The 1960s gave advertising artistry. The 1970s gave it strategy. This episode completes the story.

In Part II, we examine a media landscape flooded with advertising messages, brands that all had personalities, and consumers growing harder to reach by the year. The answer was a concept that now sits at the center of every brand strategy conversation in the industry: positioning.

THE 1970s PIVOT: WHEN EVERYTHING GOT LOUDER

By 1979, total U.S. ad billings had nearly tripled over the start of the decade, reaching $27.9 billion. J. Walter Thompson became the first agency in history to break $1 billion in worldwide volume. The sheer volume of advertising was becoming its own obstacle.

Into that noise, the slogan was reborn — not as a tagline, but as strategy. Theorists Jack Trout and Al Ries gave the decade its central concept: positioning. Not what the product is. Not even what the brand feels like. But where the brand lives in the consumer’s mind relative to every competitor.

7-UP doubled its sales with “The Uncola” by repositioning itself as the alternative to Coke — leveraging the category leader’s dominance against it. Coke answered with “It’s the Real Thing,” claiming authenticity, universality, belonging. BMW declared itself “The Ultimate Driving Machine” in 1975 — tried to replace it with “Joy” in 2010, retreated to the original in 2012. McDonald’s told consumers “You Deserve a Break Today” (Advertising Age’s fifth-best campaign of the century). Burger King answered with “Have It Your Way.” The fast food wars were positioning wars.

BRAND EQUITY: THE ASSET YOU CAN’T TOUCH

The 1970s introduced another concept that runs through every brand strategy conversation: brand equity. Branding expert David Aaker’s key insight: the power of a brand lives in the minds of consumers. It is not a product feature. It is a perception — and perceptions, built through consistent advertising over time, become financial assets.

Aaker also noted what most students overlook: effective slogans communicate internally as much as externally. “You Deserve a Break Today” tells customers what to expect, employees what their job is, and suppliers what standard they must meet. A well-crafted slogan provides a center of gravity for the entire organization — not just a line on a billboard.

THREE PRINCIPLES THAT NEVER STOPPED WORKING

The episode closes with a framework drawn from the full arc of postwar advertising history — three principles as applicable to brand strategy on Instagram today as they were to television in 1965. Advertising manufactures desire, not just awareness. The era of pure product claims ended sixty years ago and isn’t coming back. And positioning is a mental act, not a product act — the battle for market share is the battle for mind share.

The Stan Lee case study ties it together: Lee didn’t just co-create comic book characters. He manufactured desire for a new kind of hero, built a brand image — Marvel’s irreverent, self-aware personality — distinct from DC’s establishment tone, and positioned Marvel in readers’ minds not just as a publisher but as a community, a sensibility, a way of seeing the world.

ABOUT THE HOST

Dr. Bob Batchelor is a cultural historian, professor at Coastal Carolina University, and editor of the three-volume anthology We Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes American Life. His books include Stan Lee: A Life, Roadhouse Blues, and The Bourbon King. Subscribe to Brand Strategy and Advertising on Spotify or Apple Podcasts for new episodes connecting advertising history to the strategies shaping brands today.

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.

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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