Transcripts For CSPAN3 Lectures In History 20161225

We talked about new protections last week, laws and regulations that make it safer for consumers in the marketplace. We talked about new kind of advocacy and activism, the National Consumers league,. We will add a layer count talk about changes in how americans sold products, market goods. These are just as important as the changes on the business side, infrastructure, in American History. One of the things we will do is talk about advertising. You may think it is a little strange to study ads in a history class. This isnt marketing. This is not business. Ads are a great historical tool. They tell us a lot about the past. This is an editorial from harper weekly, a popular magazine that circulated around the country at the end of the 19th century, still published today as a monthly. Peer is what harpers said could here is what harpers said. [reading] the story of today would not go quite that far. They are not a perfect picture of the past, but advertising is a great way to think about the way society is valued. We dont take ads seriously today because we can see through ads. We think we dont notice them because they are part of the background now. Or we literally see through them. We figure out the tricks in ads. We are not deceived or manipulated, but advertising is a huge business, and the techniques developed at the turn of the century are still the ones we use today. That is what we will talk about, what they enable us to understand about the past. Ads are a great way for us to understand the cultures values, but also what society is afraid of, fears and nervousness that people have. We see those popping up in ads. We can see what a society thinks is important or who is important by what is featured in advertising. We can understand about racial and gender norms of a society by looking at who appears in ads, what roles those people play in the ads. We also find out what people feel nostalgic about, what is in the past that they miss, things that they think are cutting edge, whats really modern and out there that at the forefront. So they help us flesh out the past really interestingly. That is what we will hit today, the history of advertising. Then we will look at new developments in marketing, branding, packaging, slogans at the turn of the century. We are telling two stories, one about the seller and how they are trying to attract consumers, and how they are try to get these people to buy their products, and the other story is about the consumers themselves, how they change and how their lives adapt to new consumer marketplaces. Ts get started i want to step back a minute to tell you about the history of advertising, what advertising looked like before the ads you see today. Advertising existed long before its modern form. It has been around for centuries. Even long before america was colonized. Archaeologists have recently found a paper, advertisement for paper in the Hunan Province of china over 700 years old. Ads have been around, but they do not look like todays ads. We see things like noticeboards outside of the store. That would be a kind of advertisement. Or wine or food sellers passing out free samples in the streets, hiring actors or singers to roam around it encourage people to come into stores. Ads are not printed in the same ways we might anticipate today. We dont really get printed ads in the west until the middle of the 1400s in parts of europe. We dont get the first printed ad in north america until 1704, a slow process. But they are there, and in the concept of advertising, it has been around for centuries. It is the forms and techniques of advertising that has changed. The big colonization of america depended on advertising. This is an ad from 1609 encouraging immigration to virginia. They are trying to encourage people to take off and cross the the atlantic and take on this adventure to start something new. Ads do this. They also encourage people to try new products from the global market, spices from india and carpets from the middle east and tomatoes from the new world and coffee. All these new products. All of these things had to be introduced to a new public. I want to show you an ad from the preconsumers world, the producers world. This is an ad for coffee. What do you think of this ad . Dont be shy. Yes . A lot of text, yes. What else . Yes, sir. There is no images. To our modern eyes, the ad is not very functional. Theres a lot of text and nobody wants to read this much. The only thing different about this ad is that there is no brand name could just copy, a commodity. The ads from the past dont necessarily look to us like advertising. They look like newspaper articles in some ways. I want to point out some of the things that the ad does that looks like modern advertising. The ads claim that the upper class, the lords, they drink coffee. This is not different from a celebrity endorsement from like the kardashians, right . Somebody out there is saying, these people who are popular and have status like this drink. You might like it too. This ad does other things that modern ads do today. It talks about the Health Benefits of coffee. This is a population that had never had access to coffee before. They were not sure how to use it, consume it, what you did with it. The ad would go through and explain that if you drink coffee, it might release your gout, cure scurvy, promises all kinds of things. Its almost like Jamie Lee Curtis and her yogurt commercials. If you keep this product, youre going to feel better. The coffee ads did that. Some of the functions of the ad look similar. It is techniques that are different. The long copy makes it look so unfamiliar to us today. The other thing obviously is that there is no brand name. We dont really get brands until the 19th century. They dont really pick up until the 20th. It is not something that is common in advertising for hundreds of years. It is well into the 20th century the forget brand names on commodities like water and onbefore we get brand names commodities like water and bananas and coffee. Most of them do with massproduced goods when they finally do emerge. This is what ads looks like for hundreds of years. This is an ad from the 1600s. This was an ad from the 1700s. Benjamin franklins newspaper. It was one of the most popular newspapers in colonial america. Lots of text, no brand names, no images. Heres an ad 100 years after that from the new york herald. Pretty similar, lots of text, no images. Lots of copy, no brand names. For hundreds of years, advertising was pretty much the same. The pattern does not change much. Thats even despite all that stuff we talked about here. Even with all of the changes of the american revolution, new goods in the marketplace, advertising does not change until it does. For historians, that is a great question. What happened to make the ads change from like this where they are like announcements here is this product, here is where you can buy it, here is how much it costs those are really objective. They provide information to people. There is no kind of subjective ideas, no emotion in those ads. It is really clear what they are trying to do is show you where you can purchase a product if wanted to or interested in obtaining this product. Modern advertising is quite different. It starts appearing at the end of the 19th century and really picks up over the course of the 20th. It is not just changes Like Technology that makes this happen, or not just paper and ink become cheaper. It is changes in society, ideas, economic and social changes we have been talking about in the last few weeks. It is also the introduction of new science, the science of psychology, behavioral sciences. New kinds of economic theories coming out. This is why advertising changes. Advertising is responding to what is happening in society more broadly. We talked about a few of these. Fewer people make the goods they actually need any more. They are moving out of rural areas and small towns into cities. They need to buy things. They cannot produce them on their own anymore. More people are working for wages, so they have got cash on hand. Once they have got cash, they can spend that cash in stores. And mass production is lowering the cost of those goods, making it accessible to more people than ever before. In some ways, it becomes more rational to buy goods then to make them. You can buy storebought candles rather than spend hours making candles on your own. That is cheaper to buy kerosene lamps and electric lamps. The market economy makes all these goods available. Change and advertising go hand in hand to help explain what is happening. Manufacturers have goods to sell. The advertisers bring them together. They are that middle piece that makes the consumer marketplace happen. I want to talk about a few new developments in particular like the ways the market changes. We have ubiquitous commercials and ads everywhere. One of these things is that there is a new brand of professionals called advertising executives that did not exist before. I want to talk about them, who they were, what they thought, where they came from. This is a big business. For the first time in some respects, advertising takes leaps and bounds over 40 years between 1880 and 1920. These ad execs come up with strategies to convince consumers to buy more and more. Some of their most popular strategies are brand name packaging, slogans, and new kind of ads that appeal to people emotionally. I will show you examples of all of these. I said advertising was big business and i meant it. Advertising grows from a 230 million industry in 1800 to nearly 3 billion by 1920. It is an enormous change in what is happening in the marketplace over the course of this period. These ad execs want to shake off the old image they have of pt barnum. Grammaremember him . He had these crazy ideas about how to make money and attract people. They say, that is not us. We are not entertainers or traveling medicine shows. We are not selling snake oil medicine. We are not hucksters. You can trust us. We are professionals. We are educated. We will go out and seek public approval. The way we do that is through different kinds of tactics. They are coming out of the world theyre not coming out of the world of entertainment that pt barnum had been a part of. They are coming out of the world of science and Higher Education and economics departments. If you are looking at the potato me of advertising in the 1800s, it is pt barnum, and in the 20th century, it is edward bernays, the father of modern psychology. He learned what makes people tick. Once he does that, he figures out how he can get things into their pockets, how they can actually sell them goods. These ad execs offer to go write copy and make ads for businesses to get them to find a way to attract the new consuming public. Before this, ad execs would go doortodoor like peddlers. Now what they are saying is that we can unlock the secrets of Mass Communication and that will lead us to a mass market to get more people on board and sell them more stuff. They dont want to just print facts about a company. They want to do more than that. They see the world as more complex. They see that there is a more dynamic everest population in this country than ever before. And they are figuring out how to sell the complicated things to a complicated public. They think they have unlocked it. They have figured out a way to get people to buy things they dont actually need, and they will turn those needs into desires. We are going to find a way to do this. They will often go to businesses and say, we understand the public, the consuming public, better than you do, because we have done all kinds of Market Research and scientific studies on what makes people tick that we can be a liaison between the public and business. We can bring you together and increase your sales. We have interpreted consumers viewpoints. And we can figure out a way to bring them to their attention so they market themselves first. A lot of these guys, almost all of them, are men. There is a few women, but mostly men, white, protestant, new yorkers, and they are mostly collegeeducated. That makes them a rather specific, small demographic. They are not representative of the country as a whole. That makes businesses worry. What do these guys know . These egghead intellectuals about women shopping around the country . How can they understand a mass public . The ad exec says we can overcome that. Yes, we are distinctive and unrepresentative, but the best way to do this is to Market Research, focus on the audience and not on us, figure out the hopes and fears of those people, to meet their desires or create those desires, and to use science to back up ideas, use behavioral psychology and market polling and figure out what people want. So they said all of that data and science help them overcome their own inherent prejudice. They are not quite successful. A lot of their biases bubble up. Its an interesting question to think about what these new ad execs talk the consuming public wanted. They are mostly convinced that they need to use these new tactics. The old tactics dont work. They cant go doortodoor anymore. Cities make that impossible. They need to use Mass Communication somehow, and they need to reach out to people with totally different backgrounds. They have to figure out how to break that down. One of the ways they do this is with something we are familiar with, brand names. The first three decades of the 20th century art kind of the golden age of brand names. Today, in some ways, brands are self explanatory. It is natural that we like brands. If you had a choice between diet coke, maybe diet pepsi on this campus, and generic cola, which would you want . Why would you want the brand . Dont be shy. What does the brand mean to you . It is just something you are more familiar with, you know what you are getting. Katarina keane familiarity. Anything else . [indiscernible] Katarina Keane ok, a company you can hold accountable, or trust or something you know as opposed to a generic label. That to us is very familiar. There is a reliable experience, consistency, a corporate entity that is behind that product. American consumers had to be taught those things. They were really not used to brand names. They were not sure brands were preferable. That brands were something they could trust. So ad execs have to figure this out. How do we get consumers to buy our coffee, our tea, not just some generic brand . How do we get them to learn brands are preferable . First you have to figure out which one is their product, so it has to look different and be distinctive in the store. Distinctive packaging is the beginning of this. This is the way you start changing consumerss behavior. In 1900, most Americans Still buy things from barrels or boxes that are unmarked, unlabeled. They are unaccustomed in some ways to looking for prepackaged goods. What would happen is you go in with your own barrel or box or container or bag and you feel it from unmarked barrels in the store. You would scoop out your rice or tea, nails, anything you might need, then you fill in the container on your own. This is typical for most shoppers at the turn of the century. That is what they are used to. That is not what advertisers want. They dont want you to buy generic products. They want you to buy their product. They have to get people thinking separately, to buy something specific to their company. Distinctive packaging is one way to do this. Bottle is aa famous example. It was trademarked so early. If you want them to recognize products by what they look like here is the thing, americans dont want to do it at first. They are suspicious of packaged goods. They think these are more trustworthy than the stuff in the barrel. They would rather go in with their own container and scoop out what they want and fill it instead of buying something in a package. Their concern about packaging is that they cant see the goods. They cant smell it for taste it. That is what they are used to. They are accustomed to having a way that to make sure what they are buying is in the package. Its a different kind of shopping bee than what a lot of us do today. So somehow, the advertisers have to get them to change their behavior and start preferring prepackaged goods rather than the things they have always been accustomed to, a choice of their own. They have to make people think that the boxes are not concealing anything, odors or bad food, and this was a way for people to trust them. I bring it back to you and your current behavior. You have a choice between rice in a giant enormous barrel that you will scoop out and take on yourself, or prepackaged rice in a box. Which do you take home today . Why would you take the box home . Yeah, i pointed to you. Because you probably think it is more reliable, coming from somewhere. Katarina keane you trust the company. You feel like you know where this product came from unlike the unmarked barrel. [indiscernible] Katarina Keane you wrinkled your nose, a hygiene question. Big barrels. That hygiene question had to be taught to americans at the turn of the century. They had to be taught there were germs and danger lurking in the communal pot, in the communal barrel. So we see in a lot of these early ads, this is an ad for crackers at the turn of the century. They often talk about the cleanliness of their foods or the possibility the product was tainted by someone else before you got there. So you see things like protected by the inner seal package, you can trust this good as being safer than that stuff in the barrel you always use and your parents had always used. This is going to free you from other peoples germs. A couple of the reasons why people preferred packaged goods is that they are more affordable. How many times have you forgotten your bag . It was already packaged you coul and you could take it home with you. People like the convenience of this, the reliable amount. Some of the early ads would suggest merchants could cheat you if you brought your own box or barrel in. If you take it on the scale, you could not be sure how much you are buying whereas prepackaged goods were the same every time, the kind of standard, uniform experience. Those things have to be taught. Consumers have to change behavior and learn how things become different. Slowly over the course of decades, packaged goods become more popular. Consumers prefer that. They prefer standardized, brand name products out there. All of the packaged goods required changes in the stores themselves. We talked a little bit about this, but we will talk more next time. Remember the way stores are set up. You have a long counter in the general store or country store, counterclerk behind the. Behind the clerk was all the goods, all the merchandise. He interacted between the customer and the merchandise. He was the intermediary in all of the relationships. Advertisers dont want that. They want to be the one with direct connection to the consumer. They dont want this guy standing between them and the goods. Branding requires all kinds of cooperation with storeowners. They can point this idea in someones mind that it is the best product or safest or most , but there was still a merchant standing between them and the customer, and the merchant, who had some trust, could say, dont buy it, it is not good. Other people come in, they tell me the crackers are stale. They dont want that relationship anymore. Advertisers want to change that. They start approaching stores and say, we can boost your sales if you let us come in and set up new displays if you see these pictures. We will have these elaborate displays in your window. We have pyramid of goods stacked up in your store, and it will be its going to attract all caps of new customers two. And its going to attract all kinds of new customers two. The merchants are interested. They think they will sell products. What advertisers want to do is bypass the person. They dont want him involved anymore. They want customers to wander through the shelves and pick up goods and choose items for themselves. We get a self service store, like what you are used to today. Piggly wiggly, a kind of grocery store, opens in 1916 and becomes the product for selfservice shopping. We will talk more about this later. Piggly wiggly let customers wander through the shelves, pick up items, throw them in their heartcarts. The guys who own the store are panicked. This is removing their whole function from the shopping experience, but in some ways, it ends up helping them. It helps their bottom line. The merchants find over the course of a few years this is a better fit for the new urban environment. Before the general store or the country store, the merchants knew the people. They had long relationship with him and his family who owned it for years. In the city, the merchant is anonymous to you. The shoppers are anonymous. There is not a personal relationship. There is not the kind of trust. Wandering through the aisles kind of made sense. The people did not trust the merchants because they did not know them. The other thing that merchants find over the course of several years, retailers like selfservice because they buy more when they wander through the aisles themselves. It leads to impulse shopping. They take up items they werent expecting to like and put them in their basket. They find people are more willing to buy things that would have been embarrassing to ask the clerk for people they will pick them up themselves, put it in the basket, and take it to the checkout line. Slowly, advertisers are able to convince retailers and shoppers to change behaviors, change what they expect in the store, how they behave in the store. They need to do more. They cant just use distinctive packaging. They had to make them into loyal customers, make them come back year after year, to create a personal relationship between shoppers and the manufacturers of these items. So the old relationship between merchants and shoppers now it is advertisers and businesses and shoppers. One way to do this was to create new kinds of slogans and characters in their story, in their ads, to connect directly to products. Quaker oats is one of the first ones to do this, and they are quite successful at this. They want to make consumers feel something about buying their product. Beginning in the 1880s, pretty early, quaker oats developed this mascot, the quaker from the 17th century, and he is slapped on all of their products and advertising. So he shows wholesomeness and a nostalgia for the past. He is somebody you can trust. He inspires a kind of confidence. He promises wellness and a healthy product. You would often see in the quaker oats adds pictures of children and mothers. There is a promise to mothers that this is going to be a good reassuring experience, kids will love it, you are doing your job as a mom. Quaker oats was trying to bypass the merchants and create the experience through its ads. This becomes more and more common over the course of the 20th century. Brands have a kind of reputation. They have a meaning to consumers. They have a personality in some ways. There is a feeling about a product, product line, that did not exist before. And it takes a lot of work on the advertisers part to convince that plain old white soap can be different than ivory soap. That ivory soap means something and has a kind of special meaning to people as it starts to emerge at the end of the 19th century. Ivory does smart things. It had just been called white soap from most of the 19th century, but then it has a distinctive logo and package design that sets it apart on the shelves and start relying on ads that appeal to ideals of domesticity. An oldfashioned household with mom and her kids. Even by the time these ads appear, its oldfashioned. It makes people think of a kind of warmth and they connect that with ivory soap. They have a slogan that i admit doesnt quite roll off the tongue. 99 44 100 pure. You can trust us. This is almost totally. Pure. Ivory was trying to create relationships with consumers, to make them feel something about soap. Which is kind of silly, right . But theyre trying change the image of soap from something thats just needed, a utility, a necessity to something that warms the home, that protects children, connects mothers and children together. So what you see in these ads often, especially at the turn of the century, not quite as much today, you see characters. You get people like aunt jemima, betty crocker, the quaker oats guys. These kinds of personalities appear constantly in ads at the turn of the century. Historians have theorized that this was a kind of bridge, that before consumers went to the merchants and trusted and knew the merchants. Now they know the characters from the ads and they can trust those people even if theyre not real. Its in some ways a replacement for that old relationship between the urban shop keeper and the customer. You are living in an urban society and a mobile society. You dont know people very well, but you know the characters on the boxes. In some ways thats why they become so popular. They are symbols of security and stability, people you can trust in this anonymous, urban environment. You get trademarks. Campbells soup is the probably most famous one, the red and white label, that would allow customers to immediately recognize their favorite products. You notice in the ad that it says look for the red and white label. They are trying to get people to change their behavior patterns. Dont just look for any canned soup. Look for the one with the red and white label. These branding packages and characters, they help identify items and make them distinctive in stores. Advertising has to go one more step and explain why you need this one instead of all those other ones. Now you have recognized this, now you know this is the one you want, but heres why. Sometimes what they would do is use things like slogans. Really catchy, short phrases to get people to connect a product with an idea. Kodak is one of the first to do this. They do it quite successfully. They come up with this slogan you press the button, we do the rest. In other words, simplicity defined. You dont have to worry about this complicated camera. All you have to do is press the button. We do the rest. That becomes a catch phrase that people remember about kodak. Its the easiest product on the market. You go out there, buy it and all you do is press the button. We do the rest. Were used to this now, these short ideas that are memorably phrased and help us think about an idea connected to. Product this breaks that long technique of loss of copy, words in ads. Now were going to express a single big idea. Instead of talking about coffee is good for your health and the rich people use it and it comes from far away, one idea, express it clearly in a short concept. We still do this today. Hallmark, when you care enough to send the very best. Nike, just do it. Short, snappy slogans. Theyre best when theyre easily remembered, when theyre repeated and even parodied, like leggo my eggo. People my age will remember this one, wheres the beef. Short concepts you come back to over and over. Thats the idea behind the slogan, something short and snappy. They also need to get people engaged emotionally with a product, to make them feel something about a product. What we start seeing oddly enough is that ads start focusing on the consumers and what they think and what they feel more than the product itself. And its funny to modern audiences to go back and look at some of these ads which may not even reference the product, which may not have a picture of it or even its name in the ad because its really about the people and the way they feel when they look at it. As you can see, in this ad the cocacola is pretty small. With a tiny its a tiny little drink. The brand name is pretty big but its really making people feel in this ad something about the status of the people who drink cocacola, that theyre served on a tray. There is a kind of of discriminating people that drink cocacola. Advertisers start appealing to all kinds of these ideas, these emotions, these fears, these kind of base longings in their ads over the course of the early 20th century. Id like to take a look at some examples of this. Ive listed a handful of techniques that advertisers use. What theyve realized in other words is that the product could be sold for more than just its function, its utility, that you could sell Something Else in the ad, an emotion or an idea. And thats not easy. For example, instead of just selling an automobile as a means of transportation, getting you from point a to point b, you can sell a car as prestige, right . Instead of selling soap as something that gets you clean or cleans your home, you can sell sex appeal. You can make people feel better about themselves, appeal to vanity. Instead of, ah, instead of just a light bulb, you can sell illumination, right . These big ideas that make people feel something. And a lot of this is being driven by modern psychology, which has recognized that consumers have insecurities and they have desires and you can create longing for products in the ads and then connect them to a specific item. If you made people feel inadequate or if you made them feel scared of something, then you could convince them to buy your product. Advertisers are learning how to do this. They think that some markets are more susceptible to emotional appeals than others. Theyre pretty convinced that women and children are most susceptible to emotional manipulation. And so where we start seeing these techniques first are things for womens clothing, toys, soap and disinfectants and perfumes and makeup. And then it expands everywhere, right . Its in the automobile ads by the 1920s. But the idea behind this was if you could make a woman feel something, then maybe she would go buy your product. So for example this is an ad that was published in the ladies home journal. Whats it for . Very good. Yes. Its for a washing machine. You will notice there is no picture of a washing machine anywhere in the ad or a brand name. They dont even mention the washing machine. You cant see it in the text until the very last paragraph , but what the ad sells the woman consumer is the idea of what she could have if she bought it. She would have more time to go out with her friends. She could go learn how to play the piano. She could go gardening. The ad is selling something more than a washing machine, right . Its a promise of labor saving. Its a promise of time to yourself. In some ways the product becomes secondary and the consumer becomes primary and this is the way to sell a product. Today, as women we may not think this is a very effective ad, but its fairly typical for the 1920s. The idea is to blur the line between needs and wants. Maybe you dont need that washing machine, but you really want it because of the other things it can give you. This is a new innovation in some respects and a way of creating in consumers minds a kind of acceptance of luxury. You should expect something new all the time that will make your life easier and better and you should expect that thing to be replaced over and over again. Its a concept were rather familiar with, right . Its called planned obsolescence. Well come back to that. Its about making people feel something. These are ads for lucky strike cigarettes. What is the emotion here . What are they actually telling consumers . Why should they buy these cigarettes . Yes . Other cigarettes are bad for you, these arent . Katarina yes. Why are lucky strikes good for you . Im not actually saying that. You shouldnt go around smoking cigarettes. Katarina yes. If you dont smoke our cigarettes, you are going to reach for a sweet. Youre going to become fat, so instead you should reach for a cigarette. This is scaring people into thinking about their vanity, their appearance, and getting them to think about the cigarette as something more than just nicotine. Its a health product, a way to improve your appearance. And it has to be something new all the time. Advertisers and marketers realize you can get people to buy things once a new toaster or lamp. But then you have tapped out the market. Now you have to convince them come back for the newest model even though the one they have is totally functional and works just fine. Now you need this new one because that old one that worked great before is the wrong color or shape or toasted two pieces of toast and this one does for four. Thats the idea behind planned obsolescence. Its the idea that apple uses right . , you have the iphone 5, its totally awesome. Then the 6 comes out, now the 7 and now the iphone 5 is crap. You want the new phone. That is planned obsolescence. Its built into the design of these products. Advertisers and marketers capitalize on this. Every new year, a new model. We see this in cars in the 1920s. It had to make people feel like if you didnt have have the newest item, you were out of step you had lost track of the , you newest fad, that you were not keeping up with the joneses. Its a kind of scare copy. Its a tactic used by advertisers at the turn of the century that was about making people think about failure. Its sometimes called in trade jargon negative appeal. This idea is that you could jolt a customer into thinking differently by enacting these kind of dramatic stories of disaster or failure, right . Like the lucky strike ad. If you dont smoke our cigarette, youre going to get fat. If you dont buy our toaster, everyone is going to think youre not keeping up with the trends. If you dont buy our toilet paper, your kid is going to suffer. You alone can save them by buying scott tissue paper. This is scare copy. In scare copy, we get all kinds of stories jobs get loss, romances are cut short, marriages are threatened, we get that a lot. Germs are getting you. Cars are skidding off the roads. Your neighbors are looking at you with suspicion. There is all kinds of danger out in the world and the universe is a kind of scary place where external forces take control, but the advertiser is there with a solution and helpful hand. Buy our product and that problem goes away. Create the problem, the fear, the danger, and then solve it. Thats the idea behind scare copy. I want to offer you two examples of the most famous Advertising Campaigns in American History to show you how this actually plays out. Im giving you specific examples and not just all this theory. Ok. So are going to start with something called uneeda biscuit. You need a biscuit. Wouldnt you like a biscuit . I have said this name three times now. You get the idea. The name part of the idea. Its produced by the National Biscuit company, what today we call nabisco, at the turn of the century. In 1898, rightd at the end of the 19th century. And they do a couple things weve talked about. One is they developed distinctive packaging. The biscuits are kind of like soda crackers, not biscuits as we would call them today. They are all packaged inside in a trademarked inner seal. And at the side you get this red trademark, which is nabiscos trademark. All the uneeda biscuit campaigns also feature this kid in the yellow rain coat with his hat and rain boots. What that has too do with biscuits, i cant explain to you , but hes everywhere. It was a totally new product, and it was not available on the market before. It was introduced at the end of the century and it was the first milliondollar Advertising Campaign in the country. Its a big gamble on nabiscos part. And its so successful it becomes the prototype for Mass Marketing campaigns for decades. Heres what would happen. They have the pieces in play, right . Theyve got the character. They have a slogan lest you forget it, excuse me, lest you forget it, we say it yet, uneeda biscuit. Maybe not that catchy, but its everywhere. They had a consistent character and then they would have secondary marketing. They would go out and painted on the sides of barns with the uneeda biscuit slogan. Or they would have products. This is a chalkboard or blackboard that kids would bring to school and do math problems on and you would get this for free if you sent in their labels. You still have those kind of campaigns today. They would send stickpins and cufflinks to merchants to give away to consumers. Their idea and logo is on all kinds of merchandising and it has nothing to do with crackers. They would have their salesmen visit Country Stores and paint signs for the businesses. This is an example on the side of a building. I took this picture on seventh and indiana right north of the national archives. Its still there. It is everywhere at the turnofthecentury. It is hugely successful. Sales of the cracker immediately go through the roof. Theyre registering Monthly Sales of 10 million packages a month by the end of the it is so successful. In fact its so successful that people try imitate it but they dont imitate it well. They dont figure out why this works. They think the only reason uneeda biscuit is successful is because of the name. And thats not it. Here are some failed imitators. Uwanta beer and itsagood soup. None of these succeed. They all fail. It is the idea behind them. People think they understand marketing, but they dont quite get it yet. Its not just a name, but its everything that goes with it. Of thee textbook example introduction of a new product that gets sold to a new public. Listerine is a bit different. Listerine is an existing product. It had been on the market for years and sales were really flat. By the end of the 1920s they were only selling about 100,000 a year of listerine, in part because the stream listerine was sold as an antiseptic. People would dip their combs in them to make sure they are rid of lies. He did not need a lot of listerine. You probably needed one bottle a decade. Sales really flat. Listerine goes out to an ad agency and says what can we do . The ad execs say tell them they need it for a new reason. About an its not antiseptic. Tell them its about curing a medical problem they didnt even know they had. A medical problem called halitosis. What is halitosis . Bad breath. Most of you knew that. Halitosis is kind of made up. They went into an old medical dictionary and found this term that sounded sciencey but not too hard to say. They convinced people that halitosis is a real disease a lot of you have and you dont know it and this product can fix it. Its hugely successful. As you can see, in only seven years, they are making 4 million a year selling listerine. In part because theyre scaring people. These are changes happening all over the country. You are living in cities, working with strangers traveling , on subways, meeting people nm at movie theaters and amusement parks, sexual partners. Its a kind of anonymous world and so the ad is focused around the danger that you are going to be unpopular. That people wont like you. They dont know you yet and the first thing they know about you is that you have bad breath. And literine can fix that listerine can fix that problem. So we see this campaign which runs for decades and decades and decades to get readers to identify with stories in the ads. Its kind of long copy here but you can see it says halitosis can make you unpopular. Pretty blunt. You often get ads like this from the 1930s. Shes a nice girl, but. Has she always been that way . Theres something wrong with her. They encourage you feel compassion with people in the ads. She is a bridesmaid and never a bride. Why not . Shes lovely. And not just targeting women, but men too. You would get these stories, hes got a great job, really smart, why doesnt he have a wife . Because hes got bad breath. Listerine would fix it. Consumers identified with these people. You want this guy to have a nice vacation. Buy some listerine and youll feel better too. The listerine campaign teaches consumers that they have a new problem that can be fixed with a product they already own and they have to go out and buy more of it to make sure that problem keeps getting solved. Strategy is imitated by companies around the world because its so successful. Suddenly americans have all kinds of new problems. They are suffering from things like sweaty, smelly feet. Something called sour stomach, something called accelerator toe from pressing too hard on the pedals. All can be solved with new products. What the ad executives realize is that they are doing more than just selling goods. They are selling life. And if you want to sell a product, thats what you do. Just about how much it costs and what its made of, what ingredients are. Tell them how its going to change the persons life if they buy it. Its a big topic and we are going to come back to this over and over again. One of the key questions emerging was whether or not this was good for American Society, whether or not it was a democratic the moment, whether this was beneficial to the american public. Its a key question for the class, one well return to, but i want to point out a couple of things. One is that a lot of the ad execs said yes. They said what were doing is wiping away or erasing some of those regional barriers, differences in things like class and race and allowing visual literacy, we are allowing the illiterates to understand whats happening and all these immigrants who dont speak english. Massa creating this experience that is democratic. The critics said. You are actually creating feelings of inadequacy and reinforcing differences between different groups of americans and you are undermining the kind of cohesiveness of American Society by saying some people have access to this and others dont. One of the biggest questions obviously is about race and gender. In all the ads i have shown you there are no people of color. The ads that do depict africanamericans at the turnofthecentury, they are rarely depicted as consumers themselves. Theyre almost always appearing in roles as porters, as janitors, as washer women, as cooks. The ad was not meant to appeal to them. They were the subjects in the ads. They were really part of the story. This is one of the most disturbing ads you will see over the course of the semester. Well come back to it. The images of africanamericans in ads were often quite derogatory and to our modern eyes quite shocking. Thats because the executives didnt think they were trying to appeal to africanamerican consumers. They thought white consumers were the only ones that matters. We see that this has to deal with gender too, the women are just a basis for sex appeal and arent really considered seriously in the ads themselves. This is a big question that we will go back to over the course of the semester. When they come back next time, were going to talk about new places of consumption, department stores, and catalogue shopping. Thank you all [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2016] you are watching American History tv, all weekend every weekend on cspan3. To join the conversation, like us on facebook at cspan history. Malden was aill cartoonist for the Army Stars Stripes magazine during world war ii, showcasing the hardships of war or his popular characters willie and joe. Pulitzer prizes for editorial cartooning in 1945 in 1959. Postistorian discusses his cartooning career. He is the editor of two collections of his work, including willie and joe back home. Illustrated talk is part of a multiday conference at the National World War Ii Museum in new orleans. The Program Begins with an eight minute World War Ii Museum film about the emotional scars of war. Two of the most famous soldiers in world war ii or the gis willie and joe, cartoon characters created by bill mauld in, who were beloved for their frank representation of what it was like to be a grunt at the front. Mauldin knew that. Willie and joe story was not going to and when they came home. Has focused his work on sharing veterans stories with his Veterans Breakfast Club and he is also the biographer of mauldin. We think there is no one better to come and talk about coming home