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This is Planet Money from NPR. Okay, do you guys remember any commercials from our childhood or growing up? The jaw drops, but re-cola... Or meow mix.
The meow meow meow meow meow meow... These are my sisters, Sasha and the twins Carla and Karina. There's no like jingles anymore, like- I literally just had this conversation the other night. Surely, some of you have thought this before.
They just don't make ads like they used to. Maybe ads in the 90s were cheesy and obnoxious, but they were memorable. We would sing their jingles. We knew their whole script.
My twin sisters used to reenact this one commercial over and over when they were 7 years old. So you guys had these little like go-cart kind of things, and you guys would like crash them into each other, get out and get mad that one of us didn't have insurance. I just remember, you guys going like, do you have car insurance? Why don't you have a car insurance?
Because insurance is too expensive. So, oh my god, that's crazy. We did not really watch that much TV when we were kids. And yet, we remember these commercials fondly.
And like in weird detail, I like remember literally the phone numbers from like the bail bonds commercial. I remember the Carpakity company with 800, 588, 2, 300 and 500. And I remember. Now if we need a bail bondsman or a corporate clear carlion knows my number.
Yeah, I mean, you're remembering phone numbers from 20 years ago. Plus. Target customer base right there, 7-year-old girl for bail bonds. You know, whatever, maybe we all just remember commercials from our era because it's our era, right?
Or, or hear me out here, maybe for better or worse, there was actually something special about advertising in the 90s. Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Sarah Gonzalez. And I'm Kenny Malone, today on the show, The Evolution of Advertising. As told through two of the most bland, unexciting products, which also happen to be two of the most famously advertised products.
Soap and milk. And it all leads up to what some experts call the peak of mass marketing, the 1990s. Brazil used to have one of the fastest growing economies in the world, people called it the country of the future. There are songs, Ubrasí, Váil Páí, Ubrasí, Ubrasí, because it seems like we have it all, man.
But then the music stops. On the Planet Money podcast, a lot of countries these days aren't rich, they aren't poor, they're just kind of stuck in the middle. Why is that? Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
So, okay, check me a little bit. Am I like the grumpy old lady now that's like, they're not as good as they used to be? Like is it me or is there something to add in the 90s? I think it's both.
Annie Wilson teaches advertising and consumer behavior at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. I think there's a little bit of nostalgia because it's part of your childhood and growing up. So I think it's a little bit you, but it's also there was something genuinely special about the 90s because of where it sits technologically. And that actually changed the creative strategies of advertisers that made them, I think, more fun or more memorable on a collective level.
This was the thing about the 90s. The ads were ubiquitous. We all watched them collectively. And the 90s gave us some like real, real gems.
Maybe she's born with it. Mentos? The Fresh Maker. Mentos, fresh and fresh.
I mean, come on, that's in your head all day. And then there was of course this whole thing. Wasa! This of course a commercial from Budweiser.
Go, go, go! You're picking the phone. Hello? Wasa!
Wasa! There was a time when people were actually walking around and being like, wasa! Alright, Annie says that to understand how advertising got to its like 90s pinnacle and to what it is today, we can look back at one company that Annie calls the OG of advertising. So we're gonna stop there.
Is the origin story? Like there was a guy named Proctor. There was a guy named Gamble. And one thought he had the wider soap than the other one.
Like is that? It was kind of. Really? This is Shane Meeker.
I am the Procter & Gamble Company Historian and Corporate Storyteller. The corporate storyteller? Corporate storyteller. That sounds, you know, like it can be interpreted not well.
Yes, yes. Shane is an corporate spin master. He is a historian for Proctor & Gamble, which is kind of a company known as a soap company, you know, a hand soap, dish soap, laundry detergent. But they sell tons of products.
Tied and crests and tampax and peptobismol and Swiffer and Pampers. So many brands. Owned by one company. Ole Pantene, Old Spice.
Like 10 companies control most of the brands in a grocery store, it's wild. Anyway, this part of the advertising story is all about the radio, the first on air mass marketing. Good old radio. Now, when the radio became popular in the 1920s, Proctor & Gamble was like, this is a whole new way to talk to our customers.
Game changer. Now, in 1923, they sponsored a fancy new daytime radio show called Crisco Cooking Talks, which was 15 minutes of someone basically reading recipes on the radio that I assume contained a lot of Crisco. And housewives, they were riveted. Then Proctor & Gamble did some market research and learned that housewives wanted radio to be more than just instructional.
They wanted it to be entertaining too. So right around 1930, we decided to try a very new type of daytime radio entertainment, which was called the Dramatic Serial. The Dramatic Serial. These would offer, you know, a compelling storyline, which would encourage listeners to tune in day after day.
This was like actors and a script, a whole dramatic plot that the company funded paid for, just so they could advertise soap on the show. One of these Dramatic Cereals was called Ma Perkins. Ma Perkins was about a self-reliant widow and her business problems and family concerns. And it quickly went national, one of the most popular daytime programs.
Every day before Ma Perkins came on the radio, there would be usually one very, very long radio ad for, in this case, Oxidol. For a wash that's sparkling clean with less rinsing work, use new deep cleaning Oxidol with just one rinse. Oxidol is deep cleaning, deep cleaning, deep cleaning. And now, for Ma Perkins.
And then the show started. Well, at last, Faye has begun to open up her heart to Ma about what happened during the two weeks. She was in New York with Spencer Grace. What did Spencer do in New York?
You have to stay tuned, Sarah. That's the whole point. It's serialized. But yes, Oxidol was not the only product for which there was a whole radio drama created.
Other companies were doing this too, explicitly for the purpose of running ads on their shows. Colgate Palmol have also had some as well. Why was it like so people always? I actually don't know why sub companies end up being the ones who necessarily came up with that, other than it was a great way to bring your brands where your consumers were.
And you know, the consumers were housewives. So cleaning products. But anyway, people noticed this weird soap connection and the dramatic serial got a whole new name. Mostly because soap companies were really kind of starting them.
And they were dramas, which is where the opera bit comes in. So soap opera. This is where the soap opera comes from. Dramatic shows created just to sell housewives actual soap.
Some people knew this. I had no idea. I also had no idea for what it's worth. As the popularity of my Perkins grew, a question began to be asked, which was just how many people are listening to this thing.
And at that time, nobody really knew because the rating systems had not been perfected and was not even really developed yet. Yeah, so the company came up with a pretty clever way to try to get at some of this information through the mob Perkins soap opera itself. Basically, what we did is we announced a promotion on the program, which we said was sending an Oxidol box top, plus $0.10. And you get a packet of flower seeds back in the mail.
Yes, eight packages of our own mob Perkins favorite flower seeds, enough for a whole flower garden. Because the only way that they would know that offer is if they were listening to the program. The eight varieties include Next Patunias, Giant Mix Cars, Most and Harmony Marigold, those exotic deep colored flowers. So over a million consumers actually sent in.
That's how you guys tracked ratings? That's how we knew that's how actually, believe it or not, that was the first precise information ever obtained on radio coverage, even at that time. And as far as we know, that was the first evidence that radio advertising by itself was also selling goods. Yeah, this appears to be the first evidence that the radio could sell things.
Because people were buying these flower seeds based on this ad they heard on this talking new radio thing. And then when the TV became commonplace in homes in the 1950s, the radio soap operas moved to TV soap operas, much bigger production, and brands started co-sponsoring the soap operas. So now we got multiple ads on one TV show. Like Colgate and Tide together?
Colgate would be a competitor. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Sorry, you're crest, right? What are you guys?
Exactly. TV unlocked a whole new way to advertise to people. It was sound and video, like the most compelling form of advertising ever. Yeah, all these new advertising techniques start popping up.
And decade by decade, you can see them develop. Yeah, like in the 50s, at first the ads were mainly attribute focused. Like our peanut butter is crunchy, salty, it's brown, whatever, as we're just informative. But towards the end of the 50s, it becomes all about trying to differentiate your product from another extremely similar product.
This is like a side by side. And you know what this is. It's an ad that goes something like this. Bill, probably just saved this side with new chick power jade.
This side with another method. Guess what? One side's better than the other. And by the 60s, ads are getting even more entertaining than that shave demonstration.
The 60s through the 70s and into the 80s, depending on what you ask, is often thought of as the creative era of advertising. This is when we start to get into storytelling in ads. Let's get like it. Yeah.
He won't need it. He likes it. He likes it. He likes it.
Tag lines and jingles also really start taking off. My below me has a first name. It's O-S-A-I-O. And we start to get ads that look like modern day advertising.
After the break, the 90s. And one of the most popular ads of all time, in ad campaign that is so recognizable, you will probably know what it is, if always it is. It's two words and a question mark. It is an iconic ad that helps us consider the question behind all of advertising.
Does it actually convince people to buy? A grassy green lawn might look nice, but it's going to eat up resources, like drinking water and the gas you put in the mower. You can do a solid for the environment by ditching even just some of your lawn and replacing it with a wildlife friendly garden. LifeKit has tips to get you started.
No green thumb required. Listen to the LifeKit podcast in the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Kenny Malone with a quick but very sincere thank you to our Planet Money Plus supporters and anybody else listening who donates to public media. After all, public media means you, the public, support it.
Everything you hear from the NPR network really cannot exist without your contributions. And for anybody listening who isn't as up ordered yet, right now is a great time to change that. For you to get invested in creating a more informed public, that is after all, our whole mission at NPR. That's why we're here.
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OK, in the early 90s, the milk industry was having a big problem. People had been drinking less and less milk for years and was hitting scary new lows. Milk processors in California, so the people who turned raw milk into the milk we consume, were getting pretty worried. So they decided they needed a big new marketing effort.
You know, milk advertising has been so serious. This is Jeff Manning, the guy who wanted to rebrand milk. Step away from milk, it does the body good. Give me something edgier.
Give me something hipher. Jeff was the head of the California Milk Processor Board. And all of the milk processors in the state decided to basically tax themselves three pennies for every gallon of milk they processed to be spent mostly on TV ads. Their budget was over $20 million a year, which is an insane amount of money.
$20 million for a national program would be a big budget. It'd be a big budget. We were doing it in the state of California. Three ad agencies were going to compete for the milk gig.
They all showed up at a hotel in Oakland, California to give their big pitch. The first agency goes, then the second, and eh. They were more about milk. Oh, milk, how boring.
But then the last agency walks in. And ooh, these guys were cool. Yeah, I mean, you know, jeans, no socks, and penny loafers. Yeah.
Oh, that sounds so cool. Well, if you think about it, that's when everybody's wearing suits and ties. These cool ad guys in jeans, no socks, were from a firm called Goodby Silverstein and Partners. They walk into the board room, no socks, and they're like, all right, milk processor board.
We did a little prank. We gave our colleagues at the ad agency fun late night food, like cereal, and then we videotaped them. What they did was they cut a hole in the back of the refrigerators. They put a camry in there, and they put in empty milk cartons.
So people grab the bowl of cereal, they open the fridge, there's a carton of milk, and they lift it out, and they shake it. Now, this is all being taped to the film. They shake it's empty. They pull the other one out.
They shake it, that's empty too. And they go crazy. That was the brilliance of what we ended up calling the milk deprivation strategy. Give people the food, give them the food, the Cheerios or the Oreos or the fudge brownies, and then take milk away.
Take it away. Don't let them have it. And they won the business, obviously. Yeah, what is a peanut butter sandwich without milk?
Without milk. No, it's nothing. This led to a very famous commercial. Some guy who is very into Alexander Hamilton, first head of the US treasury, is listening to the radio while making himself a smooth peanut butter sandwich, no jelly.
And there's a $10,000 question that comes on the radio. Who shot Alexander Hamilton in that famous duo? All right, let's go to the phones and see who's out there. No, for $10,000.
Who shot him? Who? Excuse me? Who?
But no, he's got peanut butter mouth. He tries to pour himself milk, but the carton is empty. I'm not your time, I'm almost done. Got milk, a classic.
A national milk group, then licenses got milk from the California milk group, and got milk, goes national very soon. 91% of adults know the campaign, just like incredible awareness. But the California milk group also wanted to know kind of the same thing that the Proctor and Gamble people wanted to know with their whole like flower seeds thing on the radio. Were these ads getting people to change their behavior?
Were people drinking more milk? So three whole years into got milk, the milk board looked at its effect on milk consumption. They looked at the per capita consumption in the US, which looked like a staircase just down, down, down, and they looked at milk consumption in California. And Jeff says, three years and $60 million later, milk consumption was still going down in California, a little less than the national numbers, but yeah, still down.
I mean, it's not easy to change consumer behavior. And so it took at least those first three to get people to start to change behavior. But then five years in, the milk board looked at consumption again and? We did not raise the per capita consumption, but we flattened it.
So they did not get people to drink milk more, but Jeff says they didn't lose milk consumers either. And that was worth a lot of money. Exactly. Right.
A package could something he would say we defended our share of the market. Jeff says the genius of that milk is that it took this totally dull, been around forever, not new thing, and made people feel something about it. There was no emotion around milk. There's a commodity.
It's white. It's in the fridge. It comes in gallons. And then suddenly you were laughing and smiling.
And there was some emotive connection with milk that simply did not exist before. Milk got its moment. It became cool. And got milk was used in all the glossy magazine celebrity milk mustache ads.
For people who were not around to see these ads, it was basically just every big celebrity rocking. What I can only assume was Elmer's glue on their upper lip parading as a milk mustache. I do remember ripping out the got milk ads and putting them on my wallet and my locker. Again, our ad expert Annie Wilson.
Like you would not do that now. Now Annie says the milk mustache is basically the beginning of modern influencer culture. And yeah, we were just feeling good feelings about good old milk. And people call this type of advertising brand or image marketing.
And Annie says there are no direct sales goals with these types of ads. It is just I want you to see the product or the brand and feel good when you do. The milk people, Procter & Gamble Coca-Cola, they are experts at brand and image marketing. When you think Coca-Cola, you think happiness, you feel good.
But I can't measure the return on that every time you see a Coca-Cola billboard or a Coca-Cola commercial whether you're going to go out and actually buy a Coca-Cola or not. Yeah, it's really hard to measure the results of this kind of ad. But Annie says that in the 90s, brands were really, really focused on this brand and image marketing because companies were launching so many new products in the 90s. There was a lot of competition.
So Annie says brands were just trying to capture mind share over wallet share even. They wanted you to just know their brand over even buying their products because brands were playing the long game. They wanted to be around forever and they just needed you to know who they were. And you know, the 90s were kind of the perfect time for building up these brands because advertisers knew exactly where to find our eyeballs.
Like we were all watching and reading, but sort of the same two things, TV and glossy magazines. And also by the 90s, advertisers had developed this whole arsenal of advertising tricks. They got an unbelievably good at writing taglines and jingles. And I mean, just listen to some of these bangers that were running in the 90s.
It's fun to wake up, we're soldiers in your cup. That's me, let me charge. So loud, it's your address. Mommy, wow, I'm a big kid now.
I'm a splat in the master board. These are exactly the kinds of catchy ads that I feel like we just don't hear anymore. And Annie says that's because pretty soon after the 90s, the whole ad ecosystem changed. The reason that we think about it as this apex is probably less that it was like this big height so much as it died down after.
Yeah, brand advertising is built on mass viewership. And the idea that we would all repeat product taglines and jingles because we would all unavoidably see the ads over and over again. But mass viewership started to disappear when, among other things, the DVR came out in 1999. Now we could fast forward it commercials.
Oh, that one heard advertisers. Yeah, a whole bunch of things then started happening that continue to keep us from all watching the same commercial. So the internet starts stealing more of our attention, streaming sites with options for no commercials come out, smartphones, social media. Today, the chances that two people have seen the same ad for the same product are pretty low.
Which is why companies don't really even attempt to make a new jingle or tagline take off the way that they used to because it is just harder to get complete awareness of a product today. But there are a few exceptions, a few companies that do still have this goal. Like you can all probably name a lot of credit card companies or car insurance companies because they still do big mass brand marketing. They spend so much money to make sure that everyone knows their name.
And so for example, I might want to advertise my insurance brand or my credit card company on a kids channel, not because I think kids are going to buy it and not because I even think their parents going to buy it. But because when the kid turns a certain age and they need a credit card, for some reason, they just think MasterCard or they have this good feeling about MasterCard. This is why my twin sisters could recite car insurance commercials when they were seven years old. It was all intentional, kind of dark.
Now, after the 90s, brands marketing started having to share the stage more with a different type of advertising called performance marketing. These ads do have an immediate sales goal. This would be like, you know, how many people clicked through on your digital ad. And and this is now what a lot of companies focus on.
Yeah, and these ads, they are not really designed to appeal to the masses. They are targeted, super targeted because Annie says, a lot of brands don't care about everyone knowing their product anymore. They just want their niche target market to know. And Annie says this does make advertising more efficient, but like, Oh, what a bummer.
You want the jingle back. That's what this is all about, isn't it? I mean, yeah. On the next planet, money, I never imagined this.
You know, my work is on antitrust economics, but I do enjoy confrontation a little bit. What started out as an anonymous forum to help Econ grad students find jobs, eventually turned into just another Internet cesspool. But no one knew where the toxic posts were coming from until an unlikely trio decided to look into it. If you have a story you want to hear us do, email us planetmani at NPR.org or find us on social media.
We're at Planet Money. Today's show was produced by James Snead and engineered by James Wilitz. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez and edited by Molly Massey. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
Super special thanks to Jeff Goodby, who was the person behind the Scott Milks Logan. And thanks also to Roland Rust and Alicia Slasi. I'm Penny Malone. And I'm Sarah Gonzalez.
This is NPR. Thanks for listening.