Made In America - Bill Bryson [159]
Because of the confusion, and occasional lack of fastidiousness on the part of their owners, many dozens of products have lost their trademark protection, among them aspirin, linoleum, yo-yo, thermos, cellophane, milk of magnesia, mimeograph, lanolin, celluloid, dry ice, escalator, shredded wheat, kerosene and zipper. All were once proudly capitalized and worth a fortune.
II
On 1 July 1941 the New York television station WNBT-TV interrupted its normal viewing to show, without comment, a Bulova watch ticking. For sixty seconds the watch ticked away mysteriously, then the picture faded and normal programming resumed. It wasn’t much, but it was the first television commercial.
Both the word and the idea were already well established. The first commercial – the term was used from the very beginning – had been broadcast by radio station WEAF in New York on 28 August 1922. It lasted for either ten or fifteen minutes, depending on which source you credit. Commercial radio was not an immediate hit. In its first two months, WEAF sold only $550 worth of air-time. But by the mid-1920s, sponsors were not only flocking to buy air-time but naming their programmes after their products – The Lucky Strike Hour, The A&P Gypsies, The Lux Radio Theater and so on.18 Such was the obsequiousness of the radio networks that by the early 1930s many were allowing the sponsors to take complete artistic and production control of the programmes. Many of the most popular shows were actually written by the advertising agencies, and the agencies seldom missed an opportunity to work a favourable mention of the sponsor’s products into the scripts.
With the rise of television in the 1950s, the practices of the radio era were effortlessly transferred to the new medium. Advertisers inserted their names into the programme title – Texaco Star Theater, Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, Chesterfield Sound-Off Time, The US Steel Hour, Kraft Television Theater, The Chevy Show, The Alcoa Hour, The Ford Star Jubilee, Dick Clark’s Beechnut Show and the arresting hybrid The Lux-Schlitz Playhouse, which seemed to suggest a cosy symbiosis between soapflakes and beer. The commercial dominance of programme titles reached a kind of hysterical peak with a programme officially called Your Kaiser-Frazer Dealer Presents Kaiser-Frazer Adventures in Mystery.19 Sponsors didn’t write the programmes any longer, but they did impose a firm control on the contents, most notoriously during a 1959 Playhouse 90 broadcast of Judgement at Nuremberg, when the sponsor, the American Gas Association, managed to have all references to gas ovens and the gassing of Jews removed from the script.
Where commercial products of the late 1940s had scientific-sounding names, those of the 1950s relied increasingly on secret ingredients. Gleem toothpaste contained a mysterious piece of alchemy called GL-70. Consumers were never given the slightest hint of what GL-70 was, but it would, according to the advertising, not only rout odour-causing bacteria but ‘wipe out their enzymes!’*29
A kind of creeping illiteracy invaded advertising too, to the dismay of many. When Winston began advertising its cigarettes with the slogan ‘Winston tastes good like a cigarette should’, nationally syndicated columnists like Sydney J. Harris wrote anguished essays on what the world was coming to – every educated person knew it should be ‘as a cigarette should’ – but the die was cast. By 1958 Ford was advertising that you could ‘travel smooth’ in a Thunderbird Sunliner and the maker of Ace Combs was urging buyers to ‘comb it handsome’ – a trend that continues today with ‘pantihose that fits you real comfortable’ and other grammatical manglings too numerous and dispiriting to dwell on.
We may smile at the advertising ruses of the 1920s – frightening people with the threat of ‘fallen stomach’ and ‘scabby toes’ – but in fact such creative manipulation still goes on, albeit at a slightly more sophisticated level. The New York Times Magazine reported in 1990 how an advertising