Single Sponsorship in the “Golden Age” of Radio: 1920s–1940s

American broadcasting's singular reliance on advertising revenue was not inevitable.Footnote ⁹ Susan Douglas, Susan Smulyan, Robert McChesney, and Kathy Newman each document early resistance to radio's commercialization, identifying different turning points for the triumph of commercial broadcasting over alternative models. Michele Hilmes argues that there was no one single moment of decline into commercialism; rather, radio was commercial from its “earliest moments.”Footnote ¹⁰ A variety of factors led to the advertising-supported business model. Thomas Streeter notes that the political climate in the United States was hostile to tax-supported programming, which was perceived as an improper assumption of state power over media and a violation of the First Amendment.Footnote ¹¹ Although patent-holders and manufacturers could profit from selling radio equipment, broadcasters could not charge audiences admission fees to broadcast programs, as the signals were available to anyone with a receiver. Seeking a way to monetize its radio patents, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) began offering “toll broadcasting” in 1921. Like a telephone booth of the air, AT&T's radio station WEAF sold airtime on its transmitter to businesses for presenting promotional “selling talks”—charging the sender, not the receiver of the message.Footnote ¹² However, concerns that audiences would reject “direct advertising” on the air led many, including then secretary of state Herbert Hoover, to encourage businesses such as department stores to use radio for “indirect advertising” instead, that is, as a promotional or public relations medium.Footnote ¹³ To attract audiences, some companies canceled the “selling talks” and hired performers to fill their rented airtime with entertainment, often naming the programs after their products, including The Ipana Troubadours (1923–1934), The Eveready Hour (1923–1930), and The Clicquot Club Eskimos (1923–1936). Each advertiser hoped that this “free” entertainment would inspire audiences to feel “gratitude” and “good will” and in turn to buy its products.Footnote ¹⁴ Once audience demand was evident, these advertisers sought to reach listeners beyond the range of a local broadcast signal by linking stations together for simultaneous transmission. And so, by 1923 the foundations of American commercial network broadcasting were laid: an advertiser-controlled program was transmitted over distance by telephone landlines to multiple stations, having been produced in broadcast station facilities by an advertising agency hired by the advertiser.Footnote ¹⁵ The economies of scale involved presented strong incentives to individual stations to join networks of stations linked by landlines, and national advertisers realized that radio networking allowed them to penetrate multiple markets on a scale hitherto unseen in the print media, even by national magazines like the Saturday Evening Post.Footnote ¹⁶

During the Depression, while other media industries suffered revenue losses, spending on radio advertising increased, from $18 million in 1929 to $165 million in 1937.Footnote ¹⁷ But in broadcasting, unlike in print media, advertisers controlled the content through the practice of single sponsorship. The national broadcast networks, National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), simply rented each block of airtime to a single advertiser, which was then responsible for the programming. As one advertising executive put it in 1932, “When radio began the broadcasting companies couldn't afford to pay for their entertainment. . . . They said to the large national advertiser, ‘If you will put on a fine singer and a fine orchestra and a fine quartet, why, we will let you mention the name of your company.’”Footnote ¹⁸ But this collapsed the traditional divide in media between editorial content, controlled by the publisher, and advertising, controlled by the advertiser. The broadcasters, both local stations and national networks, although accountable to federal regulators for serving the public interest, essentially abdicated program control to advertisers. And advertisers, lacking expertise in audience attraction strategies, usually hired their advertising agencies to oversee or produce the programming.Footnote ¹⁹ Hence, radio programs were, as one advertising executive put it, “the product of the advertiser and his agent, and not the product of the networks.”Footnote ²⁰

The Depression spurred some hitherto reluctant advertisers to try program sponsorship. The practice of naming the program after the brand was, it was assumed, the most effective way to ensure “sponsor identification,” or audience awareness of the sponsor's brand, with the hope that listeners’ gratitude would extend to their purchasing decisions and so was practiced by tobacco companies (The Lucky Strike Hour, 1928–1934); automobile companies (The Ford Sunday Evening Hour, 1934–1942); and food manufacturers (Kraft Music Hall, 1935–1949). Companies that manufactured multiple brands often sponsored multiple programs, each identified with one brand. For example, General Foods sponsored The Maxwell House Show Boat (1932–1937), We, the People (1936–1942), and The Jell-O Program with Jack Benny (1934–1944), among many other programs.Footnote ²¹

Although radio advertising boosters celebrated the arrival of “big business” into “show business,” most advertisers distrusted the “show business.”Footnote ²² They relied on their advertising agencies to ensure that the entertainment (the “showmanship”) fulfilled the advertising goals (the “salesmanship”).Footnote ²³ Despite some resistance among agencies loyal to print media, many agencies leapt at the opportunity to generate more media commissions by overseeing and producing sponsored radio programs for their clients.Footnote ²⁴ Agencies applied specific theories of advertising to the programs they produced for sponsors. For example, Blackett-Sample-Hummert (B-S-H) practiced a form of “hard sell” advertising that emphasized product information, repetition, and the product's ability to solve problems.Footnote ²⁵ B-S-H applied those strategies to the dozens of daytime serials it produced for companies such as Procter & Gamble and General Mills (e.g., Ma Perkins, Stella Dallas, Just Plain Bill). Young & Rubicam (Y&R), in contrast, practiced the “soft sell,” entertaining audiences rather than annoying them with product information. They disarmingly satirized hard-sell advertising during comedy shows and slid the brand name slyly into the program text, as in comedian Jack Benny's opening line, “Jell-O again, this is Jack Benny,” for his program sponsored by General Foods.Footnote ²⁶ J. Walter Thompson (JWT) mastered the celebrity association strategy on radio. Believing that stars were the most efficient means of attracting audiences, JWT featured guest stars from Hollywood on Lux Radio Theatre (1934–1955) and a variety of musical and comedy guest stars on Kraft Music Hall (1933–1949).Footnote ²⁷

Yet single sponsorship had drawbacks. Some argued that radio was “selling its editorial pages” by collapsing the distinction between advertising and editorial content.Footnote ²⁸ Single sponsorship prevented broadcasters from controlling their schedule: advertisers were granted a “time franchise” and programmed it according to their own interests regardless of adjacent programs, audience demand, or competing networks. As an NBC executive noted, it was not clear “who owns the time and who has a better right to say what is to be done with it.”Footnote ²⁹ Meanwhile, the advertiser was limited to reaching only the audiences that tuned into its program. While General Foods hoped that audiences would buy Jell-O dessert because they enjoyed the comedy of Jack Benny, General Foods could not convey the merits of Jell-O to the audiences of other programs. Moreover, in closely identifying Jell-O and Jack Benny, General Foods made the product's reputation vulnerable to the star's; Benny's humor might so offend some listeners as to drive them to the consumption of rival desserts. By the late 1940s, this fear of offending audiences and losing sales would motivate the blacklisting of certain broadcast performers and writers.Footnote ³⁰

By the mid-1940s, sponsor identification was well accepted as an effective way to sell. Despite, or because of, World War II and the excess profits tax, which allowed advertisers to deduct advertising expenses even though few consumer products were available, the radio industry boomed.Footnote ³¹ Networks enjoyed increasing revenues from advertisers outbidding one another for airtime. Program production had shifted from New York to Hollywood in order to better access high-powered star talent.Footnote ³² However, complaints about advertiser control of programming had continued throughout the radio era. Sponsors, complained some, “tramp with hobnailed shoes over the gossamer fabric of the entertainment.”Footnote ³³ Some sponsors, having footed the bill for both the airtime and the talent, expected to have a say in program details; as one observer reported, “I saw an eminent manufacturer of perfumery march up to a dull, middle-aged actress and tell her tearfully: ‘My good woman, I'm paying for this program and I want you to put some passion into it!’”Footnote ³⁴ The radio sponsor appeared as a blustering, controlling figure in Hollywood movies such as A Letter from Three Wives (1949) and The Hucksters (1947).Footnote ³⁵ Critics blamed sponsors and ad agencies for ruining what they believed should have been a source of education and cultural uplift, instead promoting blandness, censorship, and blacklisting.Footnote ³⁶ In 1947 Fortune magazine documented a “revolt against radio,” blaming sponsors for “corny, strident, boresome, florid, inane, repetitive, irritating, offensive, moronic, adolescent, or nauseating” programming.Footnote ³⁷ Radio and advertising industry figures vociferously defended radio commercialism, citing studies showing audiences were less critical of broadcast advertising than radio's critics.Footnote ³⁸

The struggles over the appropriate usage of the public airwaves resurged in the postwar period.Footnote ³⁹ The FCC Report on Chain Broadcasting of 1941 had accused RCA of monopolistic practices by running two networks, NBC Red and NBC Blue, simultaneously. The FCC's decision not to renew the license of any station affiliated with any network owned by a company that owned more than one network forced NBC to sell off its less profitable network, NBC Blue, which was renamed American Broadcasting Company (ABC).Footnote ⁴⁰ The subsequent 1946 FCC report, known as the Blue Book, reiterated many critics’ concerns that there were not enough public-service programs and that advertising “excesses” needed to be eliminated or reduced.Footnote ⁴¹ Defenders reacted by redefining “public service” as whatever commercial broadcasters were doing, as when an NBC executive claimed, “A comedian lifts people, gets them out of the dumps. I think that is a public service program.”Footnote ⁴²

Although 94 percent of American households owned radios by 1948, and national network radio advertising revenues totaled $210 million, the dominance of network radio as a national advertising medium eroded rapidly shortly afterward.Footnote ⁴³ National networks had captured 46 percent of all radio advertising revenues in 1945; this figure had slid to only 25 percent by 1952.Footnote ⁴⁴ By the beginning of the 1960s, most radio stations had disaffiliated from networks and had shifted to cheaper programming—radio programming became dominated by “formats” based on categories of recorded music.Footnote ⁴⁵ Radio's centrality in American popular culture was rapidly eclipsed by television, the rise of which, according to Hilmes, resulted in radio's role as the foundational electronic medium being “thoroughly forgotten.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Single Sponsorship in the “Golden Age” of Television: The 1950s

In retrospect, television's rise to dominance as the central entertainment and mass advertising medium seems inevitable, but it took many in the industry during the 1940s by surprise. A JWT executive claimed in 1944 that “television will never be the world force radio is, because television will leave little or nothing to the imagination, and it is imagination that gives radio its power.”Footnote ⁴⁷ While television's ascendance was rapid, it was not immediate. Fewer than 1 percent of households had a television receiver in 1948; by 1952, that figure had risen to 34 percent, and by 1954 to 55 percent.Footnote ⁴⁸ As William Boddy, James Baughman, and Christopher Sterling and John Kittross document, the transition was complex, contested, and fraught.Footnote ⁴⁹ The technical and regulatory issues included struggles over spectrum allocation and the addition of UHF to the existing VHF standard; determining standards for station licensing and color television technology; the challenges of live broadcasting; content regulation; and the development of electronic recording (videotape).Footnote ⁵⁰ But underlying those issues was the question of how to make television into a profitable business. And at its advent, the answer was unclear. Radio program production required only talent, scripts, and microphones; television production required far more labor, rehearsal, and equipment: sets, lights, costumes, and cameras, all of which increased broadcast production costs tenfold.Footnote ⁵¹ Although the networks were poised to seize greater programming control, they sought to charge television's higher production costs to sponsors, whose ad agencies faced financial losses overseeing television programming as long as their compensation was limited to commissions.Footnote ⁵² Meanwhile, both agencies and sponsors, though eager to avoid increased costs, balked at any diminution of their program control. The early 1950s, then, was a transitional period during which the television and advertising industries wrestled over how to change radio-based practices to fit the business needs of television.Footnote ⁵³ One alternative to single sponsorship was the “magazine concept”: the networks, like magazine editors, would select the programming and then would sell interstitial airtime to advertisers, like ad pages in a magazine scattered among articles.Footnote ⁵⁴ Advertisers would then be able to reach various audiences at various times, extending their reach; they might avoid dangerously close association with one program or star; and networks could shape the broadcast schedule to serve audiences overall rather than the narrower interests of competing advertisers. More important, more advertisers would be able to advertise on television at a lower cost, no longer being solely responsible for the financing of an expensive program. Others opposed this plan on the grounds that broadcast advertising depended on a tight association between a program and the sponsor. Ads for different products during one program would, according to one advertising executive, so confuse the audiences that they “could not tell what product to buy!”Footnote ⁵⁵ But it was immediately clear that television's exponentially higher production costs made single sponsorship financially unfeasible for many advertisers. Consequently, at the advent of the television era, the networks moved to gain program and schedule control.Footnote ⁵⁶ Program packagers and Hollywood studios began replacing advertising agencies as program suppliers to broadcasters.Footnote ⁵⁷ To spread out program costs, networks began moving toward the magazine concept, selling “participating” sponsorship, when more than one advertiser sponsored the program, and “alternating” sponsorship, when two advertisers alternated weeks. Meanwhile, a number of advertisers, and some ad agencies, held on to their belief in sponsorship and the primacy of the advertiser's role in programming.

The early years of television were in part a struggle between institutional (or corporate-image) advertisers and consumer product advertisers.Footnote ⁵⁸ The consumer product companies, such as Procter & Gamble, sought to reshape broadcasting into a more efficient, adaptable platform for marketing specific products, while the institutional advertisers, like US Steel, wanted to continue sponsoring culturally uplifting programs, such as classical music and dramas with serious themes, to prove their commitment to the public good and to align their company with values such as technological innovation, Americanism, or high art. Such advertisers could employ national stars of stage, music, and screen to associate with themselves the highbrow culture they made available to mass audiences.Footnote ⁵⁹ Roland Marchand explains that many large firms turned to institutional advertising in order to “humanize” themselves, hoping to create a “corporate soul” and build a form of “social legitimacy.”Footnote ⁶⁰ As Anna McCarthy notes, institutional advertising was “a kind of indirect political speech that sought to locate corporate interests on a moral plane that transcended the market, rendering them equivalent to a public good.”Footnote ⁶¹ Institutional advertising campaigns often overlapped with various other public relations efforts: worker education and corporate welfare, industrial films, world's fairs, and arts sponsorship.Footnote ⁶² Institutional advertising was also often openly didactic—demonstrating a manufacturing process, explaining research agendas—as in BBDO's segment, “News from the Wonderful World of Chemistry,” during Cavalcade of America.Footnote ⁶³ Some have pointed out the political rather than commercial goals of institutional advertising. William L. Bird argues that in the 1930s it was part of a battle strategy to attack the New Deal through a “new vocabulary of business leadership.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Elizabeth Fones-Wolf notes that institutional advertisers on radio waged not only public relations campaigns for their images but also engaged in “advocacy advertising,” designed to influence public policies.Footnote ⁶⁵ McCarthy similarly argues that much Cold War–era television institutional advertising was part of an effort to build a postwar liberal consensus.Footnote ⁶⁶

Institutional advertisers on television often sponsored anthology drama programs: usually the performance of a different play every week with its own cast, characters, set, and story.Footnote ⁶⁷ Often broadcast live (with no retakes or editing), these programs were lauded by critics at the time as more authentic than episodic series (with continuing characters, such as situation comedies), serials (such as soap operas, with open-ended narratives), or filmed series (such as westerns) in part because they more closely resembled legitimate theater.Footnote ⁶⁸ Live anthology dramas such as Philco Television Playhouse (1948–1955), US Steel Hour (1953–1963), and the Goodyear Television Playhouse (1951–1957) are remembered today as the apotheosis of “golden age” television. Yet, despite the mostly positive critical reception of these programs, their sponsors are often remembered as suppressors of art and truth seeking only to fulfill narrow commercial goals.Footnote ⁶⁹ Infamously, writer Rod Serling reported being asked by a tobacco company to avoid the words “lucky” and “American” in order to avoid unintentionally plugging a rival tobacco company.Footnote ⁷⁰ But most of these sponsors wanted to be seen as “patrons of the arts.”Footnote ⁷¹ And, like other cultural patrons, many sponsors believed their financial contribution entitled them to a say in the cultural production process. As one advertising executive pointed out, “If advertisers sometimes butt into the jobs of the writers and directors, so, too, does the money on Broadway and in Hollywood dictate to the creative echelon.”Footnote ⁷² These sponsors believed their purpose was to elevate the cultural tastes of audiences they assumed needed educating and, in so doing, associate their companies with the good taste those audiences would acquire. This effort, as McCarthy points out, has largely been overlooked: “Fifties television is so closely identified with the period's hyperactive consumer culture that those sponsors who turned to TV with other things in mind besides selling products have largely been forgotten.”Footnote ⁷³

The Case of Armstrong Circle Theatre

Armstrong Circle Theatre (1950–1957 on NBC; 1957–1963 on CBS) illustrates many of these institutional advertising ideas and practices; unlike better-remembered programs such as US Steel Hour (1953–1963) and General Electric Theatre (1953–1962), it has been neglected. US Steel and General Electric were large embattled corporations fighting public relations wars against critics of “big business”; Armstrong Circle Theatre sponsor Armstrong Cork, in a smaller industry, thought of itself as a corporate liberal company practicing what its executives believed to be progressive policies and pursuing their ideals of civic responsibility. The program, then, is less easily dismissed as mere corporate propaganda and so may show more clearly the motives and beliefs of broadcast advertisers in their full complexity. This live anthology program was described by one of its executives as having “the feeling of fine entertainment, coupled with authenticity, believability, and importance.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Beginning on television in 1950 as a half-hour live program presenting a different play every week, it expanded in 1955 to a one-hour live program that dramatized “true life stories taken from the headlines of today,” with the tag line “This really happened.”Footnote ⁷⁵ As Armstrong's executives put it, “by entertaining our viewers with stories that reflect man's hopes and dreams—by fulfilling the need for viewing something of value and substance, we hope to bring to television a show of stature and importance.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Armstrong, based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, began as a maker of bottle corks in 1860 and then expanded into insulation and flooring products, in part to use waste cork.Footnote ⁷⁷ Over the next few decades, Armstrong manufactured industrial products such as acoustic insulation, fiberboard, fiberglass, asphalt tiles, gaskets, and plastics; to consumers, Armstrong marketed flooring materials, such as linoleum and enamel-surfaced flooring branded “Quaker rugs.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Its Presbyterian founders sought to build a corporate culture around a “golden rule” of reliability: “Let the buyer have faith,” not “Let the buyer beware.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In contrast to what was then current practice, Armstrong published prices for its products, treating each buyer equally instead of favoring some with better prices.Footnote ⁸⁰ “The Armstrong Creed,” composed in 1922 by then director of advertising and future president Henning Prentis Jr., mandated “fair and honorable” treatment of customers, employees, and its local communities.Footnote ⁸¹ Armstrong Cork was not, like DuPont or US Steel, in constant conflict with unions and government regulators.Footnote ⁸² Nonetheless, it promoted similar claims to having innovated in product diversification, career training of employees, investment in research and development, and experimentation in new advertising media.Footnote ⁸³

In 1917, Armstrong hired the Batten Company to advertise its flooring in wide-circulation general interest consumer magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post.Footnote ⁸⁴ Prentis, Armstrong's director of advertising, resisted the then dominant theory, promulgated by Albert Lasker at Lord & Thomas, that advertising is “salesmanship in print.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Rather than make repetitive hyperbolic claims about product attributes, Prentis ordered that Armstrong's print ads should instead simply “show beautiful rooms,” thereby inspiring readers to improve their homes.Footnote ⁸⁶ Illustrations of colorful, comfortable rooms were headlined with appealing phrases such as, “Can any other floor give all these comforts?” (1926), “The floor of magic texture” (1927), and “A lot of happy days will start in our new morning room” (1934). Prentis also developed brochures, such as The Attractive Home: How to Plan Its Decoration (1927).Footnote ⁸⁷ By such methods, Armstrong increased its sales volume from $6.2 million in 1910 to $25.7 million in 1920 and to $32.5 million in 1930.Footnote ⁸⁸

Beginning in 1928, Armstrong advertised on NBC's “Blue” network as a sponsor of the musical program The Armstrong Quakers (1928–1931), which included the musical jingle “A Quaker Rug in Every Home.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In 1931 the program also included news commentator Lowell Thomas.Footnote ⁹⁰ The use of “Quaker” as a brand name reflected both Armstrong's Pennsylvania location and its effort to associate itself with the Quakers’ reputation for honesty. After a hiatus from broadcast advertising during the worst of the economic downturn, Armstrong returned to radio sponsorship in 1938 with a serial, The Heart of Julia Blake, aimed at housewives.Footnote ⁹¹ In 1941 Armstrong sponsored a weekend daytime live anthology radio program, Theatre of Today (1941–1954). The program opened with the words “It's high noon on Broadway” and a five-minute newscast, followed by a dramatization based on a recent news story.Footnote ⁹² Avoiding stories about crime, the program aimed at “a wholesome treatment of current events” and featured well-known performers including Helen Hayes, Ray Milland, and Vincent Price.Footnote ⁹³ Having tripled its sales volume since 1940, and crediting its radio program with some of that increase, in 1950 Armstrong executives decided to sponsor a television program in addition to its radio program.Footnote ⁹⁴ At that time, many radio sponsors assumed they needed to get into television early to secure a time “franchise” on the schedule. Armstrong Circle Theatre, a half-hour live program on NBC-TV, featured well-known plays with some well-known performers like John Cassavetes; it was “distinguished by the lack of violence, murder mysteries, Westerns, and farces in its story material.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Guiding Armstrong's advertising strategy was its advertising agency, BBDO, known for creating institutional advertising for large corporations such as General Electric, General Motors, and DuPont. Originating as the George Batten Company in 1891, BBDO was formed in 1928 when Batten merged with the Barton Durstine & Osborn agency, founded in 1919 by three former journalists. Its most famous founder, copywriter Bruce Barton, is remembered as the author of the 1925 best seller The Man Nobody Knows, which exhorts the modern businessman to model advertising on Jesus's short, pithy parables.Footnote ⁹⁶ Barton, whom Marchand calls a “forger of institutional souls,” was instrumental in the shaping of General Electric and General Motors during the 1920s.Footnote ⁹⁷ Barton argued that business could be a form of “service” and that advertising, “the voice of business,” could keep manufacturers honest by publicizing brand attributes and educating the public.Footnote ⁹⁸ Barton suggested that General Electric not advertise light bulbs so much as promote electricity use.Footnote ⁹⁹ In a 1926 GE ad overseen by Barton, electricity consumption is represented as social progress for women. Headlining an image of a housewife hand-cranking a non-electric washing machine: “Any woman who does anything which a little electric motor can do is working for 3 cents an hour!”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

BBDO staff applied the concept of advertising as a form of consumer education to the agency's radio program productions. BBDO's work on radio began in 1925 with an opera program for a radio manufacturer, The Atwater Kent Hour (1925–1934). In late 1931, BBDO claimed to produce “88 separate shows per week for 29 different clients, over a total of 913 stations.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Although BBDO produced some entertainment programs, featuring, for example, bandleaders Tommy Dorsey and Guy Lombardo, its most prestigious programs were designed as institutional advertising. Instead of selling cars on the General Motor's radio program A Parade of the States (1931–1932), Barton wrote a “testimonial” intended “to sell America to Americans by a weekly radio tour of each state.”Footnote ¹⁰² For DuPont, BBDO produced Cavalcade of America (1935–1953), an anthology drama based on historical events (e.g., Alfred Nobel's contributions to dynamite) that was vetted by historians like Frank Monaghan, scripted by such well-known authors as Carl Sandburg, and performed by stars such as Orson Welles and Cary Grant.Footnote ¹⁰³ Cavalcade, claimed DuPont, “offers a new and absorbing approach to history, the incidents being re-enacted so as to emphasize the qualities of American character which have been responsible for the building of this country.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

BBDO's high-minded approach to advertising—as education, service, and corporate-image building rather than a hectoring hard sell of products—was also reflected in its production of Time magazine's radio program, The March of Time (1932–1939).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Another live radio drama based on actual events and people, but scripted by BBDO staff and accompanied by a live orchestra, the program featured actors who impersonated newsmakers, such as Amelia Earhart on her last airplane journey, and re-enacted events such as the burning of the Hindenburg airship (the live re-enactment of which radio listeners heard later on the same evening it happened).Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Each of these programs, like much of BBDO's advertising, was designed to be educational, uplifting, and weighty. By basing the program texts on actualities rather than fiction, BBDO could associate its clients not with frivolous entertainment but with serious matters of civic concern. Furthermore, by fictionalizing those events, BBDO could shape the representation of history and current events in ways that could reflect well on its clients—the goal of every effective public relations effort.

By 1951, BBDO was still producing network radio programs and was beginning to place clients on television.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Anticipating that the agency role in television would resemble that in radio, in 1951 BBDO employed 150 in its television department, including producers, writers, and directors.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But it was clear even at this early stage that producing programs for television would not be profitable for the agency. So BBDO began buying “package” shows from independent producers rather than producing the programs within the agency. To protect their clients, BBDO kept script and casting approval while the independent producers took over the bulk of program production tasks. BBDO remained in charge of producing the commercial messages as well as negotiating the airtime schedule and costs with the networks.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ By 1954, BBDO was directly producing only one television program, Your Hit Parade for American Tobacco, while maintaining agency “script control” over programs produced for DuPont, Campbell Soup, and Armstrong.Footnote ¹¹⁰ For overseeing seventeen shows in 1956, BBDO's “billings” to its clients for television airtime totaled about $72 million, a large increase from $50 million in 1955.Footnote ¹¹¹ Thus, although BBDO, like many other ad agencies, had changed its role from radio to television, it made an effort to retain content control. For example, BBDO continued to vet and blacklist suspect talent (through a department run by Jack Wren) and openly announced this process when asked by journalist John Cogley.Footnote ¹¹² In a 1952 meeting, Armstrong president Prentis noted that BBDO “does a fine job in keeping Armstrong out of trouble on this score.”Footnote ¹¹³ BBDO's unusual openness about this practice was characteristic of its concern with its clients’ public images.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Thus, BBDO was well known within the industry for producing radio and television programs for industrial clients and for claiming that institutional advertising strategies worked.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Armstrong had long collaborated with BBDO to help represent it as an honest, reliable manufacturer building long-term relationships with its customers. BBDO executive Robert Foreman claimed to have come up with the idea in 1955 of changing the format of Armstrong Circle Theatre from half-hour plays to one-hour dramatizations of current news stories (which he called “actuals”); he also claimed to have engaged the well-known producer David Susskind's production company Talent Associates to handle production duties.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The switch from a half-hour length to one hour doubled Armstrong's costs, so the program was telecast on alternating weeks.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In 1957, Circle Theatre moved from NBC to CBS for a better time slot and there alternated with US Steel Hour, also overseen by BBDO.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Prominent entertainment stars were no longer employed, since they “would tend to reduce the feeling of authenticity in our documentary flavored programs” and so Armstrong executives intended instead to make “the story itself the star.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ This change saved money, of course. Stories were to be “newsworthy as well as noteworthy.”Footnote ¹²⁰ To emphasize the seriousness of the program, host-narrators, including John Cameron Swayze (1955–1957 at NBC) and Douglas Edwards (1957–1961 at CBS), functioned as quasi newscasters.Footnote ¹²¹ The first live broadcast of the new version of Armstrong Circle Theatre concerned a geologist who discovered uranium, portrayed by an actor in the fictionalized re-enactments; the program closed with an appearance of the actual geologist, reinforcing its claim to verisimilitude.Footnote ¹²² The narrative traced the geologist's triumph over various setbacks, thereby not only “combin[ing] fact and drama,” according to one of the Talent Associates producers, but also “present[ing] some potential solution, some hope for our citizens to consider.”Footnote ¹²³ Many of the featured stories would concern overcoming adversity—surviving the sinking of the Andrea Doria or the Spring Hill mine disaster, overcoming drug addiction, and defecting from East Germany.Footnote ¹²⁴

Among institutional advertisers, it was a common refrain that business should serve the public. Their involvement in television programming, explained Armstrong president Clifford Backstrand in 1958, should reflect “a keen sense of history, of the significance of business to the over-all social and political life of a nation. We have to be public servants.”Footnote ¹²⁵ This was not, claims Armstrong's corporate historian, mere “paternalism” but a sincere belief that long-term corporate success was linked to the well being of its employees and communities.Footnote ¹²⁶ Armstrong's advertising director, Max Banzhaf, made the connection explicit between the company's corporate liberal policies, its financing of educational programming, and its economic success: “We do it to make a profit.”Footnote ¹²⁷

Armstrong and BBDO's policy of vetting all scripts was based on the assumption that the medium of television had powerful effects on viewers; according to Backstrand, the program was “a mirror to America of what Armstrong is.”Footnote ¹²⁸ To present a story that was not fully aligned with Armstrong's values would undermine the purpose of the sponsorship. So, producers from Talent Associates met biweekly with Banzhaf and with BBDO executives to review story ideas and drafts of scripts.Footnote ¹²⁹ No stories were developed without Armstrong and BBDO approval. This was justified in part by Armstrong executives’ view of television as an invasive medium: “The t.v. medium invades homes,” argued Banzhaf, “and has no right to present programs that are in bad taste or fail to live up to their major responsibility to the public.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Talent Associates was provided with Armstrong's editorial policy: “Stories should be based on actual case histories, with the theme of success over obstacles, long-awaited and long-deserved hope fulfilled, or a crisis met and mastered.” Stories with a “morbid or pathological background” should be avoided. Aiming at the family audience, Armstrong executives insisted that the program “leave our viewers with a feeling that what they've seen on the television screen is something of value.”Footnote ¹³¹ Banzhaf vetted the story ideas carefully for moral outcomes; for example, for one proposed about the criminal “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Banzhaf insisted it focus instead on the efforts of Floyd's brother to live a noncriminal life.Footnote ¹³² Circle Theatre was designed to avoid the mindless pleasures these executives assumed were typical of mass culture; Backstrand claimed that they had no interest in appealing to “unthinking people who tune in just for entertainment.”Footnote ¹³³ Besides selecting stories that concluded with an appropriate moral, they rejected proposals linked to controversial subjects, including Alger Hiss and racial integration.Footnote ¹³⁴ The producers at Talent Associates were neither surprised nor bothered by such rejection.Footnote ¹³⁵ Susskind, as one of the top producers of live television anthologies, told Myron Shaw in 1962 that he was “bored” with the complaints by other producers about sponsors: “The great majority of sponsors and advertising agencies do give you your creative head. . . . There is no vicious, insidious, ignorant set of strictures laid upon you by an agency or sponsor.”Footnote ¹³⁶ While Susskind would very publicly complain about sponsors insisting on talent blacklisting, this comment most likely reflects his own alignment with the aesthetics and goals of institutional advertising strategies: the production of educational, uplifting morality tales.Footnote ¹³⁷

At its advent, when fewer than half of American households owned television sets, television provided advertisers access to more affluent audiences than radio.Footnote ¹³⁸ As Banzhaf explained, because Armstrong flooring is only purchased a few times during a consumer's lifetime, “the character of the program and reaching the people of the greatest influence in the market are more important” than reaching everyone.Footnote ¹³⁹ “Ratings” and audience size, an increasing factor in network programming decisions, did not concern Armstrong executives.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Banzhaf noted, “We don't aim to sell the product in a single program, but rather to build an image over a period of seven or eight years.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ In a 1958 interview, Banzhaf argued that the audience perception of the program's quality would matter more than its popularity: “Being associated with programs of taste and quality has a more lasting affect [sic] on the public than being successful for a short while with something frivolous.”Footnote ¹⁴² According to Banzhaf, “Show-wise, the program provides a good climate for our commercials. The feeling of fine entertainment coupled with authenticity, believability, and importance, ties in directly with the current theme in all our flooring advertising.”Footnote ¹⁴³ In 1956, when Armstrong was spending $7 million per year on advertising, at least $2 million of its advertising appropriations were spent on television, most of which went to production costs and airtime. For that expenditure, Armstrong broadcast five minutes of advertising messages during the one-hour program—about one-twelfth of the paid airtime. Several of those minutes promoted some of Armstrong's consumer products (a typical commercial for the Quaker floor covering featured a housewife easily sweeping up a broken Christmas ornament from the seamless Armstrong floor), and at least one of those advertising minutes was devoted to an “institutional” message designed to promote the company itself.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In the view of these Armstrong executives, they were taking up very little of the audience's time with commercial messages; the program was the true vehicle for shaping its image with audiences.

Viewership for live anthology television programs began to drop in 1956 and they began disappearing from network schedules.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ By 1958, despite reduced viewership and a general trend toward prerecorded formats (videotape or film), Armstrong announced that it was going to continue with Circle Theatre because “the good will the program is creating for the Company” makes it “a sound advertising investment.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ As a relatively low-budget live program, Circle Theatre delivered a relatively low cost per thousand viewers; BBDO claimed its cost was 25 percent lower than the cost of the “average evening program.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Backstrand remained a believer in live performance: “It is more ‘actual,’ and we have more control over it than if it were filmed.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Hollywood studios, he no doubt feared, were less likely to accommodate a sponsor's dictates than Susskind's group.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Banzhaf argued that to sponsor one of the Hollywood studio-filmed westerns then becoming so popular would defeat the purpose of broadcast sponsorship because it would prevent “sponsor identification” between Armstrong and the program: Armstrong “could hop aboard the horseopera bandwagon, like everybody else,” but “it'll be virtually impossible to tell who sponsors which.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰

But trends continued to move in the opposite direction. In 1961, CBS refused to air a Circle Theatre performance titled “Window on the West,” which used television clips from actual newscasts in Soviet-dominated countries to show American audiences how the United States was portrayed in the communist world. A columnist noted that CBS's program philosophy had recently become “fact is fact; fiction is fiction; and never the two should meet”; Circle Theatre was clearly an amalgam of the two.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In a statement, CBS announced that the program “did not fall within the classification of a purely dramatic show, and, therefore, was unsuitable to be carried on the network.”Footnote ¹⁵² In other words, CBS had a news division, from which it was earning substantial revenues, and it no longer wanted to allow any sponsor or other producer to provide newslike programming that would compete with it.Footnote ¹⁵³ But this was also an indication that BBDO's strategy of dramatizing actuality was falling from grace. Having lasted longer than some of the other institutional advertising programs, in 1963 Armstrong dropped Circle Theatre and became instead an alternate sponsor of the Danny Kaye program on CBS.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Armstrong's then director of advertising, Craig Moodie, conceded it was in part because the networks’ expansion of documentary programming had left few stories for their docudrama to fictionalize.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Armstrong's new president, Maurice Warnock, declared that he intended to focus on leading the company through change, including Armstrong's television advertising strategy.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ By 1965 Armstrong had switched to cosponsoring Gidget (1965–1966), a comedy about a teenage girl surfer, starring Sally Field, in a complete repudiation of the advertising and programming strategy it had pursued with Circle Theatre.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

The Magazine Concept in the Network Era: The 1960s

By the late 1960s, the transition to what historians call the “network era” was complete: the surviving three major television networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) not only had gained control over program content and scheduling but enjoyed a buyer's market with program producers—who were usually forced to grant equity in program ownership or syndication rights to networks in return for a place on the network schedule—and a seller's market for airtime with their customers, the advertisers.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Leveraging the public outrage over the 1958–1959 “quiz show scandals,” in which producers of sponsor-controlled game shows were discovered to have rehearsed contestants, networks claimed they would be more responsible stewards of the public airwaves.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ But the number of single-sponsored programs on network prime time had already been declining, having dropped from seventy-five in 1955 to forty in 1959 to twelve in 1964.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The percentage of network programs sold as “participating” or “cosponsored” increased from about 11 percent in 1953 to 84 percent in 1963.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The decline of single sponsorship helped increase the number of advertisers using television from 1,206 in 1956 to 1,316 in 1963.Footnote ¹⁶² By 1968, national television networks had tripled their advertising revenues from about $550 million in 1955 to about $1.5 billion.Footnote ¹⁶³

Critics of advertiser control of programs had assumed that network program control would improve program quality, as networks would presumably select programs based on audience demand rather than advertisers’ tastes.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ To measure such demand, networks used ratings, such as Nielsen's audience sample, and they quickly canceled programs not meeting ratings expectations, even if those programs had sponsors willing to pay.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Institutional advertisers resisted network program control and magazine-format advertising; a General Electric executive, a longtime BBDO institutional advertising client, warned in 1962, “It is doubtful that we would continue to use television as a means of institutional communication should the magazine concept ever become a reality.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The magazine format, some believed, would remove the advertiser's sense of responsibility: “When you take away an advertiser's personal involvement—when a program can no longer reflect any degree of corporate pride or corporate public responsibility—then an advertiser must consider his tv investment in purely amoral and statistical terms.” The networks favored programs that attracted mass audiences, such as westerns, detective series, and situation comedies. As had been the case during the pre-network era, critics claimed that popular programs catered to the lowest tastes or “lower common denominator.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Some critics of the networks’ relentless pursuit of “ratings” defended the single-sponsorship system as less commercial; A. Frank Reel argued for the important role of institutional sponsors in maintaining quality because they “often used their influence to obtain better shows, regardless of audience ratings, because of the beneficial effect on their corporate or product image.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸

Institutional advertisers and agencies also bemoaned the networks’ newfound dependence on Hollywood movie studios. By 1964, nearly 80 percent of prime-time network programs were prerecorded on film instead of performed live.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Film studios, many in the ad industry assumed, catered to audiences’ base needs for entertainment while institutional advertisers were more sensitive to family home viewing. Reflecting a commitment to the didactic over the merely entertaining, one executive complained in 1961, “Hollywood producers are exerting far more influence over the content of tv programs than sponsors ever did. . . . Which type of company do you think would be most likely to put on the air tv programs of high quality and real public interest and service—a Dupont or a Warner Brothers?”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ DuPont, as an institutional advertiser in need of positive public relations, had produced Cavalcade of America, designed to educate audiences about American history, whereas Warner Bros. was simply a film studio that had long churned out genre films about gangsters and cowboys and was now doing the same for television.

By 1963, Sponsor magazine reported that the competition between Madison Avenue and Hollywood over program control had been resolved. Advertisers, no longer vetting scripts, were no longer perceived by Hollywood producers as “blue penciling heavies.” Advertising agencies were less worried about controversial topics in programs because advertisers were no longer tightly associated with those programs.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Agencies, meanwhile, no longer had direct contact with the program producers, sending their comments to the network program departments instead. They cared more about the position and length of commercial breaks than the content of the program.

The magazine concept was blamed for creating more “clutter” and for overcommercializing the viewing experience. During the single-sponsorship era, commercials were often textually integrated into a program that advertised only one product or brand. These commercials were often embedded in the program texts, sometimes by using cast members or announcers to promote the product, helping to smooth any disjuncture between entertainment and advertising. But in the network era, networks began to sell interstitial minutes during a program to more than one advertiser, and some of those advertisers used their sixty seconds to “piggyback” two thirty-second commercials, thereby increasing the number of commercials.Footnote ¹⁷² Some observers objected to seeing more and shorter commercials for more products interrupting programs. TV critic Les Brown argued, “When the advertiser was the sponsor, it behooved him to be sensitive to the frequency and length of his program interruptions.” But now that advertisers bought minutes scattered over many evenings and programs, “he is unburdened of the aesthetic decency as well as other responsibilities.”Footnote ¹⁷³

At length, as the magazine concept became more established, the advertising industry reached widespread consensus about its advantages. Television, according to a BBDO executive, had become more efficient at reaching large audiences and more flexible for advertisers, who were not only freed from season-long time buys but also “unburdened of program-development risks.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Sponsor magazine noted in 1964 that “agencies have abdicated program production as, virtually, have networks, preferring to let independent packagers take the risks involved.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Agencies soon realized the many advantages of ceding program control: they could blame the network or producer or star if a program failed; they could claim better objectivity in advising their clients, since they were no longer financially and emotionally invested in any particular program; and they no longer had to risk their own profit margins. It was, in many measures, a relief. In retrospect, as one television executive explained, the network takeover of program control was “kinda like [the US] taking over for the French in Vietnam”—a Pyrrhic victory for the networks, perhaps, and a fortunate defeat for the agencies.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Advertisers changed their notions of how to use television for advertising: instead of an “identification” medium, in which audiences make a close association between program and advertiser, television would be a “dispersion” medium, in which advertisers try to reach as many homes as possible, their advertising “scattered” across multiple programs.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Commercials, dispersed among many time slots and programs, could spread the message with “volume” instead of “intensity,” or, as one observer put it, advertisers changed their targeting of consumers from a “William Tell” to a “Machine Gun Kelly” approach.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

Thus, during the 1960s, advertisers and their agencies almost completely reversed course on a strongly held belief about broadcast advertising. According to Fairfax Cone, leader of the Foote, Cone & Belding agency, in the early 1960s “sponsor identification was still an important measurement of value, and this held down interest in commercials.” To sponsors, the programs were more important than the advertising, so “little thought” was put into commercials. However, by 1969, Cone notes, the situation had reversed: “Now the commercial became important, and new attention was paid to each one. . . . Commercials that might appear anywhere there was a time spot for sale had to stand on their own.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Rather than focus on developing programs with which to associate their brands, advertisers began focusing instead on creating commercials that would keep audiences attentive.

By the late 1960s, both the television and advertising industries had reached new heights. The three networks—NBC, CBS, and ABC—had consolidated bottleneck control over programming and advertiser access to audiences.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ While radio at its peak in 1948 had accounted for 12 percent of all advertising spending, by 1969 television accounted for 19 percent of all advertising spending, and national network television accounted for nearly 47 percent of spending on broadcast advertising. The limited inventory of airtime, enforced through a trade association code that capped the number of minutes available during prime time, helped propel airtime prices upward, from an average of $30,000 per minute in the early 1960s to over $160,000 by 1970.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Advertisers, once able to create or destroy programs at will, could only either buy in or cancel out of slots during a program determined entirely by the network; as one advertising executive lamented, “An advertiser's power to control or affect programming is reaction rather than action.”Footnote ¹⁸²

The three networks assumed a captive audience (roughly 90 percent of viewers) who had few alternatives; success in their tripartite oligopoly consisted of one network maintaining a marginal advantage over the other two. To attract mass audiences, assumed to be the entire family, the networks scheduled the “least objectionable programming”; for example, programs such as The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–1971), The Andy Griffith Show (1960–1968), and Green Acres (1965–1971) made no reference to any of the social and cultural upheavals of the late 1960s. As one television executive explained, networks sought programs “that will attract mass audiences without unduly offending these audiences or too deeply moving them emotionally. Such ruffling, it is thought, will interfere with their ability to receive, recall, and respond to commercial messages.”Footnote ¹⁸³ These generic network-controlled programs were designed to provide anodyne context for the true purpose of television: exposing viewers to commercials. The advertisers no longer needed the programming to be “a mirror to America” of a corporation's image, as Armstrong's Backstrand had assumed Armstrong Circle Theatre needed to be; they only needed programs that attracted the targeted market segment.

Meanwhile, beginning in the late 1950s, the advertising industry also went through a significant shift. It began to turn its attention from the mass market to segmented markets.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Manufacturers created multiple brand extensions to target those market segments and thus needed to expand advertising budgets.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ So, for example, Procter & Gamble's toothpaste brands included Crest, for customers fighting cavities; Gleem, for those seeking white teeth; and Denquel, for those with sensitive teeth. Advertisers began to view consumers as increasingly sophisticated and cynical about advertising.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ The long-dominant hard-sell product-centered ad strategy, which might focus on many “reasons why” to buy a soap brand—its cleansing power, purity, low cost, unique ingredients, and performance in scientific tests—suffered from declining credibility. The soft sell, promulgated by such theorists as Theodore MacManus (1872–1940), had long countered the hard sell's emphasis on product information by appealing to emotions instead. A soft-sell ad for a soap brand might feature not an account of the cleansing power of the product but a woman lovingly embraced by her husband, implying that the soap might help satisfy the consumer's emotional need for love.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Or, a soft-sell ad might attract a reader's attention with clever concepts, puns, humor, or visually arresting imagery—all strategies long disdained by the hard-sell theorists such as Claude Hopkins (1866–1932).

By the late 1960s soft-sell-influenced “hip” advertising had conquered the ad industry and “the idea became mightier than the marketing.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Later called the “Creative Revolution,” this definitive and permanent shift toward the soft sell meant that the long-dominant hard-sell strategies, including repetitive verbosity, product information, hyperbole, and multiple “reasons why” to buy, crammed into busy layouts, suddenly seemed old fashioned and patently less credible to not only consumers but the advertising industry as well. Creating advertising was less likely to be a businesslike and rational process of identifying a brand's “unique selling proposition” and more of an intuitive process of finding images and ideas that would resonate with audiences and disarm their resistance.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ To counter consumer disappointment with hard sell's hyperbolic product claims, Creative Revolution leaders including Bill Bernbach at Doyle Dane Bernbach specialized in underselling, creating slogans such as “We're number two—we try harder,” for Avis. Perhaps most famous is their ad for the Volkswagen Beetle, which appeared the size of a thumbnail on a page of mostly white space under the headline “Think Small.” The ad copy noted the advantages of “small” insurance and “small” repair bills and being able to squeeze into “small” parking spaces, obviously mocking the hyperbolic hard-sell claims of “bigger, better.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Bernbach also sought to elevate the status of the copywriters and art directors, known as “creatives,” and to ease advertisers’ suspicions of them: “It is ironic that the very thing that is most suspected by business, that intangible thing called artistry, turns out to be the most practical tool available to it.” However, Bernbach was not altogether a romantic; he believed advertising to be a craft in the service of a specific goal: “Properly practiced creativity must result in greater sales more economically achieved.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ Bernbach's emphasis on developing a compelling single concept for an ad, rather than a list of product attributes, ignited a wave of new advertising that, according to Thomas Frank, “pandered to public distrust of advertising and dislike of admen.”Footnote ¹⁹²

Shattering the stereotype of the martini-swilling adman in a gray suit, new boutique ad agencies sprang up, staffed by “countercultural creatives” sporting bellbottoms and miniskirts and seeking inspiration in psychedelics and New Age encounter groups.Footnote ¹⁹³ Their “hip” advertising employed minimalist graphics and flippant language about products that mocked consumer culture and made regular references to escape, defiance, rebellion, or nonconformity.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Campaigns traded on sexual innuendo, fantasy, and comedy. Copywriter Mary Wells Lawrence's Braniff Airlines print campaign featured images of attractive young flight attendants changing uniforms midflight under the headline “Introducing the Air Strip.”Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Art director George Lois's ad for Maypo hot cereal featured famous male athletes crying like spoiled children, “I want my Maypo! I want it!” These ads attracted consumers’ attention by playing against expectations in order to get in “under the radar” of consumers’ defenses against advertising. Frank argues that the Creative Revolution was not just a response to the youth market or the rise of market segmentation; neither was it an effort to destroy or reject consumer culture. The business world, he argues, shared the counterculture's critiques of mass culture as a system of conformity and therefore welcomed the changes brought by the counterculture as a way to “revitalize American business and the consumer order generally.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Hip advertising and the Creative Revolution thus solved the crisis of creativity and rejuvenated the ad industry when consumer cynicism, increased regulation, and saturated markets had threatened it.

Although Creative Revolution television commercials were perhaps less racy and outrageous than the magazine ads, given network standards and indecency rules, there was a noticeable aesthetic shift in the mid-to-late 1960s toward a more cinematic visual style, sometimes referred to as the “New York school of film.” Gordon Webber of the Benton & Bowles agency described this “New York Look” as a “synthesis of intimate, fluid movement and dynamic editing that eventually would find its way into feature film-making.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Agencies began hiring directors who hoped to break into Hollywood filmmaking, replacing the industrial filmmakers trained in didactic techniques, and they showed an increasing interest in close-ups, long shots, location shooting, more rapid editing, and shorter shots. Directors were often allowed some latitude to try shots not included on a storyboard, and eventually they became key collaborators in commercial production.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ By 1969, the traditional hard-sell agency Foote, Cone & Belding was experimenting with sudden edits, shots of less than a second in length, naturalistic soundtracks, and minimal dialogue.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Pepsi and its agency, BBDO, hired filmmakers and producers such as Ed Vorkapich and Jerry Bruckheimer to direct commercials using pop music, young people cavorting in swimsuits, and avant-garde editing techniques and camerawork.Footnote ²⁰⁰ The documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, known for their “direct cinema” or “fly on a wall” style, made commercials for Jell-O and for Champion Spark Plugs.Footnote ²⁰¹ Their handheld camerawork and emphasis on spontaneity signaled a kind of authenticity that might resonate with cynical consumers.Footnote ²⁰² Moreover, such commercials might stand out from the program in which they were embedded, perhaps attracting the audience's attention with their cinematic style or use of popular music.

These changes helped elevate the cultural prestige of the television commercial. Some called the late 1960s “the golden age of arty commercials.”Footnote ²⁰³ Earlier hard-sell television commercials, such as those featuring announcers repetitively intoning product information and demonstrating products, were relatively cheap and simple to produce. The new focus on cinematic aesthetics led to a drastic increase in television commercial production costs; according to one estimate, such costs increased 72 percent between 1963 and 1967.Footnote ²⁰⁴ As commercial aesthetics evolved, agencies hired more specialists, such as sound consultants for “sound logos”; music composers for original music; famous photographers such as Irving Penn; and commercial actors, who received residual payments.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Improving production quality required more location shoots, elaborate lighting, and special effects. Agency employee roles shifted: a television art director—“part director, writer, diplomat and general overseer of the entire commercial project”—began to replace the copywriter altogether.Footnote ²⁰⁶ Advertising, once defended as a rational business practice based on scientific research, became an art, a cultural form on a par with other cultural forms.Footnote ²⁰⁷

For the trade organization American Association of Advertising Agencies, in 1972 the agency Benton & Bowles produced a fifteen-minute documentary titled Stalking the Wild Cranberry, “a behind the scenes look” at how commercials were made, designed to improve the public's attitude toward advertising.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Showing every step in the making of a Grape-Nuts cereal commercial that featured the celebrity naturalist Euell Gibbons, the film includes re-enactments of the creative process. Hiply dressed executives meet in space-age meeting rooms, redesigned to reflect the agency's “commitment to creative work.”Footnote ²⁰⁹ In a meeting of the creative department, one executive explains that this is a chance to do something “really fresh and original in the cereal category.” They discuss how their trip to the cereal factory helped them understand how Grape-Nuts are made from natural ingredients; then the creative partners, the art director and copywriter—sitting in front of the famous poster of Bob Dylan designed by Milton Glaser, a clear signifier they are members of the Creative Revolution—discuss potential spokesmen, from bakers to wheat farmers, before settling on Gibbons, author of a book on natural foods. One creative cogitates, “Perhaps we could base our commercial on something like wild cranberries? What if we had a scene in the snow, and he says something like ‘I'm gathering part of my breakfast,’ and you don't see anything but snow until you get to a close up of the cranberries. Then we could go to an inside scene where he's putting the cranberries on the Grape-Nuts.” Subsequent scenes show the making of the storyboards, the client meetings, and the production of the commercial in a snowy mountainous location, where technical challenges are laboriously surmounted in multiple takes. Following the editing process, the screening of the commercial for approval by the creative director is the “moment of truth.” The creative director wants a closer zoom in on the cranberry bush; fortunately, they have such a take, so after re-editing and client approval, the commercial runs. The narrator concludes, “Finally, an idea that began life in an art director's office more than two months before is transformed by a small army of specialists, a long chain of events, into a television commercial.” This Grape-Nuts commercial, then—despite its use of such traditional strategies as a testimonial by a celebrity, product claims (“made from natural ingredients, wholesome wheat and barley”), and the fiction of Gibbons picking cranberries that likely grow better in summer bogs than winter snow—is presented as an authored creative text, its cinematic documentation legitimating the commercial as a cultural form rather than an irritating interruption of the viewers’ pleasure.