Made In America (47 page)

Even greater efforts go into finding out why people buy the brands they do. Advertisers and market researchers bandy about terms like
conjoint analysis technique, personal drive patterns, Gaussian distributions, fractals,
and other such arcana in their quest to winnow out every subliminal quirk of American buying habits. They know, for instance, that 40 per cent of all people who move to a new address will also change their brand of toothpaste, that the average supermarket shopper makes fourteen impulse decisions in each visit, that 62 per cent of shoppers will pay a premium for mayonnaise even when they think a cheaper brand is just as good, but that only 24 per cent will show the same largely irrational loyalty to frozen vegetables. To preserve a brand name involves a certain fussy attention to linguistic and orthographic details. To begin with, the name is normally expected to be treated not as a noun but as a proper adjective – that is, the name should be followed by an explanation of what it does:
Kleenex facial tissues, Q-Tip cotton swabs, ]ell-O brand gelatin dessert, Sanka brand decaffeinated coffee.
Some types of products – notably cars – are granted an exemption, which explains why General Motors does not have to advertise
Cadillac self-driving automobiles
or the like. In all cases, the name may not explicitly describe the product’s function, though it may hint at what it does.
Thus
Coppertone
is acceptable;
Coppertan
would not be.

The situation is more than a little bizarre. Having done all they can to make their products household words, manufacturers must then in their advertisements do all in their power to imply that they aren’t. Before trademark law was clarified, advertisers positively encouraged the public to treat their products as generics. Kodak invited consumers to ‘Kodak as you go’, turning the brand name into a dangerously ambiguous verb. It would never do that now. The American Thermos Product Company went so far as to boast ‘Thermos is a household word’, to its considerable cost. Donald F. Duncan, Inc., the original manufacturer of the Yo-Yo, lost its trademark protection partly because it was amazingly casual about capitalization in its own promotional literature. ‘In case you don’t know what a yo-yo is ...’ one of its advertisements ran, suggesting that in commercial terms Duncan did not. Duncan also made the elemental error of declaring, ‘If It Isn’t A Duncan, It Isn’t a Yo-Yo’, which on the face of it would seem a reasonable claim, but was in fact held by the courts to be inviting the reader to consider the product generic.
¹⁷
Kodak had long since stopped saying ‘If it isn’t an Eastman, it isn’t a Kodak.’

Because of the confusion, and occasional lack of fastidiousness on the part of their owners, many dozens of products have lost their trademark protection, among them
aspirin, linoleum, yo-yo, thermos, cellophane, milk of magnesia, mimeograph, lanolin, celluloid, dry ice, escalator, shredded wheat, kerosene
and
zipper.
All were once proudly capitalized and worth a fortune.

On 1 July 1941 the New York television station WNBT-TV interrupted its normal viewing to show, without comment, a
Bulova watch ticking. For sixty seconds the watch ticked away mysteriously, then the picture faded and normal programming resumed. It wasn’t much, but it was the first television commercial.

Both the word and the idea were already well established. The first
commercial
– the term was used from the very beginning – had been broadcast by radio station WEAF in New York on 28 August 1922. It lasted for either ten or fifteen minutes, depending on which source you credit. Commercial radio was not an immediate hit. In its first two months, WEAF sold only $550 worth of air-time. But by the mid-1920s, sponsors were not only flocking to buy air-time but naming their programmes after their products –
The Lucky Strike Hour, The A&P Gypsies, The Lux Radio Theater
and so on.
¹⁸
Such was the obsequiousness of the radio networks that by the early 1930s many were allowing the sponsors to take complete artistic and production control of the programmes. Many of the most popular shows were actually written by the advertising agencies, and the agencies seldom missed an opportunity to work a favourable mention of the sponsor’s products into the scripts.

With the rise of television in the 1950s, the practices of the radio era were effortlessly transferred to the new medium. Advertisers inserted their names into the programme title –
Texaco Star Theater, Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, Chesterfield Sound-Off Time, The US Steel Hour, Kraft Television Theater, The Chevy Show, The Alcoa Hour, The Ford Star Jubilee, Dick Clark’s Beechnut Show
and the arresting hybrid
The Lux-Schlitz Playhouse,
which seemed to suggest a cosy symbiosis between soapflakes and beer. The commercial dominance of programme titles reached a kind of hysterical peak with a programme officially called
Your Kaiser-Frazer Dealer Presents Kaiser-Frazer Adventures in Mystery.
¹⁹
Sponsors didn’t write the programmes any longer, but they did impose a firm control on the contents, most notoriously during a 1959
Playhouse 90
broadcast of
Judgement at Nuremberg,
when the sponsor, the American Gas Association, managed to have all references to gas ovens and the gassing of Jews removed from the script.

Where commercial products of the late 1940s had scientific-sounding names, those of the 1950s relied increasingly on secret ingredients. Gleem toothpaste contained a mysterious piece of alchemy called
GL-70.
Consumers were never given the slightest hint of what GL-70 was, but it would, according to the advertising, not only rout odour-causing bacteria but ‘wipe out their enzymes!’
^*29

A kind of creeping illiteracy invaded advertising too, to the dismay of many. When Winston began advertising its cigarettes with the slogan ‘Winston tastes good like a cigarette should’, nationally syndicated columnists like Sydney J. Harris wrote anguished essays on what the world was coming to – every educated person knew it should be
‘as
a cigarette should’ – but the die was cast. By 1958 Ford was advertising that you could ‘travel smooth’ in a Thunderbird Sunliner and the maker of Ace Combs was urging buyers to ‘comb it handsome’ – a trend that continues today with ‘pantihose that fits you real comfortable’ and other grammatical manglings too numerous and dispiriting to dwell on.

We may smile at the advertising ruses of the 1920s – frightening people with the threat of ‘fallen stomach’ and ‘scabby toes’ – but in fact such creative manipulation still goes on, albeit at a slightly more sophisticated level. The
New York Times Magazine
reported in 1990 how an advertising copywriter had been told to come up with some impressive labels for a putative hand cream. She invented the arresting and healthful-sounding term
oxygenating moisturizers,
and wrote accompanying copy with references to ‘tiny bubbles of
oxygen that release moisture into your skin’. This done, the advertising was turned over to the company’s research and development department, which was instructed to come up with a product that matched the copy.
²⁰

If we fall for such commercial manipulation, we have no one to blame but ourselves. When Kentucky Fried Chicken introduced ‘Extra Crispy’ chicken to sell alongside its ‘Original’ chicken, and sold it at the same price, sales were disappointing. But when its advertising agency persuaded it to promote ‘Extra Crispy’ as a premium brand and to put the price up, sales soared. Much the same sort of verbal hypnosis was put to work for the benefit of the fur industry. Dyed muskrat makes a perfectly good fur, for those who enjoy cladding themselves in dead animals, but the name clearly lacks style. The solution was to change the name to ‘Hudson seal’. Never mind that the material contained not a strand of seal fur. It sounded good, and sales skyrocketed.

Truth has seldom been a particularly visible feature of American advertising. In the early 1970s, Chevrolet ran a series of ads for the Chevelle, boasting that the car had ‘109 advantages to keep it from becoming old before its time’. When looked into, it turned out that these 109 vaunted features included such items as rear-view mirrors, reversing lights, balanced wheels and many other such items that were considered pretty well basic to any car. Never mind; sales soared. At about the same time, Ford, not to be outdone, introduced a ‘limited edition’ Mercury Monarch at $250 below the normal list price. It achieved this by taking $250 worth of equipment off the standard Monarch.
²¹

And has all this deviousness led to a tightening of the rules concerning what is allowable in advertising? Hardly. In 1986, as William Lutz relates in
Doublespeak,
the insurance company John Hancock launched an ad campaign in which ‘real people in real situations’ discussed their financial predicaments with remarkable candour. When a journalist
asked to speak to these real people, a company spokesman conceded that they were actors and ‘in that sense they are not real people’.
²²
During the 1982 presidential election campaign, the Republican National Committee ran a television advertisement praising President Reagan for providing cost-of-living pay increases to federal workers ‘in spite of those sticks-in-the-mud who tried to keep him from doing what we elected him to do’. When it was pointed out that the increases had in fact been mandated by law since 1975 and that Reagan had in any case three times tried to block them, a Republican official responded: ‘Since when is a commercial supposed to be accurate?’
²³
Quite.

In linguistic terms, perhaps the most interesting challenge facing advertisers today is that of selling products in an increasingly multicultural society. Spanish is a particular problem, not just because it is spoken over such a widely scattered area but also because it is spoken in so many different forms. Brown sugar is
azucar negra
in New York,
azucar prieta
in Miami,
azucar morena
in much of Texas, and
azucar pardo
pretty much everywhere else
²⁴
– and that’s just one word. Much the same bewildering multiplicity applies to many others. In consequence, embarrassments are all but inevitable.

In mainstream Spanish
bichos
means
insects,
but in Puerto Rico it means
testicles,
so when a pesticide maker promised to bring death to the
bichos
Puerto Rican consumers were at least bemused, if not alarmed. Much the same happened when a maker of bread referred to its product as
un bollo de pan
and discovered that to Spanish-speaking Miamians of Cuban extraction that means a woman’s private parts. And when Perdue Chickens translated its slogan ‘It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken’ into Spanish, it came out as a slightly less macho: ‘It takes a sexually excited man to make a chick sensual.’
²⁵

Never mind. Sales soared.

In 1877, in one of those instances of one thing leading to another, the railway tycoon Leland Stanford and a business crony were lounging with drinks on the veranda of Stanford’s California stud farm when the conversation turned to the question of whether a galloping horse ever has all four hoofs off the ground at once. Stanford was so sure that it did – or possibly didn’t; history is unclear on this point – that he laid his friend a bet of $25,000. The difficulty was that no matter how carefully you watch the legs of a galloping horse you cannot tell (particularly, we might suppose, when you have had a number of drinks on the veranda) whether the horse is at any point momentarily suspended in air. Determined to find an answer, Stanford called in his chief engineer, John D. Isaacs, who in turn summoned the services of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge.

Muybridge was a self-created exotic (his real name was the rather more plebeian Edward Muggeridge) and an accomplished landscape photographer, though in 1877 his fame rested chiefly on having managed to get himself acquitted of murdering his wife’s lover in one of the more sensational cases of the age. Isaacs and Muybridge deployed twenty-four cameras along a racetrack and with the aid of trip-wires executed a series of photographs of a horse galloping past. This had two effects. It proved beyond question that a galloping horse
does
get all four hoofs off the ground, and for
quite a lot of the time, and it marked the beginning of motion picture photography.
¹

Motion pictures of a type had been around since the late eighteenth century. Usually they involved cut-out silhouettes, pictures painted on discs or cylinders or some other such simple device, which could be back-lit and spun to throw a moving image on to a wall or screen. Despite their primitiveness these early devices went by a variety of scientifically impressive names: the
phenakistoscope,
the
animatoscope,
the
thaumatrope,
the
phantascope,
the
stroboscope.
Inspired by their linguistic inventiveness, Muybridge constructed a projector of his own and called it a
zoopraxiscope.
Soon other similar devices were flooding the market: the
mutascope,
the
kinematoscope,
the
kinematograph,
the
theatrograph.

All of these had certain deficiencies, primarily that they relied on stringing together sequences of still photographs, a process that required either a lot of cameras or careful orchestration of movements on the part of the subjects. What was really needed was moving film. Thomas Edison saw himself as the man to provide it – or at least as the man to provide the man to provide it. He gave the task to a young Scotsman in his employ named W. K. L. Dickson. Dickson (who would later go on to found Biograph, one of the first Hollywood studios) studied the competitors’ machines, considered the problem, and in short order devised an entire motion picture system, the first in the world (which perhaps makes him the true father of the movies). The camera was called a
kinetograph,
the projection device a
kinetoscope,
and the films thus made were
kinetophones.
(I mention them specifically because books of film history sometimes confuse them.) Nothing that Dickson came up with was particularly new. He essentially put together, albeit in an ingenious way, existing technologies.