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When Advertising Became Art — and Art Became Everything, Part I
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.
Subscribe to Brand Strategy and Advertising on Spotify or Apple Podcasts for new episodes connecting advertising history to the strategies shaping brands today.
View all episodes
By Bob BatchelorHere’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.
Subscribe to Brand Strategy and Advertising on Spotify or Apple Podcasts for new episodes connecting advertising history to the strategies shaping brands today.