Here’s a question worth considering: What is advertising actually for?

If your answer is “to sell products,” you’re not wrong. But you’re also only about a quarter right. The other three-quarters -- the part that explains why certain brands feel like part of your identity, why slogans burrow into your memory and stay for decades, why a Super Bowl spot can hit you in the chest before you process what it’s selling -- that’s what this episode is built around.

In Part I of this two-part series, Bob Batchelor traces the economic logic that made advertising necessary, the dark psychology that made it powerful, and the creative revolution that made it an art form.

The story of the entire postwar American economy: sixteen years of Depression and war, factories running at full capacity, and suddenly the problem wasn’t production. It was consumption. How do you get people to buy fast enough to absorb everything industry can make?

The idea is that mass production only works when it’s matched by mass consumption, and that consumption doesn’t happen on its own. Government can prime the economic pump. Industry can build the product. But neither can manufacture the will to want it.

That’s advertising’s job. The advertising industry manufactures the consumers necessary to make the system work. Not the products — the people who want the products.

By the 1950s, this manufacturing had acquired a darker edge. The United States had become a material utopia — the country was practically floating in consumer goods. So advertisers shifted strategy. They manufactured discontent. The subtext of postwar advertising: something is wrong with you. Here is the product that will fix it.

The 1960s asked a different question: what happens when the most talented people in the country decide to make that system beautiful?

Bill Bernbach — co-founder of Doyle Dane Bernbach, and one of the models for Mad Men’s Don Draper — started a fight over who should lead advertising agencies. Not account executives running research. Creative people. Writers, art directors, designers. Ideas as strategic weapons.

David Ogilvy built his empire differently — research over instinct, brand image over cleverness. His Rolls-Royce headline (“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise comes from the electric clock”) made luxury palpable on a printed page.

But the figure who most completely unlocked what television could become was Mary Wells Lawrence — who the show Mad Men failed to adequately represent. Wells saw television not as a billboard that moved, not as radio with pictures, but as theater. Her Alka-Seltzer work gave the world “plop, plop, fizz, fizz.” Her Braniff Airlines campaign — planes painted in Emilio Pucci rainbow colors, tagline: “The End of the Plain Plane” — generated more press in one year than Braniff had paid for in a decade. Southwest Airlines’ colorful planes are still running that logic today.

What Bernbach, Ogilvy, and Wells Lawrence collectively built is what writer Steven Heller called “the Big Idea”: advertising that had to continually amuse in order to truly capture attention. The 1960s was the image era — the total personality of the brand mattered as much as any product claim. You weren’t buying a car. You were buying a statement about who you were.

Which sets up the problem Part II will solve.

ABOUT THE HOST

Bob Batchelor is a cultural historian, professor at Coastal Carolina University, and editor of the three-volume anthology We Are What We Sell. His books include Stan Lee: A Life, Roadhouse Blues, and The Bourbon King. His analysis has appeared in the New York Times, NPR, BBC, and PBS NewsHour.

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When your favorite YouTube creator says "this video is brought to you by Squarespace" and spends 90 seconds weaving the brand into their content, they're executing a strategy Procter & Gamble invented in 1932.

On the radio. To sell laundry detergent. The model hasn't changed in 90 years. The medium has.

In this episode, Bob Batchelor traces how one of the most consequential advertising innovations was born in Depression-era radio, nearly destroyed by the arrival of television, and ultimately rebuilt into the dominant content strategy powering every platform deal, creator sponsorship, and branded series you encounter today.

In 1930s America, Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Lever Brothers didn't buy advertising time on radio programs. They owned the programs outright. The brand didn't interrupt the content — the brand was the content.

Why did this work? Habit formation. Audiences tuned in every single day to follow serialized storylines, and the sponsor's message arrived with every episode. The product became emotionally fused with the narrative. By the late 1930s, soap operas were more profitable than any other radio genre — so profitable that NBC executives proposed using daytime advertising revenue to subsidize the entire network and run prime time commercial-free.

This is the identical mechanism behind every podcast subscription, every Netflix cliffhanger, every creator building a devoted audience before dropping a sponsor mention. The loop is the same. P&G engineered it first.

Meet Irna Phillips — the most important advertising innovator most people have never heard of. Phillips created The Guiding Light, The Road of Life, and multiple radio hits. Unlike almost everyone else in broadcasting, she owned the rights to her shows.

When television arrived, Phillips saw the future instantly. In 1948, she pitched ad agencies on a television serial where a main character would work for one of the sponsor's companies, weaving product messaging organically into storylines. She was describing influencer marketing and native advertising in 1948.

Sponsors said no. Television production cost more than double what radio required. But the deeper problem was structural: sponsors realized they could rotate multiple brands through a single expensive production, rather than owning one show per brand.

Phillips kept fighting. She launched These Are My Children in 1949 — television's first soap opera. It lasted four weeks. But even in four weeks, fans wrote in demanding to know what happened to the characters. The emotional hook worked.

By 1952, The Guiding Light was on CBS television. By 1956, As the World Turns premiered as a 30-minute serial and became one of the most watched shows on daytime TV. By 1964, advertisers were spending $103 million on CBS daytime programming alone. By 1965, daytime revenues accounted for more than 60% of the three networks' total profits.

Here's the part every brand strategist needs to understand: P&G didn't just pay for the shows. They controlled them. P&G established its own production division in 1949.

YouTube's advertiser-friendly content guidelines that demonetize certain topics? Instagram's content moderation shaped by advertiser pressure? That's P&G's 1952 daytime editorial standards, automated and scaled.

Habit formation beats impression buying. Owning content beats buying time in it. And brand and narrative fuse in audience memory whether the audience notices or not. Red Bull's media company, Patagonia's documentaries, Nike's films — they're all following a playbook P&G wrote before television existed.

Bob Batchelor is a cultural historian, editor of the three-volume anthology "We Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes American Life," and author of more than a dozen books. His analysis has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, BBC, and PBS NewsHour.

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