Rich Bunnell

26 October 2005

History 101

Prof. Foletta

Thesis Progress Report—Radio Salesmanship

Back in the halcyon days of late September, I posed the subject of the emergence of American commercial radio jingles as the potential basis of a semester’s worth of scholarly research. Since then, I have realized that based on my class schedule and the limited holdings of the University of California, it isn’t really all that possible for me to ride this project to completion without a lot more time and fundage than Berkeley’s history department can provide me with. Instead, I’ve slightly broadened my focus while still staying in the same arena. My thesis will still draw from the subject of commercial jingles, but the overall focus will be on an interesting theme I discovered while doing my initial research on jingles: the existence, subsequent development of and public reaction to a wider “science of salesmanship” that developed between radio retailers, sponsors and broadcasters over the course of the first two decades of radio’s existence.

Almost as quickly as radio hit the American national scene, advertisers were attempting to find ways to make money off of the new medium, and the result was a proliferation of pamphlets, publications and full-length books dedicated to the subject of seizing this new radio audience. The material that I’ve found within UC Berkeley’s holdings as well as Interlibrary Loan is of a reasonable variety and scope, ranging from material officially released by broadcasting corporations to marketing and salesmanship studies carried out by private individuals to back issues of Variety and The New York Times, witnessing radio as it was viewed on the public stage. All in all, I feel that they form a well-rounded picture of the early days of radio salesmanship in all its forms.

As a tool of not only advertising but also social interaction, radio salesmanship is an admittedly complex topic, and one that can’t be reduced easily to formula. However,based on what I’ve read thus far as well as the books and materials I have yet to receive, researchers in the area tend to focus on two overarching aspects as crucial to the success of a radio advertisement: the announcer himself, and the external aspects which surround him. The material I’ve found concerning the performance of the announcer himself is practically fodder for a thesis in its own right—as the figurehead and voice of a program, the overall impact of an advertisement rests heavily on whether or not an announcer is capable of successfully carrying across his sponsor’s message. The aspects which feed into the success of an announcer are multi-part—the personality of an announcer is of the utmost importance, but so is the actual text of the advertisement he’s reading. An entire section of a radio advertising pamphlet I found is focused on the idea of “goat feathers” – segments of advertising copy that unnecessarily lengthen the time when the announcer is in front of the microphone, thus boring the listener and dulling the sponsor’s message.

At the same time, the aspects of a radio advertisement external to the performance of the announcer, mostly centering around the use of music in the program, are allotted a similar level of importance throughout the material I’ve come across. This is where my initial research surrounding the topic of radio jingles comes in: entire chapters in books I’ve read from the era have focused on the importance of theme songs and signatures in providing context and memorability to a radio advertisement. Music is treated not only as the means to maintain the flow of a successful advertisement—it’s the aspect of the advertisement that remains lodged in the mind of the listener long after the radio has been switched off. Most of my research in this area is coming from print sources, but in addition to these sources the University of Maryland’s Library of American Broadcasting is in the process of sending me four compact discs worth of radio programs, funded by UC Berkeley’s history department, containing programs from the ‘20s through the ‘40s involving the use of jingles and music in radio broadcasting.

As of this exact moment I’m not currently planning that my thesis focus solely on the mechanisms by which radio sold itself to consumers—there are other cultural forces at work which I need to focus on in order to provide a welcome sense of context to the salesmanship at play. The first of these is directly connected to the timeline covered by my research. I chose the time period 1922-1945, 1922 being the year in which Variety first announced the emergence of radio’s popularity in the public eye, and 1945 being the end of the Second World War. I chose that my research span World War II so that I could draw from sources focusing on how radio advertising adapted its salesmanship to a wartime audience, as well as how the U.S. government and wartime industry altered itself in order to allow breathing space and potential collaboration with the advertising world toward achievement of their individual goals. The purpose of researching this particular aspect of radio advertising is to provide a parallel with the science of salesmanship during the Depression era; whereas the focus of advertising at radio’s birth was to sell, sell, sell with a combination of fervency and verve, once the war began, advertisers had to find ways to sell during troubled times without coming off to a wider audience as taking advantage of an international crisis for profit. There is a reasonable though meager amount of scholarly work both from the wartime era and from contemporary historians on this particular subject, but thus far it seems like my most reliable source from this era will more than likely be print publications focusing on the shifts in the radio world.

The final aspect of my research, and probably the area which has surprised me the most often over the course of my reading thus far, concerns the topic of public reaction to radio advertising, both before and during the wartime era. It is easy to assume that upon the dawn of radio, the masses were stupid and gullible, ready to accept as canon whatever came out of their speakers by virtue of it being an amazing new technology. Surprisingly enough, a recurring theme that I’ve found that runs throughout almost everything I’ve read about radio salesmanship is that radio audiences are two things: really smart and really, really easily bored. According to a majority of the works I’ve read, advertising should carry itself out with the assumption that members of radio’s audience know when they’re being talked down to and get royally ticked off when this is the case. And ticked off they get: an issue of Readers’ Digest printed in the fall of 1942 contained an article sweepingly denouncing tasteless radio announcements, labeling them “Plug-Uglies” and calling for the formation of an anti-radio advertising association called “Plug Shrinkers.” The article came packaged with a mail-in membership card, and within a single month Plug Shrinkers received over 15,000 submissions, originating from basically every walk of life. Similar articles concerning the tastefulness of plugs, both from a wartime and aesthetic perspective, appeared in the New York Times. The point that the existence of associations like Plug Shrinkers illustrates is crucial: the science of salesmanship was not merely a useless form of media manipulation—it was a delicate art whose results actually mattered, not only to the moving of product but to the perception of radio as an institution to a mass audience.

Several more stretches of browsing through Berkeley’s online resources and Doe Library’s microfilm reserves aside, at this point I feel like I basically have the material necessary to write a complete, full-fledged undergraduate thesis. Even more importantly, based on what I’ve read, I feel like I have a rough structure for what I’m going to be writing in as soon as two weeks from now. As of this point, I’m envisioning the thesis as consisting of five extended sections. The first section will be an introductory section dealing with radio as it was viewed as a cultural institution by audiences, broadcasters and sponsors, a topic for which I have ample material. The next two sections will focus on the resulting science of salesmanship, with the second and third sections dealing respectively with the announcer and the aspects of broadcasting external to the announcer. The fourth section will concern how radio broadcasters altered their approach to adapt to a wartime atmosphere, both from an aesthetic and a practical perspective. Finally, the final section, focusing on popular response to and discontent with American radio advertising, will tie it all together by focusing on why this science of salesmanship actually mattered in the first place.

At this point in my research I am fairly confident about my ability to produce a full-length paper on this subject, though my research toward the audience side of my research would definitely benefit from delving a lot more deeply into weekly publications from the era such as Time and Harper’s Weekly. Plus, even though my resources aren’t as ample as those of a historian with more time and money than I currently have, I have to admit that the fact that as far as I’m aware, no sweeping scholarly work exists as of yet on the subject is pretty exciting, even if a fifty-page, double-spaced thesis amounts to little more than a chapter of a larger work. Still, I have high hopes for the weeks to come.

Bibliography

Cantril, Hadley. The Psychology of Radio. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1935.

Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. Radio in 1937: A book for executives who want to

know the number and quality of families in the radio audience. New York:

Columbia Broadcasting System, 1937.

Day, Enid. Radio Broadcasting for Retailers. New York: Fairchild Publishing Co., 1947.

Dunlap, Orrin Elmer. Radio in Advertising. New York: Harper, 1931.

Dygert, Warren Benson. Radio as an Advertising Medium. New York: McGraw-Hill

Book Company, 1939.

Firth, Ivan Eustace. Gateway to Radio. New York: The Macaulay Company, 1934.

Hettinger, Herman S. A Decade of Radio Advertising. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1933.

Horten, Gerd. Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda During World

War II.Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Karmen, Steve. Who Killed the Jingle?Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2005.

Morell, Peter. Poisons, Potions and Profits: The Antidote to Radio Advertising. New

York: Knight Publishers, inc., 1937.

The New York Times. New York: H.J. Raymond & Co., 1857. (available through

ProQuest)

Paley, William S. Radio as a Cultural Force. n.p., 1934.

Palmer, B.J. Radio Salesmanship. Davenport: The PSC Press, 1944.

Radio Corporation of America. The Radio Decade. New York: The Radio Corporation of

America, 1930.

The Reader’s Digest. Pleasantville, N.Y.: The Reader’s Digest Association.

Rolo, Charles James. Radio Goes to War: The “Fourth Front”. New York: G.P. Putnam’s

Sons, 1942.

Sandage, C.H. Radio Advertising for Retailers. Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press,

1945.

Variety. New York: Variety Publishing Co., 1905.

Wolfe, Charles Hull. Modern Radio Advertising. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1949.

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