by Tim Wu
The harms of advertising are aptly attested by the Lucky Strike campaign of the late 1920s and ’30s. The massive amounts spent on cigarette advertising had spurred demand for a dangerous product and deterred switching between brands, while also preventing cheaper newcomers from making much headway. The result was an oligopoly of branded cigarettes—Camels, Lucky Strike, and so on—that has lasted for decades, and, of course, no few cancerous lungs.12
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As advertising suffered through its comeuppance, much the same fate awaited Lucky Strike, when its “Reach for a Lucky” slogan attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. (The confectionery industry, displeased with tobacco’s displacement of their product, might have had something to do with this scrutiny.) The FTC had taken particular note of the claims that cigarettes soothed the throat, along with the dubious doctor’s endorsements and paid testimonials; it also cast a jaundiced eye on the suggestion that cigarettes were a weight-loss aid. Finding both the testimonials themselves and the failure to disclose the payment for them deceptive, the commission insisted that Hill stop claiming that Luckies would help anyone lose weight.13
Unfortunately, the commission’s actual power over deceptive advertising, legally ambiguous at best, was definitively quashed by a skeptical Supreme Court in 1931, just as Lucky’s campaign was firing on all cylinders. Consequently, Hill and Lasker were back to their old tricks, if somewhat more cautious, now peddling their claim more by implication than outright assertion. A new version of the ad from later in the 1930s shows a slender and beautiful woman on the edge of a diving board, surrounded by a plumper silhouette. “IS THIS YOU FIVE YEARS FROM NOW?” it asks. “When tempted to over-indulge, Reach for a Lucky instead.”14
But the humbling of the FTC and general sense of outrage yielded a legal reform movement whose goal was to control the excesses of advertisers and their clients. At the Agriculture Department (the FDA’s ancestor), Rexford Tugwell, the economist, was appointed an assistant secretary with a mandate to improve consumer protection. Like others in FDR’s government, he felt the 1906 Food and Drugs Act had not been strong enough to prevent unscrupulous practices. So the administration introduced a bill that pushed for legislators to impose tough rules over advertising.15
As originally conceived, the so-called Tugwell Bill was very tough indeed. It combined the concepts of false labeling and false advertising, designating as the latter anything that was clearly untrue, or that, by “ambiguity or inference,” created a false impression. The law also barred advertisements from purporting that a product could cure any of a long list of diseases. Products falsely labeled or advertised would be subject to seizure by the Department of Agriculture; their promoters subject to criminal prosecution.16
Such strong medicine would have effectively outlawed many of the techniques that the advertising industry had adopted over the 1910s and 1920s. Though the softer brand advertising would have been unaffected, much of reason-why advertising’s arsenal, the entire patent medicine approach included, would have been finished. If Hill and Lasker had persisted with the Lucky Strike campaign as it stood, they might both have landed in prison. And many of today’s most familiar infomercials claiming the miraculous benefits of this or that would be illegal.
Unlike patent medicines, however, the advertising industry, though bloodied, was more than equipped to defend itself; and its side was joined by the fledgling pharmaceutical industry, already practiced in government relations, and determined to protect what it called the “sacred right of self-medication.” Rexford Tugwell became the target of claims that he was a communist agent trying to import socialism: “The world knows that he has visited Russia and has found its institutions acceptable,” charged one industry flack, and now “he believes that packaging and advertising constitutes economic waste that should be prevented.” Advertising also cleverly enlisted newspapers to its cause, even issuing threats to pull most of its business were the bill to pass; as the historian Inger L. Stole points out, the American media almost entirely declined to cover the controversy. Sensing their very viability was at stake, the newspapers, food producers, and drug manufacturers formed a tight phalanx with the advertising industry, doing everything they could, even funding front groups, until they were sure the Tugwell Bill would go down in flames.17
In 1938, a far weaker law was passed; the Federal Trade Commission regained its powers to oversee advertising through a ban on “unfair or deceptive acts or practices,” which referred only to factually untrue statements, not the potential inferences targeted by Tugwell. The new law reflected “a five-year effort to render such protections painless for business interests”; and many at the time argued, like Milton Handler, a law professor at Columbia, that it did not go far enough: “While the [new law] represents a sincere attempt to stem the avalanche of false and misleading advertising, it is no more than a first, and unfortunately, inadequate step in that direction. Unless buttressed by clarifying amendments broadening its prohibitions and implementing it with effective sanctions, it will not effect an abiding solution of the vexing problem of false and misleading advertising.”18
The industry, albeit humbled, had survived, and mostly unregenerate. In the end it was left with the grim awareness that it had worse problems than government. In Depression-era America, advertising’s pitches were falling on deaf ears, or at least, on the ears of people now lacking the means to buy all those items great and sundry on which they had frittered away so much money just a few years before.19
Something had to change, and it would. But few in late 1930s advertising could have predicted it would be an explosion in the supply of usable attention. This happened thanks to two new inventions, the first one whose potential most doubted and the second whose potential they could scarcely imagine. A whole new attention economy would soon be born, and advertising would cling to it for dear life.
* * *
* Some economists contest the idea that demand can be created by advertising, despite the empirical evidence. Whether “wants” can be created may just depend on how you define them. One might be said to be born wanting “beautiful things,” and advertising merely identifies for you what is beautiful. Or one can more easily say that advertising shapes or creates demand.
PART II
THE CONQUEST OF TIME AND SPACE
The first thirty years of the twentieth century demonstrated that attention could be harvested on a mass scale and converted into unprecedented levels of commerce and military might. It is therefore remarkable that this effort—which seemed at the time so pervasive, to the point of inflaming critics and whole movements—was, in retrospect, so circumscribed in time and place. To see where and when attention was being harvested, one had only to see where advertising (or propaganda, its noncommercial twin) was to be found. For however inescapable and multifarious it may have seemed at the time, advertising before 1930 was confined to the oldest of media, those from the nineteenth century or earlier—newspapers, magazines, billboards—and the oldest of the major communication networks, the mail system. It had as yet no purchase on the new media of the twentieth century, which were only beginning to transform the lives of those who heard and watched them—the movies, radio, and soon, television. Furthermore, there remained a divide between the highly commercialized public sphere and the traditional private one. A newspaper or leaflet might be brought inside, but otherwise the family home was shielded from the commercial bombardment to which one was subjected in public. This, however, was soon to change.
As global advertising crashed in the 1930s, along with the rest of the economy, the industry was in existential crisis, and desperate to renew itself. With advertising’s usefulness now in question, the old channels of attention could no longer generate enough revenue to keep the advertising business viable. So it began to search for others, and its search led it into what turned out to be human attention’s mother lode. By means of new technologies, advertising and its master, commerce, would enter what had been
for millennia our attention’s main sanctuary—the home.
CHAPTER 7
THE INVENTION OF PRIME TIME
In 1928, Walter Templin, the new general manager of Pepsodent toothpaste, was looking for an idea, anything that might save the company, which was on the verge of collapse.
Just a few years earlier, thanks to Claude Hopkins’s inspired “tooth film” campaign, Pepsodent had reigned as king of the dentrifices. But by the late 1920s, the product had suffered from bad, if accurate, publicity. Unlike our toothpastes, Pepsodent didn’t contain fluoride or appropriate cleaning agents. Its vaunted “clean” feeling was produced by an abrasive ingredient that was, according to one Columbia University chemist who tested it, “hard and sharp enough to cut glass.”1 Furthermore, he found that “Mucin placque [technical term for the ‘film’] cannot be digested from teeth by any advertised use of ‘Pepsodent.’ ”2
Another problem was that Pepsodent’s initial success had lured in competitors, so that there were more than one hundred brands of toothpaste on the market by the late 1920s. Some were admittedly even worse: Tartaroff, for example, which claimed to turn teeth “into gems of pearl-like beauty,” in fact whitened them by burning off enamel with hydrochloric acid.3 But Pepsodent was also losing market share to better alternatives, like the upstart Colgate, “the ribbon dental cream,” which promised a “safe” dentifrice with a “delicious flavor.” (A “man is known by the teeth he keeps.”)4 By 1928, Hopkins’s brainchild was on the verge of going out of business.
But Templin, a Canadian who had relocated to Chicago, had an idea. Like many in the 1920s, he was entranced by the invisible miracle of radio broadcast. In fact, before Pepsodent, he’d run a radio set manufacturer. Might there be some way of promoting Pepsodent on the airwaves? But how?
In the 1920s, the idea of advertising on radio was controversial if not contemptible. Even Printer’s Ink had opined that “the family circle is not a public place, and advertising has no business intruding there unless invited.”5 Radio, moreover, was in a utopian phase, and its destiny seemed to be the uplift of the human condition, not selling toothpaste.*1 As the future president Herbert Hoover had put it in 1922, “It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter.”6 Some even doubted that radio could be an effective advertising platform, based on failures of ad-supported cinemas in the 1910s. As Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, owner of New York’s largest movie theater, said, “If you try to sell some brand of shoes or anything else over the radio you’ll have no radio audience.”7
At the time, companies with designs on radio’s audiences stalked them indirectly, by sponsoring content. Gillette, for example, underwrote a lecture series on the “history of the beard.” Most, however, sponsored a musical act like La Palina Hour, named after La Palina cigars, or the Clicquot Club Eskimos, a banjo ensemble presented by a popular ginger ale (the “Eskimos” played their banjos in full parkas before their studio audiences).
So perhaps a Pepsodent orchestra? But another toothpaste had gotten there first—the Ipana Troubadours played swing but dressed like Spanish bullfighters. Among the nondental ensembles, listeners could also enjoy the Goodrich Zippers, the Silvertown Cord Orchestra (featuring the Silver Masked Tenor); the Sylvania Foresters; the Champion Sparkers; the Fox Fur Trappers; the Ingram Shavers; the Yeast Foamers’ Orchestra; the Planters Pickers; and, of course, the Freed-Eisemann Orchestradians. The field, suffice to say, was fairly crowded.
One evening in 1928, at a friend’s home in Chicago, at 7 p.m. to be exact, Templin heard something quite different on the radio, something along the lines of:
“Dell me ’dis one ding—is you a democrat, or is you a ree-publican?”
“Well, I was a democrat…”
“mm hmmm”
“Bu’ I believ’ I done switched ovah to da republicans now.”
“Who is da man who’s runnin’ in dese heah elect’n times, explain dat to me.”
“Herbert Hoover. Versuvius Al Smith.”
“Wha’ is da difference?”
“Da one of dem is a mule. And da otha’ is an elephant.”
Two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, speaking in “Negro” voices, were telling a story that never ended—a “serial”—in fifteen-minute installments. It was carried by a local station, one of the countless independents that existed in the early days of the medium.*2 Little did Templin or anyone else realize that his discovery of Amos ’n’ Andy—the ancestor of the sitcoms and other broadcast entertainment that captivated so many for so long—was to revolutionize the business of capturing and selling attention.
The characters, Amos and Andy, were two Southern blacks who’d moved from Georgia to Chicago, only to be perpetually confused and confounded by modern urban life. Andy, voiced by Correll, was the older, brash and overconfident, “absolutely convinced that he had the answers to everything.”8 Amos, meanwhile, was earnest and simple—as later promotional materials read: “It’s ‘Ain’t dat sumpin’?’ when he’s happy or surprised.”9 Originally from Richmond, Virginia, Gosden, who played Amos, was the son of a Confederate soldier. The show, he said, was based on his experiences of being raised by a black nanny alongside a black boy named Snowball.
When Amos ’n’ Andy had come on, Templin noticed something peculiar at this friend’s house: the entire family stopped what it was doing to gather around the radio and listen intently for the show’s entire duration. Radio, he rightly concluded, could not only capture attention, it could do so inside the customer’s home. It could cause a whole family to ignore one another and listen in rapt silence.
We have spoken of the mind’s impressive ability to shut the door to the outside world; but while Amos ’n’ Andy was on, people were apparently glad to fling it wide open. The rapt attention was different from what the musical acts had. Templin recognized that this was an astonishing power, if it could only be harnessed.
His idea was to take the Amos ’n’ Andy show to the NBC radio network, with Pepsodent as sponsor. Kenneth Smith, now head of Pepsodent, and the other executives seemed to like the idea, perhaps because it seemed connected to the old tradition of advertising toothpaste in print using stylized black men with shiny white teeth. (In fact, it was around this time that an English company launched the Darkie brand, with a smiling black man as its logo.)10
But outside Pepsodent, the idea met immediate resistance. As Broadcasting magazine later recounted, “Other advertisers laughed at [Pepsodent’s] foolhardy ignorance of radio.” The conventional wisdom, wrote the magazine, was that “people won’t listen to talk on the radio. They’d rather talk themselves.”11 When Templin went to NBC, its managers offered him a choice: the Vincent Lopez orchestra, or Jesse Crawford, the organist. When Templin insisted on Amos ’n’ Andy, and in “six quarters” (fifteen minutes, six days a week), the network was unresponsive.
A subsequent attempt to sell Amos ’n’ Andy to the new CBS network was no more successful. Informed that the show was a “daily blackface act,” then President H. C. Cox said, “Do you mean to tell me that you believe an act can go on a network at the same time every day in the week, five days in succession?” The answer was yes. “I think you should go back to Chicago,” said Cox. “It’s very plain to see that you know nothing about radio.”12
Even within Pepsodent some had their doubts, arguing that Amos ’n’ Andy’s dialogue format was too simple. They proposed a longer, more elaborate blackface program, with a chorus and an orchestra—a sort of minstrel competitor to the Eskimos or Troubadours. Ultimately, however, after nine months of wrangling, NBC agreed to take the order, for an enormous sum, over $1 million, and introduce its first sponsored serial program—indeed probably the first network “show” that wasn’t musical or educational. It agreed to sell thirteen weeks at 7 p.m. on its farm team Blue network, which, given Pepsodent’s dire financial strait
s, was effectively a bet on Pepsodent itself. “Never in the history of radio,” said one commentator, “had there been such an order as that.”13
Amos ’n’ Andy would be the same show it was before, with two changes. First, the characters would move from Chicago to Harlem. And second, as a concession to the tradition of musical acts, NBC introduced a theme song. Adding what seems now a further coat of racism, the music director chose “The Perfect Song,” the theme from The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s 1915 hit film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan.
And of course the sponsor’s message had to be right. Pepsodent and Lord & Thomas hired, on an exclusive basis, an announcer with an exceptionally mellow voice named Bill Hay, who pronounced at the end of every Amos ’n’ Andy segment this message:
“Use Pepsodent Toothpaste Twice a Day—See Your Dentist at Least Twice a Year.”14
In August of 1928 as the series launched on NBC, Amos ’n’ Andy were making their move to Harlem:
AMOS: Heah we is goin’ to New York—we don’t know whut we goin’ do.
ANDY: Dat IS right too. Yo’ know, I been thinkin’ ’bout dis heah thing. We was crazy to come heah.
Templin had gotten his way, but after the first run, Amos ’n’ Andy looked to Pepsodent like a mistake. Despite high hopes, listenership was low and there was little noticeable effect on sales. Realizing he had nothing to lose, however, Templin doubled his bet, spending one of Pepsodent’s last millions on the program.