SPEAKER_25: New, immune-supporting Emergen-C crystals brings you the goodness of Emergen-C and a fun new popping experience. There is no water needed so it's super convenient, just throw it back in your mouth. Feel the pop, hear the fizz, and taste the delicious natural fruit flavors. Emergen-C crystals orange vitality and strawberry burst flavors for ages 9 and up have 500 mg of vitamin C per stick pack. Look for Emergen-C crystals wherever you shop. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixcel.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. This show would not be possible without our advertisers. Seriously, don't worry, I'm not about to read some ads right now. I just want you to consider the way we use advertising. A lot of podcasters and radio hosts, myself included, read out messages from our sponsors rather than play pre-recorded commercials. Rush Limbaugh does it.
SPEAKER_01: Bow and Branch, they have reinvented sheets and bedding with the sole purpose of making your nighttime rest more comfortable than ever.
SPEAKER_25: Howard Stern does it.
SPEAKER_03: It's SnoreStop Extinguisher. Yes, the fast-acting snore spray.
SPEAKER_25: And these ads, in some ways, actually harken back to where audio advertising began. But the journey of how we got to now is fascinating. The Organist, a podcast from KCRW and McSweeney's, recently featured a two-part documentary about the surprising and strange history of radio advertising, as heard through the ears of Clive Desmond, a radio producer and podcast host who has worked extensively in the ad industry. His account of the evolution of ad spots, jingles, and voiceovers all add up into a story of his own journey. And it starts when he was a boy.
SPEAKER_19: I grew up in a little bungalow-style house in Buffalo, New York. There was a beautiful radio in the kitchen. It was always on. In 1959, when I was two and a half, I began listening. My favorite station was WKBW.
SPEAKER_13: It was a top 40 station, so there were three or four commercials between every song.
SPEAKER_19: Listening as intensely as I did, I soon discovered that all radio commercials weren't the same. They were like pasta. They came in different shapes. There were monologue commercials, dialogue commercials, interview commercials, musical commercials. But even to my tiny, tender ears, I noticed all commercials had one thing in common, a certain lack of authenticity. The radio voices spoke with a cheery, make-believe tone, one that said, It's going to be wonderful. Everything's great. This was a tone I had never heard real people speak in, except for one of our neighbors, Mrs. Cunningham. She was an optimist.
SPEAKER_19: But then one day, when I least expected, I heard a radio commercial that featured a little girl.
SPEAKER_16: Marsha, what's your opinion of all the vitamins and minerals in Bosco? I'm never sure of them.
SPEAKER_16: You can't see them, but they're there. It says so right there on the label.
SPEAKER_27: I don't know how to read yet. I'm only four.
SPEAKER_16: Oh, I'm sorry, Marsha.
SPEAKER_27: That's okay. Anyway, I don't care about vitamins and things. I just like Bosco because it makes my milk taste so good.
SPEAKER_16: What does it taste like?
SPEAKER_27: Like milk with chocolate in it. I don't like milk without it.
SPEAKER_16: Well, Bosco's good for you.
SPEAKER_27: I know. My mother thinks I like Bosco because of the vitamins. But I just like it because it tastes good.
SPEAKER_16: Looks like you fooled her.
SPEAKER_27: Mothers are smart, but kids are smarter.
SPEAKER_19: This little girl's voice had a powerful effect on me, because she sounded as real as the girl who lived in the bungalow next door to us. A few days later, sitting in the back seat of the family car, we drove past WKBW in downtown Buffalo. I peered out the window at the station and wondered if the Bosco syrup girl lived there. I mean, how else could the girl in the commercial be on the radio like that all the time? I hadn't yet learned about the wonders of the tape recorder.
SPEAKER_19: While I sat in the car pondering the whereabouts of the Bosco syrup girl, 375 miles to the south in New York City was the man who made the Bosco syrup radio commercial. His name was Tony Schwartz. He was a radio producer and audio archivist. Tony Schwartz specialized in recording commercials with real people instead of recording actors trying to portray real people, which meant the Bosco syrup girl was a real child and not a 35-year-old actor playing a child. Schwartz's production philosophy was to avoid the use of any music or unnecessary sound effects. And when he did work with actors, Schwartz directed them not to sound like actors. In this way, Tony Schwartz was radio advertising's first modernist. A fire breaks out on the first floor of a two-family house.
SPEAKER_10: The woman quickly leaves to call the fire department. And two people die upstairs, overcome by smoke. A man smoking in bed starts a fire. Leaves the bedroom, rushes to a phone. And before the fire department gets there, the rest of his house burns down. Is there one single act that could have been done to help prevent this needless loss? Loss of life and property. Close the door. What should these people have done? Close the door. Do you know that a door is one of the best pieces of firefighting and life-saving equipment? Close the door. And if you leave a room that is on fire, close the door. If you simply close the door, close the door, it will help stop the fire and smoke from spreading too quickly. Close the door. This life-saving information is brought to you by this station and the New York City Fire Department.
SPEAKER_19: After I turned nine, every summer I was ritually shipped to California to spend time with my cousins in San Francisco. Like most children, I was fond of Saturday morning cartoons. The more cartoons I watched, the more familiar I became with the characters. And the more familiar I became with the characters, Bugs, Bup-Eye, Bullwinkle, the more I took notice of their specific voices. But there was one voice I liked most, perhaps because he sounded so...uncartoon-like. You may know him as Pete Buma, Junior Bear, or Jiminy Lammox. He appeared in Sylvester and Tweety, The Bugs Bunny Roadrunner Hour, Ren and Stimpy, Stuart Little, and I Go Pogo, among hundreds of other shows. But when I was a boy, he was in radio commercials too. His name was Stan Freeberg.
SPEAKER_23: Announcing the 1966 Chun King. Sleek, arrogant, a different breed of chow mein. You see it instantly in its bold new bean sprouts. It's crisp, aggressive water chestnuts. Talk about extras. You want bucket bamboo shoots? How are onions? You've got it, mister, in the 1966 Chun King Chow Mein. Outside too, you notice the revolutionary styling of its round cans right away. Wrap around labels, more pickup in the two cans taped together. That's standard equipment on this baby. Look at the way she handles. In the bottom can, independent vegetable suspension. And in the top can, where the action is, over 27 cubic inches of succulent Chun King sauce, loaded with high performance chicken. Step up to the tuned Chow Mein, the 1966 Chun King. Noodles optional. I didn't know who Stan Freeberg was or how big a role he would play in the evolution
SPEAKER_19: of sound for radio commercials. But whenever I heard his voice, it got my attention. One night, driving over the Golden Gate Bridge with my uncle Owen, Stan Freeberg's voice popped out of the speaker. Stunned, I asked my uncle, could you turn that up?
SPEAKER_22: Radio? Why should I advertise on radio? There's nothing to look at. No pictures.
SPEAKER_18: Listen, you can do things on radio you couldn't possibly do on TV. That'll be the day. All right, watch this. Okay, people, and now when I give you the cue, I want the 700 foot mountain of whipped cream to roll into Lake Michigan, which has been drained and filled with hot chocolate. Then the Royal Canadian Air Force will fly overhead towing a 10 ton Maraschino cherry, which will be dropped into the whipped cream for the cheering of 25,000 extras. All right, cue the mountain.
SPEAKER_26: You and the Air Force. Cue the Maraschino cherry.
SPEAKER_18: Okay, 25,000 cheering extras. Now, you want to try that on television? Well. You see, radio is a very special medium because it stretches the imagination. Doesn't television stretch the imagination? Up to 21 inches, yes.
SPEAKER_19: Who Listens to Radio was part of an advocacy campaign sponsored by the Radio Advertising Bureau of America to encourage clients to buy more radio time. Apparently, radio was going through a sales drought. Nevertheless, Stan Freeberg was the main voice of this epic radio commercial, and that's what caught my attention. Hearing Freeberg command a 700 foot mountain of whipped cream being rolled into Lake Michigan while the Royal Canadian Air Force towed a giant Maraschino through the sky, it flipped a switch in my imagination as nothing had before. This was bigger than the Bosco chocolate syrup girl, although in hindsight, she was still pretty good. To a nine year old, two weeks feels like a year, and that was more than enough time for me to untether myself from the familiar sounds of Buffalo and absorb the subtly different tone and tempo of California. California. Two weeks on the West Coast had cleared my mind and readied me for the next phase in my radio commercial journey. After my vacation ended, I was sent home to Buffalo via the scenic route. I spent most of my time in the observation car with the new transistor radio my Uncle Owen had given me as a going away present. The radio, model name Juliet, was about the size of an iPhone 5. It was an inch deep and came with a leather cover as soft as a lamb's ear. But of most importance, it had an earplug. The earplug looked like a piece of outmoded technology from the Balkan Wars, brown and round as a walnut attached to the radio by a coiled wire. Listening with the earplug was a new experience for me. It was like being in a radio cocoon. Station after station, commercial after commercial, I slowly began to overdose. Then I made a disturbing discovery. The more I listened, the more I recognized the sameness of all the stations and commercials. After hours in this echo chamber, I grew bored. I wanted to hear something new or something different. Two days later, after passing through the American heartland, the train had a one hour layover in Chicago. My plan was to stay on the train, listen to the ball game, and read The Amazing Spider-Man number 38. During the first inning, I fell asleep and had a dream. A weird kind of dream. You could call it a radio dream. And now the dream. I am in Chicago. I leave my train seat and go outside. Next, I am walking through a secret tunnel, but I had to be careful because it was dark. The tunnel led to a theater. Suddenly, the footlights come on, and a lanky man in a black suit walks up a few steps onto the stage. He unfolds a greasy sheaf of papers and starts to read. A small jazz band gets to work behind him.
SPEAKER_17: I want you to know that I love my baby, and my baby loves me. A short time ago, we went out together to a place called Far Out, up a limbo. The rhythm was there. I reached over and held my baby's hand. She gave me a little squeeze. I knew we were in the same key. Everything was beginning to swing in a quiet way. Years later, I would learn that this combination of writing and music was called word jazz.
SPEAKER_19: And the pioneer who created it was a man called Ken Nordeen.
SPEAKER_17: Then, I heard a train whistle, and I woke up, and I snapped back into reality.
SPEAKER_19: In the beginning, Nordeen was simply a writer and a performer with a lot to say. To supplement his meager income, he began making radio commercials in the word jazz style. As we pulled out of Chicago, an Nordeen commercial played over my Juliet radio earphone. It was as though the heavens had opened, and I heeded the voice of all that could be.
SPEAKER_17: Think with your tongue about lemon. From the first smack, your tongue can tell that lemon is something else, something so subtly obvious by something so obviously subtle. Yet, there was a feeling among yesterday's tongues that the something else that is lemon wasn't getting its just desserts. For that was before the Sheriff Flavor Bud. Nothing secret about Flavor Bud, except it gives you a perfect lemon jelly dessert every time. Best thing that's happened to lemon since trees. Best thing that's happened for tongues since please. Flavor Bud is what makes this lemon so lemony lemon. Reward your family with the Sheriff Jelly dessert marked lemon. As any honest tongue will tell you, not all jellies are created equal, so ask for Sheriff Jelly dessert.
SPEAKER_19: This time, lemon. The lemon dessert radio spot was like nothing I'd ever heard, but it was just what I'd been searching for. Nordeen had created something fresh, and it seemingly came from out of nowhere. I loved it, but I didn't have much hope that anything else like this would be coming down the line. Perhaps I was too young to see that Nordeen was a harbinger of things to come. On the last Friday of the summer of 66, I arrived in Buffalo. But I wouldn't be there long, because that night at dinner, my father announced the family was moving to Toronto. As long as I had my comics, my Juliet radio, and uninterrupted access to my favorite Buffalo media, the move to Toronto meant little to me. Heck, I thought, it may even be a good thing. As a child growing up in the 60s, I can't say I loved jingles. In the 60s, all the jingles I heard were reiterations of jingles from the past. Sure, they were as cute as a basket of puppies, but for the most part, nothing more than tuneless mindless junk. That was until the summer of 1967, when some very strange things began to happen in the universe of the lowly jingle. In 1967, the Beatles' record, Sergeant Pepper, had just come out, and popular music suffered a massive disruption. With its guitars, barnyard sounds, and allusions to Lewis Carroll and Stockhausen, Sergeant Pepper landed with a bang. Even so big was the bang, Sergeant Pepper sent jingle producers on a mad scramble to copy the new sound any which way they could. One of our neighbors, a jingle producer named Mort Ross, went berserk. At a barbecue one night, I remember Mort telling my mother, this is the biggest thing ever. What am I going to do? How can I compete with the goddamn Beatles? My mother looked solemnly at her freshly manicured fingernails and said nothing. The Beatles, of course, had always been badgered to endorse products, but being the Beatles, it was not to be. However, if the Beatles wouldn't make a jingle, there were plenty of musicians who would. Still giddy from the success of their single, White Rabbit, the Jefferson-era plane accepted an invitation to make a jingle. The invitation came by way of Levi Strauss, the clothing company, who were anxious to draw attention to their line of white jeans. It may take a second or two to grasp what you're about to hear, but it's a jingle, all right. A summer of love jingle. Listen to the way Grace Slick summons the spirit from a pair of white jeans.
SPEAKER_01: Now Jefferson Airplane.
SPEAKER_11: Right now with your white Levi's. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, the strangest jingle to come out of the period was a spot
SPEAKER_19: for Remington electric razors. It was produced by Frank Zappa. Teaming up with then unknown singer, Linda Ronstadt, Zappa produced one of the most magnificently odd jingles in the history
SPEAKER_11: of the world.
SPEAKER_19: Of course, senior management at Remington rejected Zappa's jingle. I don't know why, because Zappa's jingle is a one of a kind creation. To be honest, it's as strange as shaving itself. For the next three years, I adjusted to my new life in the dominion of Canada. I went to school, stumbled through the nuances of Canadian English. And because Buffalo was only 35 miles south of Toronto across Lake Ontario, I could still pick up my favorite Buffalo stations while exploring all the radio Toronto had to offer. Chum, CBC, CFRB. The list went on. By divine intervention, my father, a gadget freak, acquired an enormous Sony two track reel to reel tape recorder on which I learned to record and edit. When I was 12, my voice began to break and I saw my future. I was going to become a voiceover actor in radio commercials. And maybe if I was lucky, I'd be on TV commercials too. One step at a time, I warned myself. My voiceover nom de plume was Chris Christiansen. Reading into the Sony tape recorder as Chris, I practiced every day. I read copy from a magazine ad to make my first radio commercial. It was an experience in humility. Take one, a lot of cigarettes promise taste, but for me, only one cigarette delivers and
SPEAKER_00: that's the route.
SPEAKER_19: Take two, a lot of cigarettes promise taste. In seventh grade, I had a friend who intentionally dressed and wore his hair to look like Andy Warhol. His name was Taylor Reed. Taylor's father, Mr. Reed, was an account executive at the ad firm McCann Erickson. McCann Erickson's biggest client was Coca-Cola. On weekends when Taylor's dad had custody of Taylor, I would often tag along and the three of us would hang out at Mr. Reed's office at McCann. One Sunday in February, Mr. Reed took us into the boardroom. We sat down and he explained he had a top secret radio project to show us and he wanted our opinion. Then he pressed the button. The curtains closed. The lights went down. We sat in the dark and waited. And then a voice of such angelic purity pierced through the silence and the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
SPEAKER_13: I'd like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love. Grow apple trees and honeybees and snow white turtle doves.
SPEAKER_13: I'd like to teach the world to sing with me.
SPEAKER_11: Perfect harmony. Perfect harmony. I'd like to buy the world a coke and keep it company. That's the real thing. I'd like to teach the world a sing and play on the key. And I'd like to buy the world a coke and keep it company. It's the real thing. What the world wants today is the real thing. What the world wants today is the real thing.
SPEAKER_19: After the new Coke jingle played, Mr. Reed said, so what do you boys think? We gave a thumbs up and boy were we right. The simple words and melody of the new Coke jingle suggested that the clearest path to utopia was through the mouth of a Coke bottle. Still, preposterous or not, to this day, I'd like to buy the world a Coke remains one of the most popular jingles in the history of radio. When FM radio came on the scene, I put my Juliet portable transistor radio in retirement and acquired a new portable Panasonic radio with AM FM reception and stereo ear plugs. The new radio was smaller than a paperback, yet bigger than the Juliet. Every Saturday and Sunday night, I would lie on my bed in the dark and toggle across the frequency band of my Panasonic in search of new things to hear. At that time, I was very excited that I had discovered the concept of irony. I was always on the outlook for tiny ironic moments to test my new capacity for irony detection. My solitary weekend listening parties typically went something like this. Saturday night, 10pm WGR radio Buffalo, tuned into Larry King. Topic, the Vietnam War with actor Jane Fonda. He'll always be part of you.
SPEAKER_00: Always. But so will Tom Hayden and so would Badim, except he died.
SPEAKER_19: Memorable moment? An army recruitment ad, produced by Ken Nordeen, yes the same war jazz Ken Nordeen I'd heard in Chicago, played right after Jane delivered a rousing speech about the hypocrisy and evil of the military industrial complex.
SPEAKER_17: Young man, are you haunted by a fear of failure? Chained to a dull job with no future? When the door to opportunity swings open and success awaits, do you have a ghost of a chance? Don't despair. You're still young, there's still time. Time to escape from a dreary future. How? Choose your own job training in today's army and say goodbye to the evil eye.
SPEAKER_01: You can choose job training before you enlist, before you enlist in the modern army.
SPEAKER_19: Sunday night, 8pm, Chum FM, Toronto. Show, the Fire Sign Theatre. Ladies and gentlemen of the radio public, tonight, Athletes in Action, the heaviest
SPEAKER_16: show you'll ever see.
SPEAKER_19: A surreal stream of consciousness comedy radio show, produced in Los Angeles, that often made coded references to recreational drug use. Usually marijuana. memorable moment, the Canadian Department of Health was a key sponsor of the Fire Sign Theatre show. So during commercial breaks, listeners were bombarded by endless rounds of anti-drug PSAs, like this weird contribution starring Indian classical musician Ravi Shankar. This is Ravi Shankar.
SPEAKER_24: As I travel around the world, I feel that the young people are searching for the means to which to attain peace, happiness and spiritual awareness. Why not get high on life itself without using any drugs? You young ones, you have the elixir of life. You don't need hard drugs to make your life more meaningful.
SPEAKER_19: In high school, I was a loner, a real Holden Caufield. But I managed to avoid most of the humiliating pitfalls of adolescence with a rapier wit, all of it stolen from George Carlin. And because I was always wearing earphones. After graduation, I took the radio and television arts course at Ryerson University, where I excelled at reading weather reports on the student radio station CFRM. On sunny days, I would call for rain. On chilly days, I would call for warmth. I was a real barrel of stupid collegiate laughs. After my freshman year at Ryerson, I got lucky and landed a summer job as a boy Friday at a Toronto recording studio called Morgan Earl Sounds. I was the lowest rung on the ladder. My daily duties included vacuuming, picking up my boss's dry cleaning, cataloging tapes, and endlessly restocking mid-priced wine for our clientele of attractive ad agency creative department workers. These were the beautiful people, and now I was among them. Morgan Earl Sounds specialized in making two things, radio commercials and jingles. On any given day, I'd hear an amazing cortege of radio commercials with the voices of Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis, and John Candy, none of whom were household names yet. Hey, come on.
SPEAKER_06: We're paying you to say Dorval Circle, huh? Harland Auto.
SPEAKER_09: It's easy to get to as they are to talk to. Easy route number one, take the Metropolitan to the Cote de Lies exit and follow Cote de Lies to the Winter Circle. It's Harland Auto at the Dorval Circle.
SPEAKER_06: You want to get a white pal? Excuse me. Or easy route number two, take the TransCanada to Sources Boulevard.
SPEAKER_09: Go south on Sources to Highways 2 and 20, then west to the Winter Circle.
SPEAKER_06: It's Dorval Circle. Can you say that? Move your mouth. Move your mouth. Dorval. Dorval. We're paying you the money.
SPEAKER_09: Once you're there, you're where you should be for the best in General Motors car sales and service. Harland Auto has been there for years, and for years they've been the automatic choice. Thinking GM? Think Harland. Look for them at the Winter Circle.
SPEAKER_06: Are you having problems at home or something? You can't read the script? I mean, it's right there in front of you, Dorval. I've had enough of you. Woody, get your hands off me. Will you leave me alone? Leave you alone? I'll leave you alone.
SPEAKER_09: Hey! As easy to get to as they are to talk to. Harland Auto at the Winter Circle. Dorval!
SPEAKER_02: It's for good.
SPEAKER_19: It's for good. After two days on the job, I was shocked when one of the senior producers invited me into the studio to witness the production of a radio commercial. For listeners who have never set foot in a recording studio, here's how it looks. The recording environment is comprised of two rooms, a studio and a control room. The studio is soundproofed and contains microphones and headphones for the performers. The control room has a variety of speakers, recording devices, and a mixing console, which allows you to edit and assemble the recorded material. There is also plush seating that includes leather-bound sofas to catch the occasional spilled drink. In those days, the control room air was rich in the unmistakable aroma of Ampex 456 recording tape, a scent that recalls campfire smoke and styrofoam-packing peanuts. There were ashtrays everywhere, and strewn around the room like sleepy domestic house cats were the coterie of writers, producers, and client representatives. Given the often experimental aesthetic of the time and the success of Second City and Saturday Night Live, many commercial recording sessions relied not on scripts, but on the improvisational talent of the performers. I remember being at Morgan Earl one night and watching Second City record a commercial for an upcoming federal election. Here's an outtake from that session.
SPEAKER_08: What do you think we have to do to get people involved in politics?
SPEAKER_07: I say we get rent buses for them and force them to go to these meetings. I see. Well, what do you think we have to do to get people involved in politics?
SPEAKER_05: I think we should send them more letters, tell them what's happening, and make them
SPEAKER_08: read them. Excuse me, what do you think we're going to have to do to get people involved in politics and good government?
SPEAKER_07: Well, I say if they don't go to the meetings, tax them. Just tax them real heavy. Hit them where it hurts, in the pocket. I see. I think political parties should be parties.
SPEAKER_05: I think that's what people are attracted to. They're attracted to fun. And you make politics fun, and you've got a lot of people involved.
SPEAKER_19: One of the great things about working at Morgan Earl were the out-of-town guests. Henry Winkler, William Shatner, and Alice Cooper all stopped by for one reason or another. A familiar face at the studio was San Francisco-based radio writer, interviewer, and genius, Mal Sharp. Mal's specialty is the man-on-the-street radio commercial. I spent one day as a tape operator assisting Mal recording some commercials outside. He wore a trench coat and a stylish fedora. Mal is one of the most fascinating and charismatic men I have ever met.
SPEAKER_19: Of the many lessons Mal taught me that day, the most important lesson in fact was how to talk with complete strangers. Mal could talk to almost anyone because he knew the power of kindness.
SPEAKER_03: Well this is Mal Sharp along with Ernie Anderson, and of course in the background you hear the people of California chanting for Bel Brand to defeat the rival chip. You can hear them as they sing, Bel-ba-brand, Bel-ba-brand, Bel-ba-brand in the background.
SPEAKER_03: Uh, ma'am, you're out here and you can hear these people. Do you think this is going to be good for sales? Well, it's a new thing.
SPEAKER_02: It's a new in-thing. Do you understand what they're chanting?
SPEAKER_07: Well, it doesn't sound like potato chips at all.
SPEAKER_03: What does it sound like?
SPEAKER_02: It sounds like an Indian chant. I mean, it's incongruous.
SPEAKER_03: So in summation you think it's going to be a good year for Bel Brand potato chips as long as there's chanting?
SPEAKER_02: I don't think so. I think it's going to be a good year for Bel Brand regardless of the chanting because their product is so good.
SPEAKER_03: Fresh, crisp and yummy. Oh, very.
SPEAKER_02: Now what else do you want from me? Is it smell?
SPEAKER_11: It's swell.
SPEAKER_19: Did you notice the pint-sized musical flourish at the end of the Bel potato chip spot? It's called a tag. Tags belong to a musical genre that began as an experiment for a waning breakfast cereal in 1926. Have you tried Wheaties?
SPEAKER_14: They're whole wheat with all of the brands.
SPEAKER_19: What began as an audio experiment for a waning breakfast cereal in 1926 would, over the next five decades, become a distinct musical form. It's called a jingle. Although I was exposed to thousands of jingles in my childhood, two of which you've already heard, who would have known there was a creative jingle explosion looming just around the corner?
SPEAKER_19: Jingles have been around since the beginning of radio, but in the 1970s, we hit peak jingle. But since they fell out of fashion so long ago, this may be a good time to review what actually makes a jingle a jingle. Jingles always have a catchy melody that's easy to sing. They must be earworms, burrowing their way in and staying there for days. Lyrically, some jingles try to create a vague atmosphere of desire in a listener's imagination. Other kinds of jingles play to the listener with more specific appeals, underlining the virtue of a product's price, speed, sexiness, or mouthwatering ingredients.
SPEAKER_19: Traditional jingles come with a chorus of singers who repeat a catchphrase or tagline near the end.
SPEAKER_19: But what a jingle really does is bind an emotion to a product or service.
SPEAKER_19: By design, jingles bypass the analytical lobes in the brain and instead stimulate the nucleation of the jingles. They're called jingles, or pleasure centers. Once you hear it, a jingle creates an itch that you can't stop scratching. Between 1970 and 1980, ad companies produced thousands of jingles, and for a good reason. Change was in the air. In the 1970s, a new generation of very sophisticated young jingle writers flooded the jingle jungle and couldn't help but write music that appealed to their generation. But none of this came as a big surprise to me, because in many ways, I was one of them. Growing up on a diet of Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell, how could I not have been? Take Dr. Pepper. The first time I heard, Be a Pepper, in 77, I had to pull over to the side of the road. Randy Newman and Jake Holmes wrote the jingle, which begins with a startling statement. I drink Dr. Pepper because I'm proud. I used to be alone in a crowd. What? A Dr. Pepper bottle to cure for alienation? Let's take a sip and see.
SPEAKER_11: I drink Dr. Pepper and I'm proud. I used to be alone in a crowd. But now you look around these days. This used to be a Dr. Pepper craze. I'm a Pepper, he's a Pepper, she's a Pepper. We're a Pepper, wouldn't you like to be a Pepper too? I'm a Pepper, he's a Pepper, she's a Pepper. If you drink Dr. Pepper, you're a Pepper too. Us Peppers are an interesting breed. An original taste is what we need. Ask any Pepper and he'll say, only Dr. Pepper tastes that way. I'm a Pepper, he's a Pepper, she's a Pepper. We're a Pepper, wouldn't you like to be a Pepper too? I'm a Pepper, he's a Pepper, she's a Pepper. We're a Pepper, wouldn't you like to be a Pepper too? Be a Pepper, drink Dr. Pepper. Come on! Be a Pepper, drink Dr. Pepper. Be a Pepper, drink Dr. Pepper.
SPEAKER_19: For me, Be a Pepper was an awakening. Listeners were calling radio stations requesting to hear Be a Pepper as though it were a hit song. The power of this fact wasn't lost on me. At 20 years old, I began producing radio commercials. Then I joined the musician and actors union and began writing, playing and singing on jingles.
SPEAKER_19: Rib Lovers Festival is on now. $16.95 only at Boston Pizza.
SPEAKER_19: Reading the union newsletters, I discovered that Toronto was a hub of jingle innovation, but that the real centre of the jingle universe was New York. The next stop is Grand Central, 40 seconds from... And so, like thousands of starry-eyed kids with a dream, in 1984, I moved to Gotham City, found an apartment and hit the pavement with my demo tape in hand. As luck would have it, I was soon working. During my New York journey, I was a writer and a producer. I worked for ad agencies and sound production companies. I listened as radio ads shortened from 60 seconds to 30 seconds. I gasped as creativity was often crushed by an increasingly powerful beast called market research. Yet despite the many obstacles, I was always in the studio doing what I loved most.
SPEAKER_19: Making radio. No matter what place I am, or era I'm living in, one thing has always been clear to me. Radio commercials are never the main course. Like the complimentary basket of garlic bread you get at an Italian restaurant, radio commercials are not something you order, but rather something you expect and sometimes take delight in. Of course, unlike today's complimentary basket of garlic bread, the very first radio commercial was written and produced without a known format to follow. No one knew how short or how long it should be, if it would work at all, and what, if anything, would happen after it went to air. On August 28, 1922, on WEAF radio in New York, a man called Mr. Blackwell stood behind a mic and urged unsuspecting listeners to leave Manhattan for the family-friendly, tree-lined streets of Jackson Heights in the borough of Queens. If living in New York was getting on your nerves, Mr. Blackwell had news for you. A magical new place called Hawthorne Court Apartment Homes. Listen to Blackwell's pitch for this exciting new place to live. Your health may depend on it.
SPEAKER_12: Friends, you owe it to yourself and your family to leave the congested city and enjoy what nature intended you to enjoy. Visit our new apartment home in Hawthorne Court, Jackson Heights, where you may enjoy community life in a friendly environment.
SPEAKER_19: History doesn't say what happened to Blackwell, but response to the radio commercial was overwhelming because within days, the vacant apartments of Hawthorne Court Apartment Homes were filled. All of this because of one simple radio commercial. When word of the Hawthorne Radio Miracle spread, every station in New York understood the potential and rushed into the fray. Finally, seeing a way to make real money, radio embraced commercials and radio commercials became a mainstay of the radio experience. What began as an audio experiment some 90 years ago actually became a worldwide industry worth billions of dollars. Brilliant or silly, thought-provoking or moving, the humble radio commercial became the fuel, you could say, that allows radio to play the news, music, and stories we've been listening to ever since. From KCRW and McSweeney's, I'm Clive Desmond.
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SPEAKER_25: This was just an edited version of part one of Clive Desmond's two-part personal history of radio advertising. To hear the rest, check out The Organist from KCRW and McSweeney's. There's a link on our website. While we're on the subject of the sound of radio changing our lives, I wanted to share a clip of me talking about my first favorite radio story, which isn't a radio story at all. It's from a movie. That's right after this. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design, or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks, and if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. What's more important, making sure you're set for today or planning for tomorrow? You can actually do both at the same time. With annuity and life insurance solutions from Lincoln Financial, you're not just taking care of you and your family's future. You're also helping yourself out today. Lincoln's annuities offer options to not only provide you with your guaranteed retirement income for life, but to help protect you from everyday market volatility. And their life insurance policies not only provide your family with a death benefit, but some can even give you immediate access to funds in case of an emergency. Go to LincolnFinancial.com slash get started now to learn how to plan, protect, and retire. Lincoln annuities and life insurance are issued by the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Products sold in New York are issued by Lincoln Life and Annuity Company of New York, Syracuse, New York, distributed by Lincoln Financial Distributors, Inc., a broker-dealer.
SPEAKER_25: Chances are you're listening to 99% Invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media, or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are, it's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember, T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile.com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile.com. So my friend Chuck Bryant is one half of the charming Josh and Chuck of the original Nerd Out on Tiny Details podcast called Stuff You Should Know. It's probably the first podcast I ever listened to, and I still love it, mainly because Josh and Chuck are just so great to spend time with. Well, anyway, Chuck has this new podcast that's really fantastic. It's called Movie Crush, where he invites people. He likes to talk about their favorite movie of all time. And I went on to talk about Jaws. Now, I love Jaws, and so does Chuck, actually. And my favorite scene is when the shark hunter Quint tells the story of him being left in the water after his ship, the USS Indianapolis, was sunk in World War II. So here's a part of that monologue.
SPEAKER_15: Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. It was coming back from the island of Tinian Delady. It just delivered the bomb, the Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about half an hour. Tiger, thirteen footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, Chief? You tell by looking from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know was our bomb mission had been so secret. No distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief. Sharks come cruising. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know, it's kind of like old squares in a battle. You see in the calendar, like the Battle of Waterloo, and the idea was, shark comes to the nearest man, and that man, he starts pounding and hollering and screaming. Sometimes the shark go away. Sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes.
SPEAKER_15: Black eyes, like a doll's eyes. Black eyes, like a doll's eyes.
SPEAKER_25: Oh, that's so good. Anyway, here's a clip of me talking to Chuck Bryant about that scene on Movie Crush. I love radio so much, and I love the storytelling in radio. It is still like my ideal form, and I think of Quinn's story as the first radio story I ever really loved. It is told just perfectly. You could almost see it, like the StoryCorps music starts, and then, you know, like on Morning Edition, and then Quinn just starts, and you can remember some teenager going, oh my God, I can't believe it, you know, on the other side. It is a perfectly told, natural, I just think it's a radio story. I would cut it out and put it on the radio in a heartbeat. It's like perfect. It's funny because there's all this stuff, all this great activity. You've already had the adventure music playing, you know, and the barrels and shooting it and everything, but that moment is so riveting. I love it. That's my favorite moment in the movie.
SPEAKER_26: I mean, one of mine for sure, and the backstory there for that scene was that that was not in the book, and Spielberg brought in the great screenwriter and filmmaker John Milius to write that monologue, and then apparently Robert Shaw himself too, who was a playwright, went in and did some rewriting on it and kind of worked with Milius on it, and, you know, just ends up being like one of the most iconic monologues in movie history for sure. It is so good, and it so naturally moves from one scene to the scar-comparing scene to the other,
SPEAKER_25: and the fact that I've thought about this a lot, it's like, because it gets called out because they're comparing scars, and Brody says, what's that on your arm? And it's the removal of the tattoo of the Indianapolis. Right. And I think about that all the time. Like, why would he remove it? Yeah. And like, what was going on in his head that he would remove it instead of keep it there? And with every part of his character that you get in other ways, that seems like this extreme moment in his life that you have no knowledge of, but you just have this little tiny peek into, and I love that part of it too. I never really thought about that. That is super interesting that he would, and that's, like, old sailors don't have tattoos removed, you know?
SPEAKER_26: Yeah, exactly. So like, the level of trauma or whatever he was trying to get away from or whatever it was,
SPEAKER_25: like, it was clearly something that haunted him in a way, like it was not an adventure story to him. Yeah. It just happened. And, or maybe, you know, maybe it was just something else. Like, you don't really know. It's an incomplete narrative, but I've tried to fill that in my head lots of times. Yeah. And I've never come up with, like, what I think is the answer. But it mainly has to do with him trying to get away from it, and him willingness, his willingness to talk about it at that moment, I think, points to how close he's gotten in this short amount of time, but also that he senses the peril that they're in and wants them to be really aware of what's, you know, what's about to happen. And what's about to happen, like, happens almost immediately afterwards. Like, they start, you know, the shark starts knocking into the boat. Yeah. In the next scene, so. Yeah, it's funny. I never really thought about it, but it's almost like Quint knows this is the last time I'm going to tell this story.
SPEAKER_26: To hear the whole episode with me or any of the other great guests talking lovingly about their favorite movie,
SPEAKER_25: go to moviecrush.show or search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. 99% invisible is Katie Mingle, Sharif Yousif, Sean Riel, Kirk Kolstad, Delaney Hall, Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taron Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are part of Radio-Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by the Knight Foundation and listeners just like you. You can find 99% invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. If you want to see the latest video we made with a box about controversial shared spaces, you have to go to our website. It's 99PI.org.
SPEAKER_17: Radio-Topia from PRX.
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