Media History and Advertising Archives

Abstract

Advertising agencies have been the U.S. media industry’s closest collaborators throughout its history; however, scholars have given them little attention. Close analysis of the archival record left by such agencies will help us correct historiographical myths and arrive at new perspectives on what we think we know about media history.

Endnotes

Notes

1 “Master List: All Inclusive up to April 23, 1954,” box 87, Edward G. Wilson Papers, J. Walter Thompson Company, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

2 For the finished article, see Cynthia B. Meyers, “Inside a Broadcasting Blacklist: Kraft Television Theatre, 1951–55,” Journal of American History 105, no. 3 (December 2018): 589–616.

3 Cynthia B. Meyers, “Advertising, the Red Scare, and the Blacklist: BBDO, US Steel, and Theatre Guild on the Air, 1945-52,” Cinema Journal 55, no. 4 (2016): 55–83.

4 Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.

5 Cynthia B. Meyers, “Frank and Anne Hummert’s Soap Opera Empire: ‘Reason-Why’ Advertising Strategies in Early Radio Programming,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 16, no. 2 (1997): 113–32.

6 Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 41.

7 Cynthia B. Meyers, “The Problems with Sponsorship in Broadcasting, 1930s-50s: Perspectives from the Advertising Industry,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 31, no. 3 (2011): 355-372.

8 David M. Potter, People of Plenty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 167.

9 Michele Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 81. Nonetheless, there have been some major scholarly works that address the role of the ad industry in American media history. See for example Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers (New York: William Morrow, 1985); Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Charles McGovern, Sold American (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina University Press, 2006); Cynthia Meyers, A Word from Our Sponsor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Michael Schudson, The Uneasy Persuasion (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

10 For example, Inger Stole, Advertising on Trial (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 50.

11 Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

12 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978).

13 Henry Luce, ed. by John K. Jessup, The Ideas of Henry Luce (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 37.

14 Cynthia B. Meyers, “The March of Time Radio Docudrama: Time Magazine, BBDO, and Radio Sponsors, 1931–39,” American Journalism 35, no. 4 (2018): 420–43.

15 For example, Robert Herzstein, Henry R. Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994).

16 Meyers, A Word from Our Sponsor.

17 “Agency Air Credit Gets NBC ‘No’ as CBS Tries It Out,” Variety, July 25, 1933, 37.

18 Raymond Fielding, The March of Time: 1935-1951 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 12. BBDO personnel were also involved in the filmed newsreel March of Time; see Ruth Woodbury Sedgwick, “Time Goes Marching On – The Screen,” Stage Magazine, February 1935.

19 An example of a secondary source is Robert T. Elson, Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923–1941 (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 183. F. R. Feland to William Johns, March 1, 1932, BBDO Records (private archive).

20 Carolyn Edy, “Trust but Verify: Myths and Misinformation in the History of Women War Correspondents,” American Journalism 36, no. 2 (2019): 242–51.

21 ShawnaKim Lowey-Ball, “History by Text and Thing,” Perspectives on History, American Historical Association, February 26, 2020, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/march-2020/history-by-text-and-thing (accessed February 29, 2020).

22 Lowey-Ball, “History by Text and Thing.”

23 For example, Tinky “Dakota” Weisblat, “What Ozzie Did for a Living,” Velvet Light Trap 33 (Spring 1994): 14–23; Jennifer Gillan, “From Ozzie Nelson to Ozzy Osbourne: The Genesis and Development of the Reality (Star) Sitcom,” in Understanding Reality Television, edited by Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn (New York: Routledge, 2004), 54–70; Laura R. Linder, “From Ozzie to Ozzy: The Reassuring Nonevolution of the Sitcom Family,” in The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005); Gerard Jones, Honey I’m Home! Sitcoms: Selling the American Dream (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992), 92; Nina Liebman, Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).

24 This is a chapter of my current book project, tentatively titled Sell-e-vision: Madison Avenue and Television in the 1950s and 1960s.

25 Meyers, “Advertising, the Red Scare, and the Blacklist”.

26 Elson, Time Inc., 93.

27 Hilda Cole, “Time Marches On,” Detroit Free Press, November 18, 1934, 80; The March of Time, original broadcast, October 4, 1935.

28 F. R. Feland to B. Duffy, memo, May 23, 1950, BBDO Records.

29 For example, “Radio an Objectionable Advertising Medium,” Printers’ Ink, February 8, 1923, 175–6.

30 For example, “The Magazine Concept! Who’s For It Today?” Sponsor, March 19, 1962, 27.

31 William Benton, interview, July 25, 1968, Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, 73.

32 John Cogley, Report on Blacklisting II: Radio-Television (N.p.: The Fund for the Republic, Inc., 1956).

33 Edward Wilson admitted that “some but by no means all of the statements” on pages 118–120 of Cogley’s Report on Blacklisting II “could have come from me.” Wilson to S. A. Armstrong, July 20, 1956, box 88, Edward Wilson Papers.

34 Meyers, “Inside a Broadcasting Blacklist: Kraft Television Theatre, 1951–55.”

35 Carroll Carroll to Danny Danker, memo, April 28, 1944, Carroll Carroll Papers, J. Walter Thompson Company, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

36 Carroll Carroll, None of Your Business (New York: Cowles, 1970), 235.

37 Duke University, “John W. Hartman Center,” https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/hartman.

38 Duke University, “Hartman Center Travel Grants and Fellowships,” https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/hartman/travel-grants.

39 Wisconsin Historical Society, “Mass Communications History Collection,” https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS4017.

40 Hagley, “About the Center,” https://www.hagley.org/research/center.

41 As of this writing, the collection should be available to researchers by 2022. This is the private collection I used for my 2018 American Journalism article.

42 Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

43 UCSF, “Truth Tobacco Industry Documents,” https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/tobacco/.

44 Society of American Archivists, https://www2.archivists.org/groups/business-archives-section/directory-of-corporate-archives-in-the-united-states-and-canada-introduction. See also Roland Marchand, “Cultural History from Corporate Archives,” Public Relations Review 16, no. 3 (1990): 105–14.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cynthia B. Meyers

Cynthia B. Meyers is a professor in the Division of Communication, Art, and Media at the College of Mount Saint Vincent. She is the author of A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio (Fordham University Press, 2014).