video, I'm gonna show you everything that
you need to know when it comes to running ads
on Instagram, How to set up high performing twitter at campaigns,
how to run ads form snatch, how to make a
great video ad, the easy way to get TikTok famous
in less than ten minutes, how to be an influence that,
how to make an impact, how to create a strong
personal brand. On instance are tiny today for many your broadcasts.

(54:58):
Nielsen is only measuring maybe a million viewers for a
top network show. And of course audience attention has moved
to streaming and to all sorts of other outlets and
platforms and technologies for not only consuming content, for for
creating their own content, And so advertisers are now once
again doing as much brand integration as they can, as

(55:20):
much product placement as they can, and they're paying producers
essentially to insert their brands and to associate their brand
with something that audiences like. So essentially the basic premise
of all radio sponsorship in the thirties and forties, it's
still the basic strategy Today Thing Crosby loves Minute Made.

(55:41):
Here's one of the phone news for you. Lend me
that man that made gives low vitamin C so by screens.
Or introduce yourself when doctors say Manute made orange juice
is batter for your health. Yes, Minute Main orange juice
is better for your health. MHO. This episode of Ephemeral

(56:19):
was written and assembled by Alex Williams, with producers Max
Williams and Trevor Yon. Cynthia B. Myers is the author
of a Word from our Sponsor, Admin Advertising and the
Golden Age of Radio. Find it wherever books are sold,
and find us on the worldwide web at Ephemeral Show.

(56:40):
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
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