Advertising & Social Consciousness

One tier, that's all it takes. One tier rolling slowly down the face of a man in Buckskin and Braids, watching a car window open and trash hit the road at his feet. If you know that image, and if you grew up watching television in the 1970s or 1980s, you absolutely know that image. Then you already understand something essential about advertising and social consciousness. You understand that the most powerful ads don't always sell a product. Sometimes they sell an idea, a feeling, a version of who we might be, who we're failing to become. That's the territory we're in today. Welcome to brand strategy and advertising. I'm your host, Bob Bachelor. Let me give you the question that drives this whole episode. Can the industry that manufactures desire also serve the public good? Think about what advertising does at its core. It creates wants. It tells you your car is too small, your teeth aren't white enough, your life is missing some essential product that will complete you. Advertising. In the bluntest terms is the engine of consumer capitalism. It runs on manufactured meat. And yet, and this is the beautiful complicated paradox at the center of today's episode. Some of the most powerful advertising in American history hasn't sold anything at all. It's tried to stop drunk driving. It's tried to get kids off drugs. It's more in the death of a continent's natural beauty. So how did we get here? How did an industry build on getting people to buy more and up being the vehicle for telling them to do better? The answer runs straight through the 1960s and it starts like so much of advertising history with a rule being broken. By the late 1950s, Madison Avenue operated like a factory. The agencies of the post-war era were organized hierarchicals scientific. They believed advertising was a discipline with measurable rules. David Ogelvie was practically its theologian. Give a product a high-class image he argued and you can charge more for it. Research tells you what works, follow the formula. The copywriter's worked in one room, the art director's worked in another, they didn't talk, the client was always right, and the ads. While they looked like the era that produced them, the conformist polished in about a surprising as a Cape Cod house in a new suburb. Then Bill Burnbock walked into the room and blew it up. Burnbock co-founded Doyle Dane Burnbock, DDB, and his genius was almost laughably simple. He put the copywriters and the art directors together, left them alone and waited to see what happened, and what happened changed the industry forever. The campaign everyone cites is Volkswagen. In an era when American cars meant tail fins, chrome, giant, big engines, they were relentlessly triumphant. DDB changed that by running ads for the beetle that said things like, quote, ugly and lemon and think small, a tiny image in the corner of an almost blank page, no boasting, no glittering promise, just honesty, or at least the convincing performance of honesty. Advertising later, advertising age later named the VW campaign as the top campaign of the 20th century, but more important than the award is what it signaled. Advertising could now be ironic. It could be self-aware, it could wink at the audience and trust them to get the joke. Mary Wells Lawrence, the first woman to head a major advertising agency, took the same energy to Wells Rich Green and pushed it further. Her Braniff Airlines campaign didn't just self-flights. It painted the plane's different colors, dressed the flight attendance in Pucci and called itself, quote, the end of the plane plane. It was a spectacle's advertising, advertising as art. Within months, Braniff was getting publicity worth more than years of paid media. Lawrence put her finger on something that still matters today. The 1960s, she said, was a time when businesses were smaller, decision makers were willing to gamble, and advertising carried, quote, a wholesome kind of supportive feeling from the public. Audiences weren't yet exhausted by the relentless commercial bombardment that would come later. They could still be surprised. Here's what you need to understand about this moment. The 1960s creative revolution wasn't happening in isolation. Inside the agency windows, the country was on fire. Think about it. Civil rights, Vietnam, the counterculture, youth in the streets questioning every institution and all the assumptions that had been made about American history, and advertising. This supposedly establishment industry started mirroring that rebellion. Agencies like DDP and Wells Rich Green were in their way the counterculture in business clothes. The ads they made felt anti-establishment because they were. They mock the conformity that Ogreby celebrated. They wanted dysfunction, irony, imperfection. If you can remember back or look up on YouTube, the famous Alka Celts are ads. Try it, you'll like it. I can't believe I ate the whole thing. These weren't selling indigestionally, so much as selling the experience of a culture learning to laugh at itself. But here's the darker undercurrent that cultural critic Thomas Frank identified. The counterculture didn't co-opt advertising. Advertising co-opted the counterculture. By the time you could buy a psychedelic t-shirt on HATE Ashbury, which by the mid-2000s had become an open-air museum, the system had absorbed the revolution and sold it back to you at a markup. The tension between authentic disruption and commercial exploitation is still the central drama of advertising today. Every time a brand runs a campaign about breaking the rules, you ask yourself, who's actually benefiting from that narrative. By 1971, a man in Buckskin was paddling a canoe through industrialized water toward a littered shore. The ad was produced by the ad council, the oldest and largest developer of public service advertising in the US. It was an organization created by the US government during World War II to push patriotic messaging, in which it never really stopped working at the intersection of advertising craft and national purpose. The man was actor Iron Eyes Cody. The message was simple. People start pollution, people can stop it. And that one tear, released at the site of a roadside trash, became one of the most indelible images in American advertising history. This is the other side of the ledger, not advertising that commodifies rebellion, but advertising that tries to redirect behavior. This is public service advertising. Here's how the ad council defines its mission. Quote, "To identify a select number of significant public issues and stimulate action on those issues through communications programs that make a measurable difference in our society." They've been at it since 1942. Many of the world's most famous advertising messages have come from this organization. Smokey bear, Rosie the Riveter, "Only you can prevent forest fires. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Friends don't let friends drive drunk. The crash test dummies just say no. These aren't campaigns. These are the things that make up our culture. They've been around so long that we stop noticing. But someone designed each one of these campaigns. Someone wrote the copy, chose the image, decided on the visuals. A skillet with a crack dig. A weeping man in buckskin. They decided that these images would cut through the noise and land somewhere that people would take to heart. In the 1980s, the partnership for a drug-free America asked a genuinely audacious question, can advertising unsell something as well as it sells it? The answer was the Brain on Drugs campaign. An egg frying in a skillet, 30 seconds, no subtlety at all. And by their own accounting, it worked. They reported a 70% drop in crack and cocaine use over the life of the campaign. Now, and this is where your critical thinking has to kick in. Those numbers come from the organization that ran the campaign. Measuring the actual impact of public service advertising is notoriously difficult. You can't control who sees the ad. You can't isolate the campaign from every other social force operating at the same time. Behavior change is slow, complex, and really from different multiple points. The honest answer to whether these campaigns work is, well, sometimes, under the right conditions to some degree. But here's what they unquestionably do. They give a society a shared vocabulary for confronting its problems. The crying Indian didn't end pollution. But it gave an entire generation of visual shorthand for environmental consciousness. The just say no campaign didn't end the drug crisis. But it gave parents and kids a phrase to anchor a conversation. Advertising, even more particularly public service advertising, is better at shaping. how we think about problems than it is it's solvent. That distinction matters. Keep that in the front of your mind. Now let's complicate this because the best stories always are complicated. That crying Indian ad, one of the most celebrated public service campaigns in American history, it has a shadow. The Keep America beautiful organization that produced it, with ad counsel support had some interesting corporate partners among them allied chemical, Bethlehem steel, American can, US steel companies that critics pointed out were responsible for industrial pollution orders of magnitude greater than any individual littering from a car window. And if for today's listeners littering from a car window seems bonkers. I remember as a child when you would go to a fast food place and there weren't many or go somewhere and you had trash parents and grandparents would say just roll down the window and toss it out. The pollution was a major problem in the 1970s still is today. Think about the move that's happening with this type of advertisement. The ad puts the moral weight of the environmental degradation on the individual, on the person who throws the wrapper out the car window, not on the manufacturer who made the wrapper, not on the industrial complex pumping toxins into waterways. You are the enemy here, the individual, start pollution, stop pollution. That's not coincidental. It's a rhetorical strategy so elegant it almost has to be admired even as you recognize what it's doing. The corporations funding the campaign had every reason to want environmental consciousness directed at consumer behavior rather than industrial practice. We see this kind of subterfuge all the time in modern advertising. Look at the thing I'm talking about. Laugh at the thing we're selling. Laugh at yourself for buying it, but not what the greater impact might be. This is what scholars called greenwashing in its early form. Greenwashing is an important concept. It's a template that's never gone away. Today brands run campaigns about sustainability while their supply chains operate on the far side of the globe under conditions they'd rather not discuss. The quote "caused marketing" that was emerging by the 1990s where brand attaches itself to a social cause to improve its image has only grown more sophisticated and more ubiquitous. So greenwashing in a sense is the way that a company says one thing to get you to focus on that one thing but then operates in a way that is completely contrary to what they are trying to get you to not think about. A 1996 survey found that 58% of Americans believe "caused marketing" was a simple way for corporations to improve their image. Only 12% said a company is associated with a cause actually influenced their purchasing decisions. The public's more skeptical than the advertising industry likes to believe. And yet the spending keeps going up. Companies invest enormous sums in social responsibility advertising because it works. Not always a changing behavior but at managing perception. That's important. Know the difference between an ad that's trying to change how you behave and one that's trying to change how you feel about a company. That's not the same thing. We saw this with DEI advertising and DEI statements after George Floyd's murder. Companies pretended to care and then as soon as the heat changed and the the perception changed they changed their way of thinking. If you want a modern day as of like yesterday example of this look at the way target has been criticized over the last several years and how much brand value target has lost as a result. So where does this leave us today? The counterculture of the 1960s got absorbed and sold back as a lifestyle brand. Public service advertising became in some hands vehicle for corporate reputation management. Caused marketing grew into a multi-billion dollar industry. And now we live in an era where every brand has an Instagram feed that looks like a social justice nonprofit and every product launch seems to come with a mission statement about changing the world. That's not cynicism. It's just an observation and it cuts both ways. Because some of this is genuine. Some companies do meaningful work around the causes they claim to support. Some public service advertising does change behavior. Save lives, shift culture. The ad cancels HIV prevention campaign. One of the first to use the word condom on American television confronted a genuine public health crisis with real craft and real courage at a moment when many institutions were looking the other way. The question you have to carry with you as a student as a future brand strategist as a consumer who lives inside this culture is not whether advertising can serve social consciousness. It can't. We know that. The question is who is served and how and at what cost? Whose interests are being laundered through the language of public good? That's greenwashing. When you see a brand make a stand on the environment on social justice public health ask the questions Thomas Frank taught us to ask back when he was analyzing the 1960s who benefits from the narrative this ad is constructing what behavior is it redirecting and away from whom is this disruption real or is this disruption itself being sold? These aren't cynical questions. They're professional ones. Every effective brand strategist has to understand the difference between authentic brand purpose and performative purpose. Is this real or is this play acting to manage brand reputation brand value etc. You're going to confront these issues not only when looking at brands but looking at your own personal brand. Look at brand you. Are you authentic to the causes and the ideas that you want to stand for? Are you performing in a way that makes you look one way or another without having any substance there? Consumers are getting better at telling the difference between the two and faster than most corporations realize. So let me bring this back to where we started. One tier rolling down a face simple devastating branded in one's mind instantly that image worked and still works because it understood something fundamental about how advertising operates at its best. It doesn't argue. Makes you feel something first and then gives you a frame for that feeling. It bypasses the rational mind and goes straight for the gut or straight for the heart. The 1960s creative revolution understood this. Bill Bernbach understood it. Mary Wells Lawrence understood it. The ad council understood it when they commissioned that commercial. The best public service advertising the best commercial advertising share this quality. They trust the audience to bring something to the experience. What separates the memorable from the manipulative isn't technique. It's honesty about purpose and developing the critical eye to tell the difference. That's one of the core skills this course is designed to build. Advertising has always been a mirror. Sometimes it shows us who we are. Sometimes it shows us who we would like to be. Sometimes if we're paying attention it shows us who profits from the image. Thank you for listening. Thank you for taking this ride in advertising history with me and the students in brand strategy and advertising at Coastal Carolina University. I'm Bob Bachelor. Thanks for listening to brand strategy and advertising.