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Radio Soap Opera Advertising

Advertising Leading to Soap Operas

Advertising has been present on the radio since 1915, when Arthur B. Church aired commercials on an experimental station he helped to create. These advertisements were for radio parts sold in his own store. In 1921 toll broadcasting had been developed by the American Telephone & Telegraph company as a way for the company to profit from the radio patents it held. AT&T created a radio station called WEAF, that sold fifteen minutes of advertising time to interested companies for fifty dollars. AT&T struggled to sell advertising time on this station as they would only allow advertisers to mention their name and product. H. Clinton Smith, a respected salesman of the time suggested that the advertisements focus on sponsoring entertainment instead of companies and their products. This is called program sponsorship and its earliest examples primarily featured musical acts.

Radio Advertising in Soap Operas

The first soap opera was broadcasted on October 20th, 1930. This program was called Painted Dreams and was created by Irna Phillips. It was broadcasted by WGN, a Chicago based broadcasting station. Before producing Painted Dreams, WGN had attempted to sell multiple specialized programs to advertisers like the Super-Suds Company without success. The assignment was then given to Phillips who “had no experience in script writing, advertising, or any other aspect of broadcasting.” Painted Dreams first aired without advertisements for almost a year in an attempt to gain larger listening audiences and attract advertisers, who were hesitant to use the newly developing form of advertising. It was not until the fall of 1931 when “Mickelberry Products Company, a Chicago meat packer, took on sponsorship of Painted Dreams.

Advertising was central to the production and creation of  these serial radio programs as it was their only source of revenue. The involvement of advertising agencies in radio soap operas went beyond generating revenue for the companies. “In fact, the majority of nationally broadcast sponsored programs on network radio… were created, produced, written and/or managed by advertising agencies.” The advertising agencies would purchase air time from broadcasters and then develop programs for clients that they would resell to them at higher prices. Despite the depth of advertising agency involvement in the production of the programs, they were given no on-air recognition for their work.

During this time many industries had a workplace that was very discriminatory toward women. The advertising industry was less discriminatory toward hiring women than many other industries of the time as daytime soap operas’ primary audiences were usually women. The women were hired as copywriters and as daytime serial popularity increased they became entire teams devoted to providing a “women’s point of view.”

Irna Phillps. Creator of Painted Dreams and Today's Children

Mail Hooks

Early daytime serial advertisements employed a method of advertising which involved using mail hooks. Mail hooks are “offers of small premiums to listeners who sent a stamped, self-addressed envelope.” Montgomery Ward broadcasted an opportunity for listeners to be entered in for a chance to win thousands of dollars in prizes. The listeners, in return had to listen to and evaluate four formats for a program that was being aired. The contest generated 70,000 responses. This was also beneficial for advertising agencies as it allowed them to gauge and assess the number of listeners their programs were getting.

Mail hooks quickly became a popular method of advertising through radio soap operas. Advertising agents, like Irna Phillips, would use the audience’s emotional ties to a program and its characters to motivate listeners to participate in these offers. A Pillsbury mail hook featured in Phillip’s serial Today’s Children offered listeners a picture of the program’s main characters when they mailed in labels from packages of Pillsbury products. The message was conveyed to the audience through a request directly from the program's main character at the end of an episode. Other characters like General Mills and Betty Crocker were also used in other soap operas to convey their company’s messages to the audience. A later promotion offering a book about Today’s Children came to receive over 250,000 mailed in requests from its audience.

The Hard and Soft Sell

As radio daytime serials gained more sponsorship, two other techniques of advertising became very popular in the advertising industry. These two methods are known as the hard sell and soft sell. The hard sell focuses on the product’s features as well as its distinctive competencies. The company and its product are clearly stated making it a form of direct advertising. The hard sell places emphasis on repeating the reasons why a customer should buy the product as well as making the message “predigested for the average mind.” These advertisers had adversity toward the new medium as it was difficult to know how many listeners programs were getting without conducting original research.

Those who decided to implement the soft sell focused more on developing associations between the program’s characters and the audience. These experts believed that the hard sell tactic would offend listeners and focused instead on integrating advertisements into forms of entertainment. The soft sell appeared to be the technique which elicited the greatest reaction from audiences. While stations owned by AT&T struggled to sell space with their rigid regulation of advertising programs, companies like the Blackett-Sample-Hummert agency were able to control “46 per cent of the daytime serials that were brought to network radio between 1932 and 1937” using soft sell techniques.

Paul Keston and Frank Stanton, who worked as advertising agents for CBS developed several methods of analyzing audience’s consumptions patterns. These reports showed the increased listenership of radio as a whole, not just for CBS and were used as a strategy of attracting advertisers toward their advertising time.

Public Skepticism of Advertising

Radio sets disseminated very quickly throughout American households during the 1920’s and into the early 1930’s. “Sales of radios increased 1,400 percent between 1922 and 1929 and even in the Depression years of 1930 to 1932, 4.6 million sets were sold.” The period of increased popularity for radio programs from the late 1920’s to the late 1940’s is referred to by some as the “golden age” of radio. While the general public was quick to adapt the new technology as a means of communication, public opinion expressed skepticism about the legitimacy and effectiveness of advertisements within the medium.

Admen created WWII slogan

Part of this skepticism was created by the travelling medicine salesmen who preceded radio advertisers. These salesmen would sell medicines with fictitious claims. These claims included lying about the quality or price of an ingredient; making false claims about a medicine’s uses and including dangerous ingredients. In 1917 the American Association of Advertising was formed to help improve the perception and practices of advertising agencies. Credibility was also earned by advertising agencies around WWI that helped to make slogans. One such slogan being  “Bonds not bondage.”  All of these things worked to shed advertising in a positive light. Despite this the public, as well as some experts still saw advertisers as manipulative.

A psychiatrist named Louis Berg postulated that soap operas and the accompanying advertisements could cause the public to behave in certain ways that were impossible for them to control. From this Berg concluded that soap opera exposure could be the explanation for “acute anxiety… tremors, vasomotor, instability, nocturnal frights, vertigo and gastrointestinal disturbances.” When other researchers began to analyze Berg’s research they found that it was questionable as he had only been using his own body to record some results. The illegitimacy of the claims did not change public opinion on radio advertising as a survey sponsored by the advertising industry found over half of radio listeners to be “annoyed” by advertising.

Many also believed in the radio’s primary function being public service and did not want this to be compromised by the inclusion of advertisements. Warren G Harding warned the nation that “It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service to be drowned in advertising chatter.”  The Associated Advertising Club of America, the American association of Advertising Agencies and the Audit Bureau  of Circulations were all formed in the early 1900’s to develop more ethical standards for advertising and improve its public image. The advertisers of the late 1920’s faced another strike to their public image. Advertising was associated with much of the economic boom of the early 1920’s. When The Great Depression began in 1929 public opinion shifted to blame the industry for the depression as much as they had credited it for the boom.