Marketing Ate Our Culture -- But It Doesn't Have To

Editor's Note: Terry O'Reilly is the author, with Mike Tennant, of the book The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture, from Random House Books. The essay that follows was written for AlterNet and based off that book.

What if I told you that you should be watching more commercials? Yes, I’m an adman. And yes, you’d expect me to say that. But you just might have a moral obligation to watch more commercials. Let me explain.

A few decades back, Texan Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson gazed down the highway and didn’t like what she saw. Billboards blocked her view of the plains, of the distant hills, and of her beloved wildflowers. So she complained to her husband. He had a fairly influential job. He was President of the United States. Like all good husbands, Lyndon Baines Johnson knew what was good for him, and prompted Congress to pass the Highway Beautification Act, which placed limits on the spread of posters - or billboards as they’re popularly known -- and preserved the views that Ladybird Johnson loved so much.

The new restrictions drew rave reviews, particularly from one British ex-pat, who later wrote: "As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?"

It’s a remarkable manifesto considering its author is the legendary advertising mogul David Ogilvy, he of Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency fame. Throughout his career, he railed at large outdoor posters, even though his advertising agency created hundreds, if not thousands, of them for their various blue-chip clients.

Let’s stick a bookmark in here for a moment, and go back in time a bit further. At the beginning of the 20th century, one of the most powerful advertising agencies in America was Lord & Thomas, headed by the most influential, albeit most forgotten adman ever to stride purposefully down Madison Avenue (even though he was based in Chicago, but stay with me). Inspired one day by Canadian copywriter John E. Kennedy’s famous insight that advertising really was “salesmanship on paper” and not just “news,” Lasker took that seemingly obvious tidbit and built Lord & Thomas into one of the world’s largest advertising empires. 

Radio was just coming out of its wrapping back then, and Lasker initially paid little attention to the medium as it struggled for the economic model that would sustain it. What he couldn’t ignore, however, was the success of radio advertising pioneers such as Bernard Gimbel, of Gimbel’s department stores and Saks Fifth Avenue. Even harder to ignore was Lasker’s client David Sarnoff of RCA, who was also happened to be the founder of the NBC radio network in 1926. Eventually, Lasker decided to experiment with radio advertising and asked his New York office to create a program based on some sort of Broadway entertainment as a vehicle for Palmolive.

Meanwhile, NBC president Merlin Aylesworth didn’t believe in radio advertising as you hear it today, but preferred that sponsors (a word not yet invented in the late twenties) be mentioned before and after a program with a passing phrase like, “The following program comes to you through the courtesy of Lucky Strike.” Clearly, he hadn’t met Albert Lasker. But he was about to. The locomotive that was Albert Lasker had a completely different point of view: He reckoned that in exchange for underwriting a broadcast, brands should be offered an opportunity to present the sort of “reason why” advertising they did in print, but adapted for sound. Instead of parcels of space, they would occupy parcels of time. And that is how the broadcast “commercial,” as it came to be known, was born. Merlin, meet Albert.