This almost-mythical family you are visualizing is drawn directly from a generation of magazine ads, commonplace during the mid-20th century, that portrayed so-called “indoor-outdoor living,” where the refinements of domesticity were combined with the restorative powers of nature. The indoor-outdoor look didn’t just sell things that suburban houses required or were improved by—like cars, construction materials, or domestic appliances. It also sold an illusion: Americans might imagine themselves living partly outdoors, but the ads ultimately promoted a life that took place inside all of the glass, metal, and wood that was being advertised.

As these idealized images of suburban life—indoor-outdoor living among them—took hold, Americans responded to the “allurement of open space,” as one film by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called it. They moved away from cities, took out their wallets, and forged a consumer culture that largely depended on the ever-increasing material needs deriving from suburbanization. In doing so, millions of Americans bought the idea—as housewares manufacturer Revere Copper and Brass put it in a 1942 ad—that a home was “no mere space bounded by walls and divided into rooms,” but “a way of life to keep pace with your needs, to change with your tastes, to grow with your means.” In other words: a way of life that would keep you buying stuff.

After the end of World War II, real estate developers began planning and promoting open and spacious suburbs on a mass scale as an alternative to the unsanitary and overcrowded industrial city. This became possible for a number of reasons: first, farmland was relatively inexpensive, and often no longer needed for agriculture. Second, the war effort had led to the rise of new construction methods, based on standardization and prefabrication that considerably cut down building costs. Finally, the poor state of the existing housing stock and the growing population led the federal government to invest in new developments, especially by subsidizing mortgages for veterans and young couples, which underwrote “white flight,” as increasing numbers of white families moved from cities to suburbs.

To encourage this trend, advertisers decided to spotlight the suburbs’ desirability by capitalizing on their non-urban qualities, with a twist: they presented suburbia as a place where the comforts of civilization (that is, urban living) merged with the soothing embrace of the natural world. The suburban house was no homestead in the Great Plains; it was an outpost of modernity and convenience built on the frontier between the city and the wild. Advertisers dreamed up a seamless interpenetration of indoors and outdoors, homey interiors and sunlit exteriors, living room and back yard—visual evidence that it was possible to have the best of both worlds. They directed those images into millions of American homes through the pages of LIFE magazine, whose circulation peaked at more than eight million in the late 1960s.

These indoor-outdoor viewscapes were in fact a downscaled rendition of the modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic designs, or the glass houses by Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and Richard Neutra, all of which revolutionized high-end domestic architecture in the U.S. In the eyes of architectural critic Sigfried Giedion, these modern American houses marked a new chapter in the history of world architecture. In his posthumous work Architecture and the Phenomena of Transition, Giedion wrote of an era in which the boundaries between inside and outside were no longer clearly defined because peace, wealth, and technology had enabled humans to stop seeking shelter from the outer world. This was an age in which “interior and exterior space continually interpenetrated one another, establishing new interrelationships.” It was a new form of architecture defined by “a simultaneous striving both for freedom and for order.”

Although most Americans were ready to join in Giedion’s appreciation of this new architectural style, they could not afford these homes with their walls of endless and prohibitively expensive glass plates. But popular ads presented the new middle-class suburban home as a standardized and mass-produced version of the same type, a domestic dream within anyone’s reach. Ads and magazines called it “indoor-outdoor architecture.”

The marketing surged. In some instances, companies exploited these visions of suburban heaven to sell commodities that were linked with outdoor living. Aluminum, for instance, had become the metal of choice to manufacture everything from lawn mowers, awnings, fences, and outdoor furniture to aluminum foil and kitchenware. It was just as useful inside the home as outside it, but not as easily marketable—so showcasing it as the perfect material for outdoor living, as the sector’s leading company, Reynolds, did, made it more appealing to shoppers seeking all kinds of products.

Windows were another case in point. They were an essential fixture to protect interiors from weather and unwanted intrusions—but in mid-century ads, they became a way to frame the outer world and transport it inside, as a beautiful picture. By installing extensive sheets of glass like the popular Andersen Windowalls, for instance, one could “furnish the outdoor fun.” If the outdoors was the perfect setting for leisure activity—barbecues, picnics, and parties—window frames and glass plates let these visions (and through them, leisure as a way of life) penetrate the domestic environment. Glass made a house almost immaterial, giving residents the impression of living on their lawn instead of under a roof—or so these ads seemed to suggest.

The charms of the outdoor world could enhance not only where people lived, but also where they worked and went to school. Companies relocating to suburban office parks could enfold employees in the peaceful arms of nature, making the dull monotony of work all the more bearable. Suburban schools could be a place where “young minds find more room to grow,” according to ad copy from Libbey-Owens-Ford, a major glass-plate provider.

Most industries banked on the suburban ideal because that was where most consumers lived. Indoor-outdoor architecture became a visual cliché for postwar advertising of all sorts of goods. Some indoor-outdoor images encouraged activities quite alien to what most think of as the purportedly outdoorsy suburban life—for example, watching TV. And yet, between 1962 and 1963 Motorola ran a series of ads in LIFE magazine that depicted this most domestic, indoor-oriented of all hobbies in suburban fantasy homes, each harmoniously integrated into the landscape. The implied message was that TV and radio could illusorily take viewers and listeners outside the limits of their domestic world, thus counteracting the potentially claustrophobic properties of these technologies. These fictional modern architectures were born out of the imaginative mind of illustrator Charles Schridde, and some were clearly reminiscent of actual examples, such as Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West.

Driving was another essentially interior activity promoted with indoor-outdoor imagery. It was advertised as an outdoor activity in itself, because car owners had a world of unlimited adventures at their feet, or rather, wheels. And yet, drivers would mostly contemplate the beauty of the outdoors from a hermetically sealed capsule, and as suburbs sprawled further and further out, the hours spent behind the wheel grew exponentially. One could roll down the windows—but why, when the automobile interior was conveniently air-conditioned?

A suburban home, too, could be a controlled climate, but it took a dose of the indoor-outdoor mystique to win people over to the idea. Many postwar consumers resisted air conditioning because it required closing windows tight to function properly, and seemed to force people into a self-imposed domestic captivity. So creative directors on Madison Avenue hoping to push air conditioners had to suggest quite the opposite idea: that living in an air-conditioned house was like living outdoors all year round. Fresh air came to seem almost unnecessary, since one could artificially reach climatic nirvana inside one’s home.

Once again, the suburban house metaphorically dematerialized: it became “the great indoors,” as a Lennox air conditioning ad put it. In contrast to the images of advertising, ordinary life—the time people spent doing housework, playing, watching TV, driving a car to go to work or run one’s errands—took place indoors. The outdoors was transformed from a place to enjoy to an abstract concept. Postwar suburbanization ultimately put Americans into comfortable, all-encompassing interiors, allowing them to go from the living room to the garage to the car to the mall without ever coming into contact with fresh air.

The post When Americans Bought the Illusion of ‘Indoor-Outdoor Living’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Some answers to that question lie in the story of a San Francisco campaign against hepatitis B.

Americans of Asian heritage have by far the highest rates of chronic hepatitis B virus infection; while less than 1% of the total U.S. population has “hep B,” one in ten Asian Americans are infected. And San Francisco, with a large population of residents of Asian heritage, has the highest rate of liver cancer in the country, reflecting in part high levels of undetected chronic hepatitis B infection.

More than a decade ago, activists and community members in San Francisco launched a major media campaign that portrayed people of Asian heritage as heroes for getting tested, screened, and vaccinated. It was the very first time that I had seen Asian Americans who looked like me in a mainstream ad.

By engaging Asian Americans as messengers to the community, including hard-to-reach immigrants, to change perceptions of the infection, the campaign offers broader lessons for how to address other hard-to-discuss public health issues.

The campaign started in 2007, with AsianWeek Foundation organizing diverse Asian Americans and immigrants to focus on ending hep B disease. Ted Fang, then AsianWeek’s executive director, brought together health leaders, including Samuel So, MD, of the Asian Liver Center at Stanford University, and Janet Zola (then with the San Francisco City and County Department of Public Health), to form a coalition called San Francisco Hep B Free (SFHBF). Mitch Katz at the San Francisco Department of Public Health put his full support behind the effort.

This coalition also included immigrants and leaders in Asian American organizations, as well as in the media, government, community, and business sectors. The campaign’s goals were to move Asian Americans to get screened and to convince public and health care providers to test and vaccinate Asian Americans for hep B.

This coalition set out to develop communication strategies that would break the silence about hepatitis B and normalize discussion of it. Without funds to start, organizers began by soliciting strong public statements of support from then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, who proclaimed the goal of making San Francisco free of hepatitis B.

San Francisco Supervisor Fiona Ma, then the only Asian American on the board of supervisors, wrote and led the passage of legislation calling for testing and vaccinating all Asian Americans in San Francisco, and also talked publicly for the first time about her own chronic HBV infection.
Having broken the ice through effective communication, the coalition soon got funding for bus signs and billboards introducing the campaign. In 2007, bus ads featuring Newsom encouraged testing for hepatitis B.

In 2008, an ad campaign called “B a Hero” featured Asian Americans with drawings of capes and Superman costumes superimposed on their everyday clothing, with a “B” appearing in place of the Superman “S.” The concept: getting tested for HBV and talking to friends and family about being tested would make anyone a hero. This upbeat approach, designed by a team of Asian Americans, proved very effective.

Courtesy of Grace Yoo.

The 2010 ad strategy was tougher because it focused, in a very personal way, on the statistical likelihood of developing cancer by having an undetected infection. Featuring local volunteers of various Asian ethnicities and backgrounds as beauty pageant contestants, one ad noted that one in 10 Asian Americans were infected with hep B, the leading cause of liver cancer, and posed the question, “Which One Deserves to Die?” A second ad asked the same question over a tableau of an inter-generational Asian family gathering for a photo.

Courtesy of Grace Yoo.

As a medical sociologist, I researched the roles of Asian Americans, their leaders, and celebrities in this San Francisco effort—the first study of such health promotion campaigns. I was particularly interested in how “narrative communication”—official stories, invented stories, and personal stories—can educate the public about a particular health issue. Such narratives had shown results in the Witness Project, a program in which local African-American breast and cervical cancer survivors talk about, or “witness,” their cancer experiences.

What I learned from San Francisco’s campaign was that breaking the silence and using personal narratives from respected Asian-American leaders helped destigmatize hep B. While the disease had previously been associated with “bad people” or “bad behavior,” the campaign repositioned it as something that the community could act to confront, in the service of greater health for all. In many Asian countries where hep B is common, infected patients are acculturated to feel ashamed or fearful, and consequently hide their disease. A common perception in Asia is that those infected somehow deserve it.

The San Francisco campaign successfully reframed this discourse among Asian immigrants and Asian Americans by providing factual information on transmission, emphasizing medical solutions, and creating positive emotions and feelings of empowerment. In effect, as then-San Francisco Board of Supervisors President David Chiu told me in an interview for my study, what the study did was to bring hep B “out of the closet.”

Destigmatization is a first step, but it is also a process that needs to be continually reiterated. Jason Liu, an activist who was a premedical student at the time, told me that even when he told Asian Americans that their primary mode of hepatitis B infection was from fluids transferred during the birthing process, the stigma is still difficult to eradicate given that hepatitis B can be transmitted sexually or through drug use.

One of the most important strategies to counter the persistent stigma was to have well-known and respected Asian Americans speaking out. Personal disclosures by Supervisor Ma and Alan Wang, then a news anchor at the local ABC affiliate, were particularly helpful. In an on-air piece, Wang, who said he was inspired by Ma’s disclosure, described the discovery of his own infection status and his ongoing monitoring and treatment to prevent liver cancer. He has proven to be a key resource and voice for the campaign by talking about his hepatitis B infection openly.

Jeanette Tam, who worked for a health plan focused on Chinese Americans at the time, told me that the campaign had broken a barrier. “This is not something that Chinese people and Chinese families discuss: weaknesses. And so with Fiona Ma coming out and talking about that, it was an eye opener to me.” That a public figure would risk her public image by coming forward impressed Tam enough to encourage her to speak up as well. Tam said, “And even if you choose to tell someone to get prevention, get tested, and get vaccinated, that’s good. And if it goes as far as, ‘You know what? I’m going through it too,’ it puts a human face on it so that people don’t have to feel secretive.”

Focusing on the upbeat message that this problem could be solved encouraged greater involvement by members of the community—especially since up to two-thirds of infected Asian Americans who are infected are unaware of their disease and the potential for liver cancer. SFHBF’s “B a Hero” campaign was built around the idea that addressing hepatitis B is a heroic cause and that “we,” everyday people, can make a difference.

Another successful strategy involved shifting the paradigm of the disease away from the impression that it is a death sentence by refocusing attention onto solutions such as vaccination and treatment. Thus, the taboo against discussing “bad news,” especially news related to death, was subverted by the message that by working together the community can prevent hepatitis B disease and liver cancer. Community activist Mary Jung said this gave participants a positive outlook: “Isn’t it nice to work on something that’s preventive? … Instead of always raising money for research like for cancer, or something like that.”

Many respondents to my surveys cautioned that it has been easier to destigmatize hep B among Asian Americans born or raised in the U.S., compared to those who are first-generation adult immigrants. But it appears that the San Francisco campaign, by having U.S.-born Asian Americans as leading figures, was able to communicate across the generations to these adult immigrants. And in establishing this precedent the campaign also broke new ground.

Even though this landmark campaign occurred over a decade ago, its lessons continue to resonate. The San Francisco campaign was culturally appropriate. It ran the first major U.S. market ad campaign featuring all Asian American models. Ethnic and general media campaigns were closely coordinated in five languages, but primarily in English and primarily through general market outlets. In addition to getting the cultural aspects right, the campaign used the right messengers and offered the right sorts of messages.

All told, the San Francisco campaign provided a model for communicating and organizing around health issues in the Asian American community—or in any community suffering from a stigmatized illness or condition.

The post To Stop a Deadly Cancer, Turn Everyone Into a ‘Hero’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Moderator Carla Hall, editorial board member of the Los Angeles Times, started off the event, held before a standing-room-only crowd at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown Los Angeles, by asking the panelists if propaganda can be both bad and good.

Hal Hershfield, a marketing scholar and psychologist at UCLA Anderson said that propaganda isn’t necessarily bad; it can help people “do the things that they say that they want to do.” Consider the campaign to convince people to take 10,000 steps a day did not have scientific backing—it was promoted by a company that made pedometers, Hall said. Whatever the intentions behind messaging, if propaganda is “moving people in the right direction health-wise, is this a problem?” Hershfield asked.

Hershfield said the positive propaganda around participation in retirement plans is similar; such messaging may come from the retirement plans themselves, but it has led to big increases in America’s retirement savings.

Another panelist, the UC Santa Cruz social psychologist Anthony Pratkanis, said propaganda can have multiple definitions. Propaganda can simply mean the promotion of one side of a dispute, or it can have a more nefarious definition. The definition he uses for propaganda is: “A message that plays on your emotions and prejudices.” Propaganda, he said, “is typically short, like a sound bite, a photo, a vivid image, and it’s designed to speak to your gut” and arouse your feelings, often fear, guilt, or your prejudices. Pratkanis offered the example of Nazi propagandist Fritz Hippler, who said his role in the production of propaganda in Nazi Germany “was to simplify, make it agreeable, entertain, and then repeat, repeat, repeat.”

One problem with this approach, according to Pratkanis: If a leader is simply constantly appealing to the public’s emotions, he or she effectively prevents real discussion of the issues. And, Pratkanis said, “a democracy is founded on having deliberative persuasion, discussion, negotiation, and (an) understanding (of) the core issues.”

Hall, the moderator, questioned whether, with the American public sphere broken, people even know the rules of productive discussion and debate. “What are the rules?” she asked the panelists.

Texas A&M historian of rhetoric Jennifer Mercieca said that we communicate more as propagandists than as citizens. Americans no longer join organizations the way we used to, and instead exchange views on social networks like Facebook and Twitter that use algorithms “designed to promote the most outrageous and emotive content,” she said.

And the notifications the networks send users are designed to “ping the dopamine receptors in your brain to get you addicted” to using the platforms. The networks train you “to speak as a propagandist on social media. It will only show your content if you’re outrageous,” Mercieca said.

Hall then asked how, given the overwhelming number of messages, notifications, and ads that reach us, we are able to pick our way through all the propaganda of this work.

Pratkanis replied that it’s impossible to think, let alone think critically, about each persuasive message we encounter in a given day. This, he said, “is the real issue we face as citizens.”

The saturated environment is one of the reasons that propaganda is so effective, Pratkanis said. Unable to think about messages, people start to use heuristics—simple rules to decide if something is good or bad, or true or false. And that strategy leads us to conclusions such as, “Well, it came from my political party so it must be good, (or) it came from their political party it must be bad.” The public simply doesn’t have the time—or necessarily the skills—to successfully wade through all of these persuasive messages.

But is there anything we can do to be “smart consumers of propaganda” Hall asked?

Mercieca said that her best advice is to be “super vigilant,” though that can be hard, since social media platforms are designed to prevent us from thinking critically. Still, Mercieca said, it’s important to ask what the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero asked, “Cui bono?,” or “Who profits?,” when consuming propaganda. You have to think about who might be attempting to manipulate you and for what reason, she said.

Pratkanis said that “when you’re receiving messages you have to pay attention to your emotions” and monitor how your thinking or emotions change after consuming a certain message. If you’re feeling guilty, or experiencing moral outrage, you should ask yourself why. And if you are feeling panicky in a sales situation, this is a “clue that someone is trying to use propaganda against you,” Pratkanis said.

Hershfield argued for bigger changes, especially in social media, to allow people to better understand the propaganda aimed at them. But that requires more transparency over social media platforms like Facebook that have shrouded their algorithms in mystery. He said, “We need the social media platforms to figure out ways to change the algorithms so that people are more mindful consumers of the messages.”

During the question-and-answer session with the audience, the panelists were asked if they thought teaching rhetoric and educating high schoolers about propaganda could be part of the solution. All the panelists agreed that more education on these issues would be helpful.

But a change in mindset is also needed. Mercieca said that one of the major differences between ancient Greek society and ours, is that citizens then saw themselves as “officers of the government.” Today, she said, “we don’t think of ourselves as having an office as citizens” and instead “act more as partisans than we do as citizens.”

In this way, the biggest propagandists are regular people themselves, spreading the propaganda we receive. In essence, Mercieca said, we “communicate as propagandists,” and not as citizens.

The post Beware the Propagandist You See In the Mirror appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Comparing the significance of the invention of color television to the development of space rockets sounds ludicrous to us today, but color television was one of the most complex and transformative technological innovations of its time, symbolizing a unique and thoroughly modern form of seeing and representing. It was, in fact, often discussed by its proponents as an ideal form of American postwar consumer vision: a way of seeing the world (and all of its brightly hued goods) in a spectacular form of “living color.”

Color television was sold to viewers as a way to experience everything from sports and nature to musical theater in a more legible, realistic, captivating, and sensational way. Network executives pitched it to advertisers as a unique medium that would inspire attentiveness and emotional engagement in viewers, making them more likely to purchase advertised products, a growing myriad of consumer goods and appliances that were now available in a wider set of vibrant colors like turquoise and pink flamingo.

And, as much as rocket thrusters, the color TV was presented as a quintessentially Cold War machine. RCA President David Sarnoff, addressing President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the 1958 dedication of NBC’s all-color station in Washington, D.C., seemed to promise that color television was even an efficient political technology—an engine of detection, knowledge, and truth. Sarnoff proclaimed the RCA color camera before him was “relentless in its revelations.” In contrast to people in communist countries (who didn’t yet have color TV), Americans feared no revelations, he added, as “we want everyone in the world to see America in its true and natural colors… Here we do not seek to be anything other than what we are. And what we are is not hidden by curtains and what we say not hidden by censorship.”

Despite all of its advantages, however, it took a while for color TV to catch on. By the 1950s, black and white television sets had been on the market since the mid-1940s and were now affordable to most Americans. Even without vivid color, they had become deeply entwined with the growth of consumerism, the expansion of the suburbs, and the workings of the domestic life of the postwar middle-class nuclear family.

Interestingly, color television systems had been demonstrated as early as the 1920s, though the technology was refined in the late 1940s. It wasn’t initially used for entertainment, but as a tool for surgeons and medical students. Doctors had long relied on “wet clinics”—instructional surgeries performed in front of live audiences at medical meetings—to learn their craft. Medical educators had experimented with filming surgeries in monochrome television, but some doctors complained that the feeds were only useful for viewing procedures on cadavers, which were usually drained of color.

Color television, however, provided a more compelling, and efficient, replacement for wet clinics. Projected on large screens before huge medical convention audiences, surgeries cast on closed-circuit color television promised the best seat in the operating theater, providing better close-up views of the body and its interior than even the surgeon performing the operation saw. Color television let students and other viewers distinguish between organs and identify healthy tissue. What’s more, advocates said, the views it offered of the internal workings of the body were both highly detailed and multidimensional.

Peter Goldmark, the head of the CBS lab and one of the inventors of color television, noted that audiences at medical conventions responded strongly to the images produced by his system. “The operations were so realistic that some of the viewers, including doctors, fermented in front of the television screens,” he wrote in his 1973 autobiography. “We began to measure the impact of our television shows by the number of faintings we could count.” Goldmark championed his color system by not only asserting its ability to represent the real in true fidelity, but by claiming that the electronic color image of the surgery had even more psychological and visceral impact on viewers than watching it with their own eyes.

Similar claims about the power and impact of the electronic color image carried over into its use in commercial broadcasting. Commercial color television systems were not approved by the FCC until the start of the 1950s, after consumers had already started purchasing black and white sets. Of the three television networks in the U.S., only NBC was invested in pushing color programming—its parent company, RCA, had developed the color system that eventually became the NTSC standard, so it stood to profit from color set sales. Full conversion of all three networks was not complete until the late 1960s.

But during that extended period of conversion and dissemination, network executives, publicists, advertising companies, inventors, and television manufacturers worked assiduously to promote color technology by reinforcing some of the same notions of its perceptual, aesthetic, and emotional functions that medical TV pioneers had noted. They were trying to convince consumers that the liveness and immediacy of television, combined with the unique visual properties of electronic color, would provide them with an expansive and revelatory view on the world that they had never experienced before. These beliefs then slipped into the descriptions of color television by commentators, critics, and journalists, further influencing the way that viewers made sense of their color viewing experience. By extension, they also cemented Americans’ positioning as good consumers—and as referenced by Sarnoff and Nixon—citizens open to the world and able to withstand revelation and scrutiny.

In the early 1960s, the particular psychological and visual attentiveness of color television viewers was explored in a study by researchers at the well-known Institute for Motivational Research, headed up by the era’s best-known consumer behavior analyst, Ernest Dichter, who combined Freudian analysis, observational methods, and interviews to get at the unconscious drivers of consumer behavior and decision-making. The resulting 157-page report, which was used by NBC to get sponsors on board with color, argued that color television gave viewers a reduced sense of psychological distance, while also increasing levels of emotional involvement, empathy, creativity, comprehension, sociality, and immediacy. Color TV could intensify a sense of realism while simultaneously stimulating “a world of fantasy.” Color was also found to be “symbolic of innovation, progress and modernity.” “Color,” the report concluded, “is symbolic of the better life.”

Ultimately, the ability to evoke strong feeling and capture attention was seen as a boon to sponsors willing to invest in color programming and commercials. Color, the thinking went, created a more receptive consumer for advertisers at a time when color had become essential to the design, economics, and planned obsolescence of goods and appliances. Car companies such as Chrysler—which sponsored NBC’s An Evening with Fred Astaire in 1958, the first prime-time program recorded live on color videotape—were some of the more enthusiastic color sponsors, finding it a good fit for the display of their ever-growing rainbow of car models.

Color television was more than just an addition to, or enhancement of, black and white television. In the postwar era, it represented the final step in the technological replication and extension of human sight: the enhancement of perception, the peak of consumer vision and display, as well as an idealized Cold War technology of truth and revelation. While color television now is simply television and the idea of a black-and-white set seems distant and quaint, there was a time in which color television was, to use a very contemporary expression, a disruptor. It not only altered the way in which commercial television was produced and received, it also claimed to shift the very way that Americans saw the world and understood their relationship to it.

The post Why Color TV Was the Quintessential Cold War Machine appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I know exactly what she saw at the corner of Pico and Bundy in West Los Angeles. It’s CBS Outdoor billboard number 14461A, advertising FX’s The Strain. A pair of giant blue eyeballs gaze upwards, held open by a nitrile-gloved hand. At the bottom of the left eye, a silver worm that looks like a sharp hook pokes through the sclera, surrounded by inflamed red blood vessels.

For adults, the image is provocative. For young children, it can be terrifying. A friend told me that her 4-year-old son couldn’t sleep after seeing the image, asking repeatedly, “Mommy, will there be a worm in my eye?” From parents at my daughter’s school, on a parenting listserv, and on Facebook, I heard the same story repeated: “My 9-year-old son told me those billboards completely scare him!” and “My son asked: ‘What is wrong with that person’s eye? Why would anyone do that?’”

The ad created enough uproar to be covered in Entertainment Weekly, AdWeek, and Deadline Hollywood. At the Directors Guild of America premiere of The Strain on July 10, FX CEO John Landgraf addressed the controversy: “We had to terrify some children in order to launch this show, but I think it was worth it. Just saying.”

Guillermo del Toro, co-creator of the series and the book that inspired it, similarly made light of the furor. “Look, honestly, I find every other form of advertising more morally disturbing. Beer commercials, aftershave. This is just a [expletive] worm in the eye!”

After my initial outrage over Landgraf and del Toro’s words, I decided to take them as a serious inquiry: Does the financial success of a TV show justify frightening some children? Is a [expletive] worm in the eye that bad? How do we balance free speech and protecting young kids? And does the public have any rights over the advertising images that fill outdoor space?

The storm over the ads certainly didn’t hurt the profile of The Strain. Jennie Timar, a mom who worked in media advertising, wrote on a parenting listserv: “Bad/negative press is almost as good as positive press for a show, so this will actually probably make people want to watch The Strain.” The show aired on Sunday, July 13, with nearly 3 million viewers, significantly higher than FX’s other recent debuts.

Defenders of the campaign told parents to explain the ads to their children, or tell them to look away. But it is difficult to impossible to un-frighten a young child through explanation. Children under 8 are still working out the boundaries between fantasy and reality.

Many children don’t yet have the verbal and cognitive tools to process their fears through talking. One mom wrote to me through Facebook about her son’s reaction: “Today, as we drove past one, I was watching him in the rearview mirror, and he was clearly disturbed by it. I asked, and he put his head in his lap. Refused to even talk about it. Tonight, finally, he did say: ‘Maybe they should take it down.’”

My daughter, who is less sophisticated than del Toro, is not yet scared by ads for aftershave or beer. By the time my kids are old enough to possibly find them “morally disturbing,” they will be old enough for a rational discussion about them.

The dilemma parents face with outdoor advertising is that we cannot choose whether our children see a billboard or signs plastered on public transportation and transit shelters. I know what my own children can tolerate. I can limit what kind of television and movies my children watch. I can control which magazines they read and websites they visit. But when a bus stops next to us with a disturbing image at my kids’ eye level, I’ve already lost my power to exercise parental discretion.

Movies for general audiences must meet certain standards set by the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA’s self-regulation sparks controversy on its own, but nevertheless, films rated G are strictly limited for sex, violence, and language. Additionally, movies are targeted for specific demographics, including children. Parents can boycott films they feel contain inappropriate content and are rated improperly.

It’s uncertain whether the organization that controls billboards—the Outdoor Advertising Association of America—would or could implement a similar system. Parents and children are not consumers, in a traditional sense, of outdoor advertising. We view billboards, but we don’t purchase them. If we avoid them, it doesn’t affect the company’s bottom line.

In theory, billboards that may be offensive to certain constituencies—parents and religious communities, for example—can be kept from their sights if the ads are placed away from schools and places of worship. But people are not static.

So how do parents protest ads with objectionable content?

On June 27, a group of parents succeeded in removing a billboard ad for The Strain near LAX within 24 hours by calling Clear Channel and the City Council. The next day, FX responded to angry calls and tweets and negative press by announcing that ads would be replaced “in several locations.” But the billboard 14461A on my route, and others parents reported to me, stayed up for three more weeks.

During this period, I made multiple calls to the city council and CBS Outdoor, which owns billboard 14461A, as did other parents. Craig Rosato, general sales manager for CBS Outdoor, told me that the company is contractually bound to display copy for a client for a fixed period and cannot immediately pull an ad. The contract does not directly link CBS Outdoor with FX—the promotional buys are handled by intermediary agencies. Going through this chain to get approval to pull an ad takes time, Rosato explained. (Somehow Clear Channel managed a swift response with the billboard ad near LAX.)

State and local governments currently have limited authority when it comes to offensive ads. Fred Sutton, a field deputy for Councilmember Mike Bonin’s office, wrote to a parent with support, but cautioned about First Amendment issues: “We are only allowed to regulate signage within narrow parameters, and the city’s ability to require that the content of a billboard be changed or removed is strictly limited by law.”

Yet commercial speech is less protected than political speech, and the few regulations in place are clearly intended to protect children. Tobacco products have been banned from outdoor advertising nationally since 1999, and the city of Los Angeles code forbids “obscene” content. (“Obscenity” is defined legally as appealing to “prurient interest” or depicting “sexual conduct.”) The California Outdoor Advertising Act and Regulations ban “any picture or illustration of any human figure in such detail as to offend public morals or decency, or any other matter or thing of an obscene, indecent or immoral character.” Many parents—and non-parents—would agree that The Strain ads offend public decency.

Existing laws should be expanded to limit gory and/or violent content, images that are at least as distressing to young minds as sexual ones. One Los Angeles mom has initiated a MoveOn petition calling on the California state legislature to “create more stringent regulation on billboards and other public advertisement.”

The ad at billboard number 14461A finally came down on July 21, a full week after the premiere. My daughter cheered when I gave her the news. But, it’s only a matter of time before another horror movie or TV series needs promotion. I don’t expect media and advertising companies to stop creating edgy, disturbing images. Nor should they. I can handle seeing an image that scares me in a newspaper, a magazine, or on TV during an adult program. I’m a grown-up.

But companies can and should promote their products without terrifying children. I don’t want my 6-year-old daughter to face another nightmare scrawled against the sky.

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The government didn’t have time to waste while its citizens made up their minds about joining the fight. How could ordinary Americans be convinced to participate in the war “Over There,” as one of the most popular songs of the era described it?

Posters—which were so well designed and illustrated that people collected and displayed them in fine art galleries—possessed both visual appeal and ease of reproduction. They could be pasted on the sides of buildings, put in the windows of homes, tacked up in workplaces, and resized to appear above cable car windows and in magazines. And they could easily be reprinted in a variety of languages.

To merge this popular form of advertising with key messages about the war, the U.S. government’s public information committee formed a Division of Pictorial Publicity in 1917. The chairman, George Creel, asked Charles Dana Gibson, one of most famous American illustrators of the period, to be his partner in the effort. Gibson, who was president of the Society of Illustrators, reached out to the country’s best illustrators and encouraged them to volunteer their creativity to the war effort.

These illustrators produced some indelible images, including one of the most iconic American images ever made: James Montgomery Flagg’s stern image of Uncle Sam pointing to the viewer above the words, “I Want You for U.S. Army.” (Flagg’s inspiration came from an image of the British Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, designed by Alfred Leete.) The illustrators used advertising strategies and graphic design to engage the casual passerby and elicit emotional responses. How could you avoid the pointing finger of Uncle Sam or Lady Liberty? How could you stand by and do nothing when you saw starving children and a (fictional) attack on New York City?

“Posters sold the war,” said David H. Mihaly, the curator of graphic arts and social history at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, where 55 of these posters will go on view August 2. “These posters inspired you to enlist, to pick up the flag and support your country. They made you in some cases fear an enemy or created a fear you didn’t know you had. Nations needed to convince their citizens that this war was just, and we needed to participate and not sit and watch.” There were certainly propaganda posters before 1917, but the organization and mass distribution of World War I posters distinguished them from previous printings, Mihaly said.

Despite the passage of 100 years—as well as many wars and disillusionment about them—these posters retain their power to make you stare. Good and evil are clearly delineated. The suffering is hard to ignore. The posters tell you how to help, and the look in the eyes of Uncle Sam makes sure you do.

“Your Country Calls!: Posters of the First World War” will be on view at the Huntington from August 2 to November 3, 2014.

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How did we get here? Mad Men has the answer, of course.

During an episode from the first season of the show, fictional advertising executive Don Draper expresses revulsion for a self-deprecating Volkswagen print ad. It was part of a real, groundbreaking whimsical campaign from the 1960s that included several legendary ads–the “Lemon” spot Draper despises, “Think Small,” and later the “Snow Plow” television commercial. The campaign was innovative because of its refreshing honesty, which caught the eye of John F. Kennedy and later grabbed the attention of the Democratic National Committee staffers plotting the media campaign for Lyndon B. Johnson.

But Draper didn’t know that yet. “I don’t know what I hate about it the most–the ad or the car,” Draper barks to a group of colleagues. What incites his ire? The copy, underneath a large picture of a seemingly spotless car, begins, “This Volkswagen missed the boat. The chrome strip on the glove compartment is blemished and must be replaced. Chances are you wouldn’t have noticed it; Inspector Kurt Kroner did.” The ad seeks to highlight Volkswagen’s superior inspection process, and to assure consumers, “We pluck the lemons; you get the plums.”

After his team argues about the ad’s effectiveness, Draper grimly acknowledges, “Love it or hate it, the fact remains, we’ve been talking about this for the last 15 minutes.”

Draper is right–the ad worked. But it’s somewhat paradoxical that this poignant, funny campaign eventually spawned a new advertising category: the political attack commercial.

Advertising agency Doyle Dane Berbach went from scrappy to formidable on the basis of the Volkswagen campaign, which auto journalist David Kiley described as being more “prose more than copywriting,” and “different from anything else the U.S. magazine reader had seen. It was the first time anyone took a realistic approach to advertising. It was the first time the advertiser ever talked to the consumer as though he was a grownup instead of a baby.” The commercial for the VW bug (“Have you ever wondered how the man who drives the snowplow drives to the snowplow?”) is often cited as one of the greatest commercials of all time.

Kennedy was so impressed by the ads that he asked his brother-in-law, Stephen Smith, to find out if DDB would work on his 1964 campaign.

After Kennedy’s assassination, Lloyd Wright of the Democratic National Committee was tasked with finding an advertising agency for Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign. According to Robert Mann’s Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds, Wright, an advertising aficionado and admirer of DDB’s work, urged the DNC to choose the New York firm over Chicago-based Grant Advertising. But DNC Treasurer Richard “Dick” Maguire and Chairman John Bailey rejected the idea because DDB was too expensive.

Wright wouldn’t take no for an answer. In a March 11, 1964 memo to Johnson’s aide and White House staff members, who had the ultimate say in deciding which firm to hire, he wrote: “I have counseled with the most respected men in the industry about this matter and without exception, they say DDB is by far the best … DDB is today recognized as one of the top agencies in the business.” The DNC hired DDB for the campaign on March 19.

For six months, a team of 40 DDB art directors, TV producers, and copywriters set to work on what would become the most famous political ad of all time–and the granddaddy of all negative political ads.

The Daisy ad, which aired only once (during the September 7 NBC broadcast of Monday Night at the Movies) features a little girl innocently counting petals as she plucks them off of a flower. Her sweet voice fades into a male announcer’s countdown to a bomb detonation. After the nuclear explosion, he tells Americans why they should vote for President Johnson. “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die. Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high to stay home. ”

Not subtle, but the DDB team was capitalizing on Republican challenger Barry Goldwater’s threats to use nuclear weapons against Communists in Vietnam and Laos.

“What we tried to do was look at what Goldwater had [truthfully] said, and present it in an unusual and bold way,” Sid Myers, one of the original art directors on the DDB team, explained to me earlier this year. “It was sort of a crusade–we were really fighting this guy.”

Myers said the team never intended to create an “attack” ad, let alone an entire genre that has come to dominate electoral discourse. “This was the way we used to do work for national clients–we did unusual, impactful kind of work,” he said. “There wasn’t a special sit-down where we said, ‘We’re going to just do attack ads, or dirty ads.’”

But Daisy produced a political world in which most interactions between political campaigns and their marketing teams would focus intently on how to take out the opposition. Mad men can be very persuasive when convincing people that someone on the ballot is, well, a mad man.

Elizabeth Weingarten is editorial assistant at the New America Foundation.

*Photo courtesy of alanmx.

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Deutsch LA Chief Digital Officer Winston Binch orders a Crazy Horse, and after he tells me “it may be the best tequila drink I’ve had, ever,” I order one too. (The off-menu combination of Serrano-infused tequila, grapefruit juice, and grenadine is indeed delicious.) When Binch says he was introduced to the drink by Deutsch CEO Mike Sheldon, I can’t help but think of Don Draper and Roger Sterling downing martinis at a dark bar in Midtown. (Even if he is wearing a t-shirt and not the dapper tailored suit I’d hoped for.)

“Don Draper’s got nothing on us,” Binch says of the challenges the adman (or adwoman) faces today. It’s the end of the evening, and by then three Crazy Horses have unleashed a little bravado.

Where Don and Roger are working at what Binch calls “the art of persuasion”-to convince viewers to make a purchase for what are often emotional, irrational reasons-today’s game is more complicated. Sure, you can still tug at heartstrings, as Binch’s firm did to such acclaim with its 2011 Super Bowl Darth Vader spot for Volkswagen. But today’s consumer is more jaded, more empowered with information, and more able to talk back. “People can go online after they see it and say that commercial is bullshit, that means nothing to me,” says Binch.

In our incessant, cluttered multimedia ecosystem, building and nurturing a brand is no longer a matter of putting up a clever TV ad and calling it a day. Today’s Don Drapers have to fret about whether their campaigns are going viral and whether the audience is engaging them on social media. In a sense, you now have to market marketing campaigns. This year, Volkswagen and Deutsch LA released a teaser for their new Super Bowl spot in advance. Yes, an ad for an ad. Maybe Binch’s job is harder than Don Draper’s.

Binch moved to Los Angeles last spring to lead the digital team at Deutsch LA after six years at Boulder-based Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the 13-time “Agency of the Year” that rose meteorically to the top of the industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As Binch tells it, he landed in the advertising world thanks to a happy accident of timing and talent. His genesis story seems to be that of the accidental advertiser, although his obvious enthusiasm for the gig belies any ambivalence he might express.

After graduating from college, Binch worked in film and television briefly, then played guitar in indie rock bands in New York at night while temping during the day. But just as Napster was coming onto the scene, he put aside his dreams of making music for a living and got a job at Sony Classical, where he helped drive the division’s digital marketing. This was just as the Internet was taking off-which meant “you got to write, you got to design, you got to code. We were making up the rules of the Web in real time.” He was hooked.

But the Internet that had created his job could also destroy it, and as Napster decimated the traditional music business, Binch witnessed “rounds and rounds of layoffs” at Sony before he too was left without a job. “It was kind of an exercise in watching an industry die,” he says. “And I got to see it firsthand.”

By 2003, the tech bubble had long since burst, but Binch had his heart set on a digital gig. He got a job producing sites for R/GA, a special effects production company that had pivoted toward digital marketing. It was, he felt, the best place for someone young and creative to work in New York at the time. A former college ice hockey player, Binch jumped at the chance to work on the Nike account, helping launch Nike ID (where you could custom-design sneakers online and in stores) as well as Nike Gridiron (football) and Nike Basketball. As we’re talking about his work with Nike, he stops to show me the Nike FuelBand he’s wearing-a wristband he picked up at South by Southwest that tracks your movement and calories and syncs with an iPhone or iPod.

“I just was never drawn to advertising. It didn’t appeal to me,” says Binch. “I wanted to be part of a revolution, and digital felt more like that-and it was, you could sense it.” But by 2005, advertising had become a part of that revolution. The innovative, multiplatform campaign to bring the Mini Cooper to America (stunts included welding the small cars to the roofs of SUVs), and a Burger King viral video called the Subservient Chicken, put Crispin on Binch’s radar. “They were using the media in a way that we, as web geeks, hadn’t done before,” he explains.

In December 2005, Binch moved his family to Miami to work at Crispin, only to find out on his first day-fresh off a 26-hour drive-that the firm was relocating to Boulder. He hit the road again seven months later and headed to Colorado.

At Crispin, “a family of creatively driven misfits,” Binch participated in a post-bubble digital renaissance. By the time he left the agency in spring 2011-after working with accounts like American Express and Domino’s, which he helped make the fourth-largest e-commerce site on the Web-the firm’s digital team had grown from four to 400 people in six years.

Last year, after flirting with the idea of going to work at a start-up, Binch made the jump to Deutsch LA. The agency, housed in a dot-comish sort of warehouse near LAX, is a tech firm at its core, and Binch feels he is engaged in creating a clients’ product as much as he is in marketing it. “Websites are an extension of a client’s product,” he says, pointing to Volkswagen’s VW.com and smartphone manufacturer HTC.com. “I see our job as solving business problems with creativity. Sometimes the answer is a television spot, an event-sometimes it’s a mobile app or a social application. Sometimes they’ll have to work together.”

The competition isn’t just from direct peers but from all the online clutter. “People love cat videos,” Binch says. “They watch crazy shit online, and it’s very hard for us as marketers to compete with that kind of stuff.” The Internet has also created a torrid pace; Binch points to Pinterest, which seemed to come out of nowhere and instantly gained 10 million users.

Keeping up with social media and the next new thing is exhausting enough if you’re a consumer; staying ahead of the trends is downright consuming if it’s your job. “I feel like an old man,” says Binch, who is only 37. He thinks of today’s new hires as being from an entirely different generation-the Facebook generation as opposed to Binch’s website generation-and they “implicitly understand what’s shareable, how [social media] works, and how to ignite culture within it.”

Binch understands people’s fears about targeted ads-most of us don’t understand how they happen. The rules of the game have been invented on the fly, and Binch thinks advertisers need to give people the chance to opt out of ads that follow us around the Web. Deutch hasn’t rushed into this sort of hyper-personalization, and he cops to finding it all a little creepy.

Still, he mainly considers the trends exciting. The realms of TV, print, and radio have morphed into something that encompasses more forms of entertainment and speaks to people on a more personal level. Also, Binch says, for all the online feedback loops and metrics and obsession over search engine optimization, “The Mad Men thing still exists.” To make a product, a brand, emotionally evocative still takes an inspired leap of creativity. That’s why, at the end of the day, Binch revels in what he gets to do: “You’re coming up with ideas, selling stuff, and making stuff.”

Sarah Rothbard is managing & books editor of Zócalo Public Square.

*Photo by Sarah Rothbard.

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