When Advertising Became Art — and Art Became Everything, Part I

Here's a question to think about as you listen to this episode. What is advertising actually for? If your answer is to sell products, you're not wrong. But you're also only about a quarter right. In understanding the other three quarters is what this episode is about. Think about the last time a brand made you feel something. Not just notice a product, actually feel something. Say like apples think different or Nike's just do it. Maybe a super bowl spot that hits you in the chest before you even processed what it was selling. That feeling is not accidental. It's the result of about a hundred years of advertising history figuring out with increasing precision exactly how to get inside your head. Today we're tracking three decades the post-war boom of the 1950s the creative explosion of the 60s and the strategic reinvention of the 1970s that produced the playbook every brand strategy still runs today. By the end of this episode and part two you'll understand exactly how advertising stopped being about products and started being about you. Umba bachelor and this is brand strategy in advertising. To understand why advertising became what it is you have to understand the economic problem it was invented to solve. Start with a fishing reel. Back in the 90s a man bought an old fishing reel at an estate sale in Southeast Missouri. Stamped on the side was the name zero hour. Nobody had heard of it. When he tracked it down the zero hour bomb company turned out to be a Tulsa Oklahoma operation that held patents on time detonated devices used in oil production. After World War II demand for those devices dried up so zero hour partnered with an inventor pivoted to consumer manufacturing and by the late 50s had become Zebco one of the most recognizable fishing reel brands in America. That story in miniature is the story of the entire post-war American economy. For 16 years the Great Depression then World War II Americans had been denied. Denied goods, denied spending, denied abundance. Then the war ended, the factories were still running at full capacity and suddenly the problem was in production. The problem was consumption. How do you get people to buy enough to absorb everything from those factories? All those products that factories could make. The economist Michael Aglietta called this the central logic of Fordism. Henry Ford in this example didn't just invent the assembly line. He invented the idea that if you produce it scale and price low enough the masses become your market. A model a model a Ford rolled off the factory floor every 60 seconds in the early 20th century. The miracle of mass production also contained its own crises. If the masses couldn't consume as fast as industry produced the whole system breaks down. The Great Depression was in part exactly the fulfillment of that breakdown. But what happens? The same thing that we saw during the COVID crisis during the financial crisis of 2008. Government stepped in with Kenzie and economics spending programs to keep money circulating and to prime the pump of consumption. Here's what government industry could not do. They could not manufacture the will to consume. They could build widgets. They could put money in people's pockets but they couldn't make people want the widgets. That's where advertising came in. Scholar Stewart you and described it this way. It's the advertising industry that manufactures the consumers necessary to make the system work properly. Now think about that. Manufactures the consumers, not the products, the people who want the products. In the 1950s advertisers had refined this into an art form but there's a dark logic at the center. In the 1950s the US had become what you and called a material utopia. The country was practically floating in consumer goods. All that technology that developed in World War II was put into place to build better consumer products but abundance created a new challenge. If people already had enough how do you convince something they need more? The answer is uncomfortable but worth contemplating. What you do is you manufacture discontent. You make the consumer feel that something's wrong with them. Something's missing from their life. And then you say ta-da here's the product that will fix it until the next campaign and then it starts all over again. Think about toothpaste. Toothpaste becomes even better. 25% wider. Things like that. It's the same toothpaste. It's only slightly altered but by giving it a new lease on life by saying that it's something better consumer brand gets another opportunity to sell it to you. That shift from rational information to an emotional manipulation from here is what this product does to here is who you will be when you own it was not a 1950s invention. It started earlier after World War I when propaganda techniques crossed over into commercial advertising and Freudian psychology gave Madison Avenue a new vocabulary for the subconscious. But in the post-war consumer boom that advertising volume got turned way up. Advertising had become a system for producing desire. The question for the 60s then is what happens when the most talented people in the country decide to make that system beautiful. What happened was a creative revolution. There's a famous line attributed to Bill Bernbach. Now Bernbach was the co-founder of an advertising agency called Doyle-Dane Bernbach. He's one of the most consequential figures in the history of advertising. He said the difference between the forgettable and the enduring his artistry. Bernbach said that in the context of a fight and it was a fight he was winning. It's also worth noting that Bernbach was one of the primary models for the TV show Mad Men's Don Draper. The advertising of the early post-war period was by and large Ernest and methodical. The product era of the 1950s meant you talked about the product, its features, its benefits and things like its superiority over competitors. Research drove strategy and account executives were over creative. The work was technically competent but largely forgettable. Bernbach changed the power structure of the industry. He argued that creative people, writers, art directors, designers should lead not follow. In Bernbach's eyes, an idea could be a strategic weapon. He believed that advertising could be simultaneously, entertainment and persuasion. He didn't just want consumers to notice ads. He wanted them to love them. His famous 1959 Volkswagen campaign is a textbook case. The beetle was small cheap and conspicuously un-American at a moment when Detroit was selling chrome and fins and maximum horsepower. The exact opposite thing and trying to convince people that's what they wanted. DDB's campaign leaned into all of that. Their slogan was "Think small." A tiny car floating in acres of white space in their advertisements. Self-deprecating copy that made fun of the product and by doing so made consumers feel smart for choosing it. The campaign didn't just sell cars, it refrained the entire category. Meanwhile, another famous figure, David Ogelvie, was building a different kind of empire from a different premise. Bernbach trusted the industry, instinct and craft, Ogelvie trusted research. He famously said "creating successful advertising is a craft, part inspiration, but mostly know how and hard work. If you had to have a modicum of talent and you know which techniques work at the cash register, you will go along way." Ogelvie built the idea of the brand image, the total personality of a product that advertising creates and maintains over time. He did add for Rolls Royce and the headline was "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise and this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock. It's precise, it's confidence, it's specific and it made the cars luxury, palpable on the printed page. But the figure who most completely understood what television could become and who madmen failed to radically represent was Mary Wells Lawrence. Mary Wells Lawrence had worked for both McCann, Erickson and Doyle Dane Bernbach before founding her own agency called Wells Rich Green. She was arguably the first advertising executive to unlock the full potential of TV advertising as spectacle. Burnbock himself called her "the agency dream" emergency. What set Wells Park was her understanding that television was theater, not a billboard that moved, not radio with pictures, but theater. Her work on the Alka Celter campaign transformed a chalky and acid into a lifestyle product through commercials that were genuinely funny. People looked forward to seeing them. And the famous plot, plot, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is, Jingle became part of the National Vocabulary. And that's every brand manager's dream. But her most revolutionary work was for brand of airlines. She took a commodity. A regional airline competing in an airline when all airlines looked more or less the same, and she turned it into a fashion statement. She had the planes painted in bright rainbow colors, designed by Emilio Pucci. She redesigned the interiors. She renamed "Flight Attendance Hostesses" and put them in mod designs representative of the 1960s. The tagline, the end of the plane plane. The campaign ran on the Super Bowl. It shocked people and delighted people in equal measure. But in less than a year, brand have received more press coverage than they paid for in over a decade of advertising. Southwest Airlines painting their planes with personality that still brand of logic at work. What Burnbock, Ogohy and Wells Lawrence collectively invented is what writer Stephen Heller called "The Big Idea." The creative leaders of the 1960s understood that to truly capture attention and impart lasting messages they had to continually amuse. Advertising became more clever, funnier and more enjoyable than ever before, and in doing so it grew more powerful because it stopped feeling like advertising. The 1960s was officially the "Image in Era." The total personality of the brand mattered as much as any individual product plane. Coca-Cola wasn't just a software. It was a refreshment, modernity, and belonging. You weren't buying a card, you were buying a statement about who you were. Which sets up the problem in the 1970s then had to solve. We'll move into the 1970s in part two of this conversation about advertising as art. [Music]