by Tim Wu
Launched in 1955, the Marlboro Man campaign was Burnett’s most successful and among the most astonishing campaigns in the history of demand engineering. But upon the cowboy’s appearance, Marlboro went from a mere 1 percent of sales to become the fourth bestselling brand in the United States within a year; its sales increased by an astonishing 3,000 percent over that time. Burnett had not modeled the Marlboro Man on himself—he was “rumpled, pillow-shaped, balding and jowly” with “heavy horn-rimmed glasses perched on his spud-like nose.”17 He also proclaimed himself adverse to psychological theory, though he did write that “the cowboy is an almost universal symbol of admired masculinity,” and perhaps he had sensed among men in the civilizing 1950s a need for reassurances on that score. In any event advertising was proving that it could project not only “reasons why” but whole mythologies; it was naturally suited to things of the spirit.
If Burnett was trafficking in archetypes, he was not alone; Jungian and Freudian thought had reached the zenith of their influence, both in society and in the advertising industry, where once they had been skeptically brushed off. If ideas of appealing to unconscious desires were once merely in the air, now an array of firms run by professional psychologists offered “motivation research,” aimed at the deepest human desires. It is hard to measure, and easy to exaggerate, how effective this analysis was; nonetheless, by 1954 there were at least eight good-sized firms offering it as a billable service. Just as in the good old days, it was under the guise of a science, until, as one reporter put it in 1959, “The difference between an ad man and a behavioral scientist became only a matter of degree.”18
Among the most outspoken, highly paid, and controversial of the new commercial psychologists was Ernest Dichter—“Mr. Mass Motivations,” as he was sometimes known. A Freudian from Austria, Dichter made his name and fortune as an advisor to companies with marketing problems. Dichter inhabited, perhaps even created, the image of the Freudian as a man with a pipe, horn-rimmed glasses, and a German accent. For him, nothing was a pipe, everything was a symbol, and his stock in trade was to find them in plain sight, outing encrypted realities as obvious truth with his blunt pronouncements.
Food was especially suggestive to Dichter, who, for instance, asserted that “the wedding cake [is]…the symbol of the feminine organ”; and that “the act of cutting the first slice by the bride and bridegroom together clearly stands as a symbol of defloration.” When hired by food manufacturers, he began by characterizing a product as “male” or “female” and carrying on from there. Elongated edibles like asparagus he predictably considered male. He theorized that women were uncomfortable eating wieners, being “spellbound and definitely attracted by the meats.” He naturally approved of Oscar Meyer’s jingle,
Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener.
That is what I’d truly love to be
For if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener
Everyone would be in love with me.19
Most foods in Dichter’s mind, however, were female, as was their preparation (except for grilling). But there were also some products for which he could not quite make up his mind. “Some foods are bisexual,” he opined, “among them roast chicken and oranges.”20
Dichter was just as blunt about the purpose of advertising. It was never merely to inform but existed to “manipulate human motivations and desires and develop a need for goods with which the public has at one time been unfamiliar—perhaps even un-desirous of purchasing.”21 His research was conducted through intense, psychotherapy-like sessions with consumers—usually housewives—sometimes several together, which he was the first to call a “focus group.” His analysis rarely failed to uncover deep associations, sexual or otherwise, explaining why consumers bought the things they did.22
Perhaps Dichter’s most famous effort was one of his first, a job he did for Chrysler. The automaker was concerned about sales of its new model, the Plymouth. Chrysler posed two questions to its corporate therapist: “1. Why do most car buyers buy the same make as their last car? 2. What influence do women have on the purchase of cars?”
In response, Dichter did not really answer the questions. Instead, he wrote, “Tell me how a man drives, and I will tell you what kind of man he is.” The Plymouth was available as both a convertible and a sedan. After interviewing car buyers, he theorized that men regarded a convertible as a symbolic mistress, offering adventure, excitement, and romance, even if they were more likely to buy a sedan, which “reminded them of the comfort and familiarity of their wives.” He therefore recommended both more advertising for convertibles and prominent showroom placement. This, he advised, would fire the male imagination, drawing in the male car buyer, so that he might yet marry the sedan.23
The ultimate success of prime-time television at attention capture, as measured in Nielsen ratings and the effects of TV advertising, would shape every subsequent contest in the market for attention; all future claimants would have to mold themselves as an alternative to TV, with profound consequences for those in the new technologies, the attention economy, and necessarily for most Americans. For television was now, as it still in many ways remains, attention’s 800-pound gorilla. With the clearest and most engaging access to the public mind, it could exercise the greatest influence and therefore command the lion’s share of advertising revenue.
As though awakening at last to the real challenge of programming, Sarnoff put the job in the hands of a former advertising executive named Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, then president of NBC. In Weaver, Paley for the first time faced an opponent with a talent as great as his own, and in some ways deeper. Unlike Sarnoff, Weaver understood the business of both attracting and selling attention. He had cut his teeth in radio at the agency Young & Rubicam, producer of many leading radio shows over the 1930s, and had later moved to the American Tobacco Company to help George Washington Hill sell Lucky Strike. Like Paley, he was a cultural omnivore, comfortable with the highest of the high and lowest of the low, and he had an uncanny gut instinct for what would work and what wouldn’t. While still subject to the General’s ultimate command, Weaver turned the war into a fair fight.
There are, as we’ve seen, two ways to win the contest for attention in a free market: the first is to present something more compelling than the competition; the other is to slip into some segment of the public’s waking life that remains reserved or fallow. Weaver took the second tack by introducing television to the early morning and late night. Mealtimes were once thought sacrosanct, but he invaded the breakfast hour with news and entertainment that were light enough to go with eggs and toast. The Today show premiered in 1952—and included among its on-air performers a chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs, usually dressed in a diaper. The New York Times described the new show as “the latest plan for electronic bondage dreamed up by the National Broadcasting Company,” but that didn’t stop it from becoming a hit. Weaver then attacked the other end of the day with the Tonight show, which played at the previously uncontested 11:30 p.m. slot, and featured the comedian Steve Allen interviewing celebrities.24
The genius of these simple ideas is attested by the fact that both formats survive to the present day, in a multitude of guises, but they did play to NBC’s unfortunate reputation for crassness. This effect Weaver tried to hedge with what he called “Operation Frontal Lobes,” his personal vision of more cerebral content. A prominent example was the show entitled Wisdom, featuring interviews of luminaries in the sciences, arts, and politics: Robert Frost, Marcel Duchamp, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Margaret Mead, to name a few. But that was window dressing. The Weaver mission was better exampled by another inspired play for ratings share: the NBC “spectaculars.”
The first was the 1955 broadcast of the Broadway musical Peter Pan, which attracted 65 million viewers, rivaling anything CBS had done. The “spectacular” concept demonstrated an understanding of the inertia of attentional habits. Weaver saw these special broadcasts as creating “excitement and controversy and washday gossip,” by disrupting t
he “robotry of habit viewing.” Thus he made viewers rethink their schedules, while sucking life out of whatever CBS had in the same slot. The success of the spectacular—a one-time event—also had the unintended benefit of making NBC think differently about sports, and in particular, big football games, which were also annual events. And so NBC decided to invest heavily in promoting its broadcast of the 1958 National Football League championship game. As luck would have it, professional football turned out to be a good match for television, and the contest between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants, decided in sudden-death overtime, was proclaimed “the greatest game ever played.” Attracting 45 million viewers, it established the precedent and template for what would persist as another great attention ritual: the Super Bowl.25
But perhaps none of Weaver’s innovations would have as much long-term consequence as his introduction of the “magazine” format over his tenure.*5 Television shows had heretofore been sustained by a single sponsor. Weaver came up with the idea of repeated commercial breaks, during which the advertiser would have a clear one-minute shot at the viewing audience. The network could now sell one show to several advertisers, as well as exercise more control over content. The advertisers, meanwhile, could split the costs and now enjoyed a more direct opportunity to pound their messages home. CBS and ABC quickly copied NBC, and for networks and advertising firms, the commercial break was a bonanza. The losers were the public, whose viewing pleasure was regularly interrupted for a sales pitch, and the writers of television shows, who now needed to produce content that would tease audiences to “stay tuned” through a commercial break.
The magazine format, in fact, only worked because television was uncompetitive enough that the networks could, effectively, raise their prices in tandem—force the viewers to watch more advertising for the same, or even less, entertainment. It is a testament to the market power over their audiences that CBS and NBC had achieved by the 1950s—there was no serious alternative with less advertising, so viewers put up with the intrusion.
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Back at CBS, Paley, now facing NBC’s advance, was forced into a long-deferred choice—make CBS live up to the highest ideals of what television could be, or commit to win the fight for the highest ratings and largest profits. Some say that his temperament decided the question: high-minded though he liked to be, “he had always hated being number two.” He would rack up the largest audiences, whatever it took.26
In the summer of 1955, at the height of Weaver’s challenge, Paley threw down what would be his great trump card—a quiz show named The $64,000 Question. The concept was not original—Louis G. Cowan, the creator, had pioneered the quiz format for radio—but the prize money was unprecedented and impossible to ignore. Like Amos ’n’ Andy, the show owed its existence to a desperate advertiser—Revlon—looking for something to set them apart and willing to try anything. So they agreed to the massive cash payout—more than half a million in today’s dollars. The rest of the work would be done by the timeless spectacle of human nature amid the vicissitudes of fortune.
As the game was structured, the questions, in categories of the contestant’s choosing, began at the $64 level, the amount doubling ($64, $128, $256—all the way to $64,000) with each correct response; one incorrect answer and all earnings would be forfeit. The contestant could quit with his winnings at any time; Paley even introduced breaks at the $16,000 and $32,000 levels, forcing players to go home and think about whether to risk losing it all for a chance at the big prize.
Within weeks of its debut, the show knocked I Love Lucy out of first place. Such a sudden and staggering seizure of the public mind warrants closer examination. The opening shot panned the audience of ordinary-looking people, and then zoomed in on one face. Over a drum roll, the announcer said, “Our brush salesman from the Bronx, Wilton Jay Singer, who answered his $8,000 question. He’s back to tell us whether he’ll take his $8,000 or try for $16,000. On his march to the $64,000 question!”
The producers carefully chose likable protagonists as contestants: like Gino, a cobbler from the Bronx, who happened to know everything about opera; Gloria, a twelve-year-old African American, who was a prodigious speller (she would take home $32,000); or Dr. Joyce Brothers, an attractive blond psychologist who knew everything about the sport of boxing. All were sympathetic people, who explained their deliberations carefully and quickly became stars in their own right, thanks to television’s remarkable power to confer celebrity with unprecedented speed.
Suspense, the agony of defeat, and above all, vicarious greed—it was an intoxicating cocktail for viewers.*6 The show also promoted an exciting and somewhat egalitarian sense that perfectly ordinary people had hidden talents. “Everybody’s smart at something,” as Louis Cowan put it. Thus, with luck, anyone might become incredibly wealthy and famous overnight—the American dream paced as prime-time spectacle. What’s more, the bitter taste of failure was sweetened: the losers, so long as they’d reached $4,000, went home with a Cadillac convertible as a consolation prize.27
But Paley’s big-money contest triggered even more brutal ratings competition, which became all-consuming and desperate. NBC immediately copied the concept several times over, most notably with Twenty One, which pitted two contestants against each other. Sponsored by a relaunched patent medicine (Geritol: “America’s number one tonic for tired blood!”), Twenty One put even more prize money at stake. But its ratings climb against CBS didn’t happen until Charles Van Doren—a handsome, deep-voiced, and patrician English instructor at Columbia—showed up to challenge the reigning champion, Herb Stempel of the Bronx. Stempel had a big nose, thick glasses, and an abrasive manner. The producer would later say, “You want the viewer to react emotionally to a contestant. Whether he reacts favorably or negatively is really not that important….Viewers would watch him [Stempel] and pray for his opponent to win.”
Like The $64,000 Question, Twenty One made theatrical displays of its integrity, such as storing its questions in a local bank vault to ensure their secrecy, putting its contestant in a sealed glass booth, where he could hear no one but the host. In the final showdowns, the suspense of Van Doren’s drawn-out deliberation before answering questions drove audiences wild. He finally knocked out Stempel, going home a rich man, with $129,000, and enough celebrity to appear on the cover of Time as “Quiz Champ Van Doren.”28
With NBC’s successful challenge for game show supremacy, the ultimate battle of attention capture began to brew. To draw audiences back, Revlon and CBS quadrupled the winnings for The $64,000 Question, and consequently, a ten-year-old boy walked off with $224,000 (more than $1.8 million today) for correctly answering some questions about mathematics, science, and electronics. Twenty One countered by bringing in another Columbia University affiliate, a graduate student named Elfrida von Nardroff. She had a winsome pixie cut and alluring way of looking up at the ceiling when searching for an answer. Over sixteen weeks she won $220,500. Revlon could afford the prizes, but had the competition continued it might have bankrupted everyone. Twenty One and The $64,000 Question, moreover, were only the biggest players in a genre that exploded into more than fifteen different quiz shows by 1958, including Dotto (connect the dots), Beat the Clock (timed stunts by couples), Dough-Re-Mi (song identification), Tic-Tac-Dough (trivia questions), and many others competing for the same eyeballs.29
The quiz show war typifies what had become of attention industries by the late 1950s: competition had taken on an intensity and anxiousness not seen since the penny papers of the 1830s. It must have made one yearn for the relative gentleness of the old radio days, with their mushy ratings, limited advertising, and smaller revenues for broadcasters and advertising firms. A show did not need to prove itself definitively so much as contribute generally to the network’s lineup and make the affiliates happy. It was a lower-pressure environment, like a school where every child is average.
That greater intensity came in part from the disappearance of doubts as to advertising’s power to d
rive sales, making audience attention more valuable. While scientific proof of the conversion of attention into sales may have been lacking, the examples of successful campaigns were too numerous to be ignored. Reeves’s commercials for Anacin (“Fast, fast, fast relief”) correlated with a 200 percent increase in sales over eighteen months. A new brand named Crest stormed the toothpaste battlements with a special ingredient, “fluoride,” and a happy boy crying, “Look, Mom! No cavities!” It became the market leader in just four years’ time. Television and print ads of the Marlboro Man, as we’ve seen, turned an obscure woman’s cigarette into one of the market leaders in less than a year, and Revlon was widely thought to be saved by The $64,000 Question. Of course, it is possible that Crest was just making great toothpaste, or that Marlboro just happened to take off. Certainly, for every successful advertising campaign there were plenty of others that seemed to have no impact. Nonetheless, the number of notable successes was sufficient to set off a feeding frenzy.