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The SponsorsBelow is an extract from a book called The Great American Broadcast by Leonard Maltin. I think it sums up nicely how powerful and influential the sponsors were whilst at the same time providing us with an insight as to how radio ushered in a whole new form of advertising that marketing executives would now refer to as above-the-line or indirect advertising. Extract from The Great American Broadcast by Leonard Maltin There were many longtime marriages between product and show: Johnson's Wax and Fibber McGee and Molly, Pepsodent and Bob Hope, Ralston and Tom Mix, Ovaltine and Little Orphan Annie, to name just a few. Many of those sponsorships were the result not of market testing, field surveys, or advertising agency pressure: they were personal choices of the company chiefs. In the modern era of demographic research and conglomerate ownership, the idea sounds almost quaint, but those were simpler times. Many of America's corporate giants were still under the firm control of their founders (much like the radio networks themselves). Those men expressed their personal taste through their choice of programs to sponsor. Orson Welles believed that to be one of the greatest distinctions between vintage radio and modern television. "There were all kinds of sponsors," he remarked. "Nutty ones, rightists, leftists, idiots, very bright people-and as a result, you had a big variety of shows, because they were expressions of different kinds of people ... not only the artists who made them, but the people who paid for them. And now, whatever you can do on television is a reflection of the three people [at the networks] who control what television is, all of which are looking with beady eyes on each other, which is rather cannibalistic, isn't it?" In radio's earliest days, there was heated debate about the wisdom of commercializing the medium; it was anathema to many people. In 1924, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover said in an address to the National Association of Broadcasters, "I believe the quickest way to kill broadcasting would be to use it for direct advertising. The reader of a newspaper has an option whether he will read an ad or not, but if a speech by the President is to be used as the meat in a sandwich of two patent medicine advertisements, there will be no radio left. To what extent it may be employed for what we now call indirect advertising I do not know, and only experience with the reactions of listeners can tell. The listeners will finally decide in any event." This would not be the only time Mr. Hoover's crystal ball was cloudy, but he wasn't alone in his beliefs. A full decade later, after commercials had become a mainstay of broadcasting, theatrical impresario and radio host S. L. "Roxy" Rothafel wrote in the January 1934 issue of Radio Mirror, "As a direct sales agency radio is a flop. And the sooner the sponsors realize it the sooner they'll eliminate the plethora of commercial advertising that is stuffed into the ears of potential patrons. Radio is the greatest builder of goodwill. But that good will may be destroyed by irritating interruptions of a program to plug a product. The very purpose of the broadcast may be thwarted by a lack of discernment, lack of showmanship. "If I were a merchant I would advertise my wares through a combination of radio and newspaper advertising. I'd build good will on the air, and I'd tell 'em what I had to sell in the advertising columns." Leonard Maltin 1997 You can find details on The Great American Broadcast and other popular old time radio books by clicking here. |
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