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There's no like, jingles anymore. Like, I literally just had this conversation the other night. Surely some of you have thought this before that they just don't make ads like they used to. And like, yeah, maybe ads in the 90s were cheesy and obnoxious, but they were memorable. We would sing their jingles, we knew their whole script. Like, my twin sisters used to re-enact this one commercial over and over when they were seven 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 car insurance? Because insurance is too expensive. Get solo. Oh my god, that's Karina. 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 car pick lady company was 85882 300 and just empire. Now if we need a bail bondsman or a corporate clear, Karina knows the number. Yeah, I mean, you're remembering phone numbers from 20 years ago. Plus. Target customer base right there, sending your 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 Wenzellis. 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 happened to be two of the most famously advertised products. So, and milk. And it all leads up to what some experts call the peak of mass marketing the 1990s.
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So, okay, got checked me a little bit. Am I like that grumpy old lady now that's like they're not as good as they used to be like is it is it mere or is there something to add in the 90s? I think it's both. Any 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 was born with it. Maybe it's made for me. Mentos? The Fresh Maker?
I'm a comment that's in your head all day. And then there was of course this whole thing. Waza! Waaaaah! This of course a commercial from Budweiser. Yo, who's that? Yo, you're picking the phone. Hello? Who's that? Waza! There was a time when people were actually walking around being like, was up. All right. And he 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 going to stop there. And then there's 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 Proctor and Gamble company historian and corporate storyteller. The corporate storyteller? That sounds like it can be interpreted not well. Yes, yes. Shane is not a corporate spin master.
He is a historian for Proctor and Gamble, which is kind of a company known as a soap company, you know, hand soap, dish soap, laundry detergent, but they sell tons of products. Tied and crest and tampacks and pepto bismol and swiffer and pamper. So many brands. Bout to one company. Ole, panteen, 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 and 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 Christo Cooking Talks, which was 15 minutes of someone basically reading recipes on the radio that I assumed contained a lot of Christo. And housewives, they were riveted.
Then Proctor and 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 cereal. The dramatic cereal. These would offer 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 ritz, Oxidol is deep cleaning, deep cleaning, deep cleaning. And now for Ma Perkins. And then the show started. Well, at last Bay has begun to open up her heart to Ma about what happened during the two weeks she was in New York with Spencer Grayson. 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 Paul Mollve also had some as well. Why was it like so people always? I honestly don't know why soap companies end up being the ones who necessarily came up with that. Other than, you know, 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 Maapurkin's grew, a question began to be asked, which was, so 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 Maapurkin soap opera itself.
Basically, what we did is we announced a promotion on the program, which we said was, you know, sending an oxydol box top plus 10 cents. And you get a packet of flower seeds back in the mail. Yes, eight packages of our own Maapurkin's favorite flower seeds, a nut for a whole flower garden. The only way that they would know that offer is if they were listening to the program. The eight varieties include mix petunias, giant mixed cosmos, 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, you know, 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.
Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh, 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 Thor will be just shaved this side with new chick power shade. 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 shape demonstration.
The 60s through the 70s and into the 80s, depending on who 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 Mikey. Yeah. He won't need it. He hates everything. He likes it. Hey Mikey. Tag lines and jingles also really start taking off. My belonging has a great night. It's all in C-A-R. My belonging has a great night. 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'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? This message comes from NPR sponsor BetterHelp. When you keep your stress bottled up, it can eat away at you. Therapy is a safe space to get things off your chest. And to figure out how to make them better.
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Listen to updated and new episodes 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 a supporter yet, right now is a great time to change that.
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People had been drinking less and less milk for years. And it 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 hip or 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. Be a big budget. We're doing it in the state of California.
Three ad agencies were going to compete for the milk egg. They all showed up at a hotel in Oakland, California to give their big pitch. The first agency goes then the second and they were more they were more about milk. Milk how boring. But then the last agency walks in and who 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 was 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 boardroom, no socks, and they're like, alright, 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 camera in there and they put in empty milk cartons.
So the people grabbed the bowl of cereal, they opened the fridge. There's a carton of milk and they lifted out and they shake it. Now this is all being taped, filmed. Yeah. They shake it's empty. They pull the other one out. They shake it. That's empty too. And they go crazy. Okay. That was the brilliance of what we ended up calling the milk deprivation strategy. Give people the food, given 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? No, it's nothing. 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 duel? All right.
Let's go to the phones and see who's out there. Hello for $10,000. Who shot the wolf? Excuse me? But no, he's got peanut butter mouth. He tries to pour himself milk, but the carton is empty. I'm sorry, baby. I'm sorry. Got milk. 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 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 good company would say we defended our share of the market. Jeff says the genius of got 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 moustache 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 moustache.
I do remember like ripping out the got milk ads and like putting them on my wall and in my locker. Again, our ad expert Annie Wilson. Like you would not do that now. Now Annie says the milk moustache 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 and 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 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 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'd gotten unbelievably good at writing taglines and jingles. And I mean, just listen to some of these bangers that were running in the 90s.
Follow wake in up, we're soldiers in your cup. That's me lucky charms. That's me, you're rich. Mommy, wow. I'm a big kid now. There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's platinum master cards. 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 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 commercials. Ooh, that one heard advertisers.
Yeah. A whole bunch of things then started happening that continued to keep us from all watching the same thing. All watching the same commercials. So, you know, 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 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 are 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 master card, or they have this good feeling about master card. This is why my two insisters could recite car insurance commercials when they were seven years old.
It was all intentional, kind of dark. But after the 90s, brand 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, how many people clicked through on your digital ad? 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, 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 antichoste economics, but I do enjoy confrontation a little bit.
What started out as an anonymous forum to help e-con 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, planet money at npr.org, or find us on social media. We are at Planet Money. Today's show was produced by James Sneed and engineered by James Willitz.
It was fact checked by Sierra Huattas and edited by Molly Messick. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Super special thanks to Jeff Goodby, who was the person behind the God Milk slogan, and thanks also to Roland Rust and Alicia Swassi. I'm Kenny Malone. And I'm Sarah Gonzalez. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. This message comes from NPR sponsor Mint Mobile. From the gas pump to the grocery store, inflation is everywhere.
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