The year was 1997.

“Un-Break My Heart” by Toni Braxton dominated the radio waves. Wallet chains and JNCO jeans were red-carpet staples. And plastic? It was fantastic.

Cool Shoppin’ Barbie wasn’t just made of plastic, she was the first ever doll to come with her very own piece of it. She came with a cash register, bar code scanner, credit card reader, and two credit cards—a life-sized cardboard Mastercard for you, and a doll-sized plastic one for her.

In a year where a record 1.35 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy, and the director of the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America was warning Americans in the red to “consider spending only what they can afford to pay off in a month or two”—or better yet, “make purchases by cash, check, or debit card”—Mattel, the toy company behind Barbie, used her to sell consumers on the fantasy of limitless shopping. Push a button, and the doll could say the magic words: “credit approved.”

“It’s so a child can really pretend,” said a spokesperson for Mattel at the time, in defense of its partnership with Mastercard International. “We thought it would be fun for her to run the card through the scanner.”

Cool Shoppin’ Barbie had a short run, which now makes her, among a certain set, a collector’s item. But today, the doll best serves as a particularly blunt object in the long history of Mattel’s marketing strategy to sell not the doll itself, but the lifestyle she promises.

In the lead-up to the first-ever live-action Barbie movie, Mattel has drilled this message home again and again, partnering with over 100 brands to sell us everything from Barbie burgers to Barbie toothbrushes. Life, Mattel wants to remind us, is better in Barbie pink. But the biggest way Mattel is signaling this message is through the high-profile summer tentpole itself. The first of Mattel’s new film arm, which can be seen as a feature-length commercial for Barbie, is a big gamble for the toy company. But it’s one that it has made before. From the very beginning, Mattel has made its name, and Barbie an icon, by selling her lifestyle to us directly on the screen.

As the story goes, after World War II, husband-and-wife team Ruth and Elliot Handler and their friend Harold “Matt” Matson began building doll furniture, and then toys, from scraps of leftover wood from their picture frame business. Early on, the company, a fusion of Matt and Elliot’s names, gained a reputation for selling musical toys, like the Uke-A-Doodle, a plastic ukulele. But Mattel really took off in 1955, when it had the opportunity to buy advertising on a new national children’s program, Walt Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club. No one had used a major campaign to speak right to kids before. There had been national ad pushes, with the Erector Set becoming the first to get a major newspaper treatment in 1913. But unlike today, where companies spend nearly $17 billion a year marketing to kids and young adults, postwar marketers were only just beginning to treat children themselves as consumers. Becoming a commercial sponsor for a year would cost Mattel $500,000 upfront, but it meant directly reaching kids all across the country. It was a pricy gamble, but one that paid off big. That October, children tuning into ABC to watch “M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U-S-E” were hit with advertisements for Mattel’s new Thunder Burp toy machine gun. The frenzy that followed created an epoch shift.

As Sydney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus put it in Toyland, their history of American toy companies, “Mattel’s decision to advertise toys to children on national television 52 weeks a year so revolutionized the industry that it is not an exaggeration to divide the history of the American toy business into two eras, before and after television.”

Were it not for The Micky Mouse Club, Barbie herself may never have become a phenomenon. Buyers had expressed little interest when Mattel brought its prototype to the 1959 American International Toy Fair. But the response was completely different when Mickey Mouse Club viewers got their first look at the 11-inch doll. As ad footage of Barbie and her accessories paraded across the screen, a woman’s voiceover said, “Barbie, beautiful Barbie, I’ll make believe that I am you.”

From the start, Barbie, in particular, was selling children not on a doll, but on an idea: You, yes you, could be Barbie. Kids demanded a Barbie of their very own to play out their fantasies, and Mattel sold more than 300,000 dolls that first year.

Mattel continued to find new ways to use television to reach its target demographic. In 1969, Bernard Loomis, a toy developer and marketer at the company, had the idea of looking beyond regular advertising and turning Mattel’s newest toy, Hot Wheels, into a Saturday morning cartoon. The strategy was an early attempt to channel what Loomis later famously referred to as “toyetics”—a media property’s power to create and sell toys.

Loomis understood that companies would one day sell toys through branded, popular entertainment, but he was ahead of the times. After the Federal Communications Commission received a complaint from a rival toy company against the Hot Wheels animated show, it concluded that it was a “program-length commercial,” under the rationale that the programming was woven “so closely with the commercial message that the entire program must be considered commercial.” The FCC required ABC to log parts of the show, including the theme song and audio and video references to the words “Hot Wheels,” as commercial advertising, and the program was soon canceled.

It took until the 1980s for toyetics to be fully unleashed when FCC deregulation opened the doors for what one member of Congress termed the “video equivalent of a ‘Toys-R-Us’ catalog” to hit TV screens. The term toyetics was, at this point, already in circulation. Loomis is said to have coined it while discussing merchandising rights for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He’d decided to pass because he said the film wasn’t “toyetic” enough. What was toyetic enough? George Lucas’ new space opera.

Extending the Star Wars experience out of the movie theater and into the toy store opened the door for intellectual property to march its way into Hollywood. And now, with the launch of Mattel Films, Mattel is hoping to use Barbie to try and write the next chapter of this history.

From the dizzying heights of ’90s Barbie mania (Cool Shoppin’ Barbie, incidentally, came out during the year Barbie sales were at their zenith), Barbie’s cultural capital sagged in the 21st century. Like with The Mickey Mouse Club gamble, Mattel is hoping the new Barbie film will directly reach, and sell, a new generation on her story. But this time around, the company is hoping not just kids, but also adults buy into the idea of Barbie. In the long list of promotional collaborations, Mattel has been going after older age groups, partnering with brands such as the dating app Bumble to expand its customer base. The movie, too, is being marketed for all ages. “Everybody can have their own experience, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s kind of for everyone,” Ryan Gosling, who plays Ken, told Reuters, during the L.A. world premiere.

Early reports seem to suggest that Mattel’s bet will once again pay off. According to box office estimates, Barbie is on pace to take in at least $130 million over the weekend. Even in a moment when Americans are spending less, it seems Barbie is still able to sell us on the plastic life.

The post Come on <i>Barbie</i>, Let’s Sell Barbies appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So it was in the late 19th century with the rising star of republics—the United States—and with the man who, more than any other, came to epitomize our nation’s drive, character, promotional flair, and obsession with celebrity: William F. Cody.

In the second half of the century, Cody, also known as “Buffalo Bill,” achieved a measure of renown in the United States as a Pony Express rider, plainsman, buffalo hunter, and military scout. Brave, rugged, handsome, and decidedly Western, he was the subject of hundreds of popular dime novels and became a stage actor portraying himself in a series of shoot-’em-up dramas that were wretched productions but nevertheless titillated theater-goers. Starting in 1883, his action-packed outdoor arena show, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” attracted large audiences in places like Lancaster, Woonsocket, and Zanesville.

Still, it wasn’t until Cody took his act to Europe, in 1887, that Americans truly began to revere him as an exemplar of national character. The Wild West was a huge hit in Britain. One million people saw the show, including statesmen (members of Parliament, and once-and-future Prime Minister William Gladstone) and famous actors (the estimable London actor-manager Henry Irving told one newspaper that the Wild West would “take the town by storm”). Queen Victoria emerged from seclusion to visit the show two days after it opened and enjoyed it a second time 40 days later during a command performance at Windsor Castle. The audience that day included many other kings, queens, and members of European royalty who had come to town to celebrate her Golden Jubilee.

W.F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody in 1875. Courtesy of the George Eastman House Collection/Wikimedia Commons.

Their adulation was picked up by the British newspapers, and that press coverage was then amplified by many American periodicals, which eagerly chronicled Cody’s every move through London society. The New York World observed that Cody was already as well-known to the masses in London as the queen. “You could not pick up in the most obscure quarter of London any one so ignorant as not to know who and what he is. His name is on every wall. His picture is in nearly every window.” The magazine Puck joked that Cody was mostly spending his time playing poker with duchesses. Other publications speculated that Cody might be knighted.

None of this happened by chance. Cody’s trip and its newspaper coverage had been engineered in large part by a burly, brilliant, sombrero-wearing press agent named John M. Burke, a man with a genius for promotion and a keen sense of what it meant to be American.

Upon first meeting Cody in 1869, Burke had recognized the scout’s quintessentially rugged Western character and universal appeal. “Physically superb, trained to the limit, in the zenith of manhood, features cast in nature’s most perfect mold…,” Burke wrote later, Cody was “…the finest specimen of God’s handiwork I had ever seen.” Burke himself was somewhat rootless—born to Irish immigrants who died when he was an infant; raised in a succession of towns and homes; trained as an itinerant theater manager, newspaperman, and scout. Perhaps for this reason, he intuited his countrymen’s emerging, visceral desire for belonging, and the prospect that Cody was an identity the American people could latch onto.

This was a remarkable insight from a man who seemingly had a crystal ball (as early as the 1890s, Burke predicted that women would get the vote, world war would break out in Alsace-Lorraine, and a member of a minority group would become president of the United States). For in the years following the Civil War, American identity was still on the blacksmith’s forge. The Republic had been formed during the lifetimes of people still alive to tell the tale, and it had been re-formed by the War Between the States. But there hadn’t been many prominent Americans in world or cultural affairs since the days of Jefferson and Franklin. Perhaps the most clearly identifiable American trait was neither intellectual nor artistic, but simply the enterprising, brash spirit of “Yankee push” best exemplified by P.T. Barnum, who was somehow both laudable and horrifying.

John Burke, the marketing force behind Buffalo Bill. Wikimedia Commons.

And so, unsure of its place, unsteady in its path, America looked across the ocean for validation. Writers, artists, statesmen, and entertainers from the United States sailed to Britain and the Continent to measure their growth and worth. The painter George Catlin, who had earned praise for his portraits of New York Governor DeWitt Clinton and General Sam Houston, and fame for his sketches of 48 tribes of American Indians with whom he had lived, still found it necessary to seek true legitimacy through a tour of London, Paris, and Brussels in the 1830s and ’40s. Even Barnum, famous and successful as he was, felt compelled to take one of his popular acts—his distant cousin Charles Stratton, also known as General Tom Thumb—on a similar sort of corroboration tour of Europe in 1844-45, appearing before audiences that included queens and tsars.

But Burke managed to do something with Cody and the Wild West that the earlier cultural exports never could. He burnished and redefined the American reputation by reflecting it in the shiny crowns of the Old World’s beloved monarchs, juxtaposing ancient and modern and thus validating the appeal of a new kind of American: the Westerner. He accomplished this by applying groundbreaking marketing tactics to promote a sort of on-the-sleeve patriotism throughout the Wild West’s tour of Britain in 1887-88, and during a subsequent tour of the Continent in 1889-92.

For example, he created an illustration of all the “Distinguished Visitors” to the show, with a dour-looking H.R.H. Queen Victoria and other royals surrounding a splendid portrait of Cody in the center. He invited reporters to see how efficiently Cody’s massive show unloaded its train cars, as a way of promoting American ingenuity. He devised a system of horse-drawn mobile billboards that awed one newspaper in Dresden, Germany seemingly as much as the show itself: “Already weeks in advance, the audience is prepared for the show through billboards etc. The American, in this matter as in many others, is very practically minded.” And everywhere the show traveled, Burke’s team plastered towns with iconic images to herald the arrival of the Wild West, employing “immense painted posters all over the city to advertise Buffalo Bill—his portraits pasted all in a row, many times larger than natural; the cowboys on their wild horses; the Indians looking very savage,” as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported. (In France in 1889, this campaign made a deep impression on even the most stuck-up Parisians. “Eh bien!,” wrote Le Temps. “All that ingenious and bold American advertising enterprise has proved to be as honest as our tame [publicity] ever was.” Crowds flocked to the Wild West show in Paris and clamored for cowboy gear in the shops all around town.)

And so Burke transformed the flesh-and-blood Cody into the almost mythic Buffalo Bill, a man whose spur-jingling acts of derring-do embodied America’s heroic past—and whose entrepreneurial wrangling of the world’s most successful entertainment property foretold of America’s promising future. Burke consciously crafted a new Western American self-image, in a rifle-toting, money-making, entrepreneurial husband-father and cultural conqueror who looked dashing in buckskins and dapper in business suits. For millions of Americans, Cody represented a new and uniquely American persona to which they could relate.

An 1898 advertisement for the Wild West show. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

It all paid off handsomely. The Wild West returned to American shores triumphant, greeted dockside by thousands of grateful well-wishers. The show thrived, and in 1893 enjoyed its most successful season ever, a six-month stand outside the gates of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that played to full houses twice a day and raked in $1 million in profits. Soon, Burke would even float Cody’s name as a presidential candidate.

In the ensuing years, John M. Burke and William F. Cody continued building the Wild West brand, though mostly on American soil. What had begun with an averted vision across the Atlantic was now an American star of a completely different magnitude. Before it was all done in 1916, they had performed in front of 50 million people, and had carved out a place for Cody in that strange eternal pantheon of larger-than-life legends, where real people and fictional ones (George Washington, Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, John Henry, Babe Ruth) dwell side-by-side in a murky world of perpetual stories, myths, and singsong nursery rhymes. When Cody died in 1917, the country mourned in a way it hadn’t since Lincoln’s assassination. Around 25,000 people ascended the tortuous path up Lookout Mountain in Colorado to attend his funeral.

But perhaps the most important legacy of Burke and Cody was the double-barreled contribution they made to the new sense of American identity: a crystallized articulation of the Western ideal that would find expression in everything from the Hollywood Western to the Marlboro Man to Ronald Reagan; and their incredibly shrewd use of promotion to build celebrity and leverage it for commercial success. In that respect, Burke and Cody may be more a part of American life today than they ever were in their own times.

The post The Savvy Press Agent Who Invented Buffalo Bill appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The bordello scenes in the video recall famous photographs from Storyville, New Orleans’s notorious red-light district, which flourished from 1898 to 1917. And while the song is clearly about Beyoncé, the persona she embodies in it resonates with an earlier iconic black female: Lulu White, the self-styled “Diamond Queen” of New Orleans’s turn-of-the-century demimonde. Knowing Lulu White’s story helps us see Beyoncé’s artistic creation within a complex historical framework, for in it are woven together threads of American history: stories of sexual slavery and prostitution; revolution and exile; and, not least, capitalism and the American Dream.

Lulu White was the most notorious madam in Storyville. She earned fame and fortune as the “handsomest octoroon” in the South, and her bordello, Mahogany Hall, featured “octoroon” prostitutes for the pleasure of wealthy white men during one of America’s most virulently—and violently—racist periods. It was also the dawn of consumer culture and the beginning of modern advertising. Thus, Lulu White crafted a persona for herself through stories that had long circulated in New Orleans; she repackaged those stories to create what today we would recognize as her brand.

The first story in White’s compendium was that of the “tragic octoroon.” The word “octoroon” describes a person who is seven parts white, and one part black. By the 1890s, the female octoroon was already a stock character in literature, having entered public discourse as part of antislavery efforts to highlight the moral and sexual depravity of the South. The label “octoroon” actually told a story about the women it described: in it their fathers were always white, and the “black” (enslaved) mothers always got successively lighter, finally producing a white-looking “octoroon.” Even in spite of paternal wishes, their daughters remained in slavery, where their light skin added to their value in the sexual slave market. The octoroon often takes her own life rather than submit—hence the “tragedy.”

The most famous abolitionist novel featured the “tragic octoroon” trope. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe described Eliza as the picture of feminine perfection, with her “rich, full dark eye,” “long lashes,” and “ripples of long silky black hair.” The reader encounters Eliza through the eyes of a visiting slave trader. “The brown of her complexion gave way on the cheek to a perceptible flush, which deepened as she saw the gaze of the strange man fixed upon her in bold and undisguised admiration.” The trader offers to sell Eliza in the New Orleans slave market. In spite of the “brown of her complexion,” she was fair enough to pass. “You would scarcely know the woman from a white one,” remarks one of the characters.

Even as stories of tragic octoroons protested slavery, they reinscribed “race.” Neither “octoroon” nor other terms, like “mulatta” or “quadroon,” were meant to be precise; the point was “one drop” of “black blood” producing something hidden deep under white skin. This played into a prevailing 19th-century stereotype of upper-class white ladies as sexually pure, pious, and submissive; black women, free or enslaved, were imagined as the opposite—sexually passionate and depraved. The very word octoroon evokes white male racial and sexual domination over several generations, with a prurient twist. The octoroon’s dormant black blood held the promise of intense, and forbidden, sex. She may have looked “white,” but, to quote Beyoncé, she had “hot sauce in her bag.” By incorporating the story of the octoroon into her brand, Lulu White reoriented her tragic fate into a modern sexual fantasy, and promised its fulfillment at Mahogany Hall, also known as the “Octoroon Club.”

The second story White wove into her brand was that of the Caribbean diaspora in New Orleans, which she used to confound her own racial status. White was born in Alabama, but she often claimed to be from the West Indies. After a racetrack refused her entry, a newspaper reported White’s complaint that “some people take her to be colored, but she says there is not a drop of Negro blood in her veins. She says that she is a West Indian, and she was born in the West Indies.” White thus asserted control over her narrative by playing on the illegibility of race in New Orleans.

What did “West Indian” mean there? Several things. New Orleans had a large Caribbean-descended population, stemming from the migrations during the French Revolution, through what became the Haitian Revolution in 1804, and then exile from Cuba several years later. All tiers of Caribbean society entered New Orleans—free whites, enslaved blacks, and free people of color—adding to a diverse population that already had a substantial percentage of free people of color. New Orleans, unlike the South as a whole, was a three-caste society, where one’s “race” did not always accord with “free” or “enslaved” status or, later, heritage. There are instances on record of Creole women suing for libel after being labeled “colored.” White’s assertion of West Indian provenance left her “race” ambiguous.

It also increased her value, because when it came to women, “West Indian” signified sublime, ineffable beauty, seemingly created by the mixture of races and the environment. The New Orleans writer Lafcadio Hearn described the type as “certainly” among “the most beautiful women of the human race,” having “inherited not only the finer bodily characteristics of either parent race, but a something else belonging originally to neither, and created by special climatic and physical conditions.” Antebellum travelers to New Orleans rhapsodized at great length about the beauty of New Orleans “quadroons.” Some of these women participated in a kind of institutionalized concubinage, whereby they entered contracts with white men. The terms of the contract, Frederick Law Olmsted remarked, varied “with the value of the lady in the market.” The female creoles of color were thus imagined as quasi-free “tragic octoroons.” Instead of being fated to sexual slavery, these women were thought to “pass their life in a prostitution,” in the words of another visitor to the antebellum city.

Lulu White’s claim to be at once West Indian, not “Negro,” and “octoroon,” blurred the matter deliberately. In a sense, she claimed both the heritage of white male creoles and of their female creole of color mistresses. This blurring was integral to White’s brand, a selling point for her business. Perhaps Beyoncé is drawing on some of this history, too: “My Daddy Alabama; Momma Louisiana; you mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas Bama.” Lulu White turned the history of Caribbean “creoles” in New Orleans to her own use at Mahogany Hall, where light-skinned black women were literally prostitutes. White was the proprietress there; she determined the value of the lady in the market.

This brings us to the third story White’s brand comprised: the self-made man. The story of the self-made man is among the oldest in American culture, beginning at least as early as Thomas Jefferson’s fabled yeoman farmer, and, of course, Alexander Hamilton. The turn-of-the-century version still reassured Americans that by hard work, honesty, and a bit of luck, anyone could rise from humble circumstances to achieve greatness—or at least a comfortable living. Northern businessmen had long come to New Orleans to make their fortunes. The New South desire to develop the region along the lines of Northern industry created new opportunities for strivers. Lulu White’s self-promotional brand encompassed the men she sought for customers. She could make their (American) dreams come true at Mahogany Hall—as she had her own.

Postcard depicting Basin Street, once a hub of high-end prostitution. Courtesy of the New Orleans Public Library/Wikimedia Commons.

White’s narrative of self-made success presented a distorted, winking reflection. She was a woman of color; her business was selling sex. Yet, it scarcely mattered that “legitimate” New Orleans did not believe White’s self-creation myth. Her customers were unlikely to have believed it themselves. A promotional pamphlet touting the success of “this famous West Indian octoroon,” described Mahogany Hall as having cost $40,000 to erect, and called it “unquestionably the most elaborately furnished house in the city of New Orleans, and without a doubt one of the most elegant palaces in this or any other country.”

White operated in a netherworld of transgressive pleasure that flouted the morality of respectable society. Lulu White, the brand, was not diminished by newspaper reports deriding her and calling her “negress”; the notoriety amplified her appeal. And men seeking sex with lovely “octoroons” knew just where to go. As the historian Roland Marchand explains about the dawn of the consumer age, “popular convention permitted advertisers to exaggerate, as if all their statements were placed within qualifying ‘quotation marks.’” Lulu White’s keen marketing sensibility predicted the transformations in American mass culture ahead of their time.

Long before Beyoncé sang, “I dream it, I work hard, I grind ’til I own it,” Lulu White built a similar narrative of self-made ascendancy, and even a brand that allowed her to profit from the interweaving of historical narratives. And Beyoncé continues to play with these ideas, so that while her success is premised in part on her sexuality, no one imagines that she’s literally a prostitute, or that she’s really treating her lover to dinner at Red Lobster. Rather, Beyoncé embodies a fantasy, crafted from multiple stories, tinged with the hard realities of racial, sexual, and economic subordination, but, in the end, triumphant.

To be sure, the similarities between White and Beyoncé can be overstated. Lulu White was a real madam who trafficked in young women and girls for the purposes of prostitution; Beyoncé reimagines that role to inhabit all at once the prostitute, the madam, and even the pimp, while embodying a brand that is at once autobiographical and relatable to her millions of fans. If White pioneered this kind of self-packaging, Beyoncé, also known as “Queen,” perfected it.

Lulu White died in obscure poverty in 1931. But her brand has been revived over the years as an emblem of a mythic, romanticized Storyville. The older stories persist, too. At the end of the “Formation” video, Beyoncé lies atop a police car floating in the Mississippi River. She sings as the car sinks into the deep, an homage, perhaps, to the tragic octoroon.

The post The Notorious, Mixed-Race New Orleans Madam Who Turned Her Identity Into a Brand appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With the drama unfolding on their television screens, the attention of millions was focused on a single event—a single step, really—for the first time. It was one of the first grand, extended global social media events of our modern era, much bigger than a Super Bowl Sunday.

But landing on the moon almost didn’t happen—not for the public, anyway. While Armstrong and Aldrin were preparing to make one of the biggest celestial moves of a lifetime, NASA’s small and dedicated marketing team was preparing to make another major move on the ground: televising the event.

Looking back on the moon landing, it would seem almost unfathomable that NASA administrators would have missed the mark to use live television to capture that historic moment, but they nearly did. Unlike recorded video, which had to be returned, developed, and shared after the fact, live television would allow viewers to watch in real-time. Many NASA engineers argued that live footage was a waste of valuable weight and crew focus and would require too much time and money to develop the technologies to broadcast live news feeds from the moon. Most of the original Mercury 7 astronauts and their bosses insisted, with good reason, that operating and performing for television cameras during their missions would unnecessarily detract from the important work at hand.

Embedded within NASA’s formative charter was a congressional mandate to report—freely and openly—the program’s activities and accomplishments to the world, unlike the secretive, closed military program in the Soviet Union at the time. “I insisted,” said Julian Scheer, the head of NASA Public Affairs during Apollo. He would not accept any dissent, either from the engineers or some of the astronauts. “They could never see the big picture. But they weren’t landing on the moon without that camera on board. I was going to make sure of that. One thing I kept emphasizing was, ‘We’re not the Soviets. Let’s do this thing the American way.’”

To enlightened astronauts like Tom Stafford, television’s value proposition was clear: “The American public was paying for Apollo and deserved as much access as it could get,” Stafford said. “They should see the wonders we saw. Photos and movies were great, but nobody saw them until after the mission was over. What better way to take viewers along to the moon than by using color television?”

“Without television, Apollo would have been just a mark in a history book,” says Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon during Apollo 17, when reflecting on the importance of television on board Apollo. “The thing that meant so much and brought so much prestige to this country is that every launch, every landing on the moon, and every walk on the moon was given freely to the world in real time. We didn’t doctor up the movie, didn’t edit anything out; what we said, was said.”

So NASA’s small public affairs team, spread over 14 installations nationwide, got down to business, working long and hard to ensure that the world was informed and engaged using media outlets and other NASA-affiliated contractors’ public affairs employees.

“We sure didn’t do the PR job by ourselves,” remarked Chuck Biggs, a NASA Public Affairs Officer during Apollo. “We needed representatives from Rockwell, Martin Marietta, and all the other contractors to do the job. By head count, we had more contractors’ public relations people than we had NASA public affairs employees.”

Operationally, NASA public affairs chose pioneering tactics now called content marketing, an approach that doesn’t overtly sell a product or brand. Rather than just promoting their cause, NASA used its resources to educate the media, who became surrogate spokespeople for the program and kept the story in front of a voracious public, both nightly on television and daily in the newspapers.

Embracing the content marketing technique, NASA operated its public affairs as if it were a newsroom—staffed not with Mad Men-era advertisers and public relations agents, but with highly qualified ex-journalists. They were professional storytellers, operating as news reporters embedded inside of the agency. As ex-newsmen, they understood what the broadcast and print media needed in terms of content, so they selected and pushed stories in various languages and formats that could slip easily into the news streams of the day. It wasn’t just that they were good writers, but they were also newsmen who understood the power of storytelling and the importance of access to live, unedited, real-time events.

“The core contingent of NASA Public Affairs people were ex-newsmen,” recalled Jack King, head of public affairs at Kennedy Space Center during Apollo. “We were good writers, and we knew the news business. That made a major difference in the whole operation.”

“We are not doing what is known in the public relations business as flackery or publicity or propaganda,” said Scheer. “We are simply not in this kind of business. We are a news operation. We don’t put out publicity releases. We put out news releases.”

Keeping a global audience engaged over a decade—from 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced his goal of landing a man on the moon, to 1972, when Apollo 17 became the last lunar landing mission—was not easy then and is not easy now. Long-term engagement requires creating a shared, communal experience that resonates with the audience. Due to NASA’s use of television, this experience was not only shared by its own engineers, but by millions of people worldwide.

I call the generation that took part in this shared experience—my generation—the “Children of Apollo.”

Apollo’s place in our collective memories is chiseled there because we experienced it together. NASA didn’t just send three men to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission, they sent more than 600 million of us—men, women, and children from all over the globe—to the moon and back, thanks to live television.

The post NASA’s Other Moonshot Helped Revolutionize Marketing appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

After dinner Spiller exuberantly showed off a sample of “cotton ball,” a weird, semi-translucent rock formation containing borax. Spiller suggested to his hosts that fortunes awaited those lucky enough to find a generous deposit of the stuff. He showed them how to test for the mineral’s presence with a combination of alcohol and sulfuric acid. After Spiller left the next day, Aaron told Rosie he had seen a material very similar to this out on the desiccated lakebed of Death Valley.

That morning the couple set off to collect samples of the opaque dirty white bulbous material that resembled a handful of dirty cotton balls spread across the desert floor. They made a camp and (so the story goes) “when the shadows had closed in around them, Winters put some of the salt into a saucer, poured the acid and alcohol on them, and with trembling hand struck a match.” Watching anxiously, Aaron exclaimed, “She burns green, Rosie! We’re rich, by God.”

Getting rich by finding gold, silver, or oil is a California tale as old as the Gold Rush and as new as the Beverly Hillbillies. But the story of 20 Mule Team Borax is also the story of one of America’s defining brands, a product that came to sit on a shelf in every household, offering an only-in-America promise that by using this particular washing powder, immigrants from around the world could share in the heritage of the Wild Wild West and join the upper middle class.

Winters staked his claim in the middle of Death Valley and quickly sold the land for $20,000 in 1883 to William Tell Coleman, a Kentucky native turned San Francisco borax magnate who built Coleman’s Harmony Borax Works on the property. Forty Chinese workers scraped the mineral from the harsh desert floor for $1.50 per day, except when summer temperatures reached above 120 degrees Fahrenheit—not to give the workers a break, but because the borax could not crystallize properly under such extreme conditions.

Coleman used mules to transport the borax 162 miles due west to a railroad shipping spur in Mojave, California. The teams that later became infamous as “20 Mule Teams” in fact consisted of 18 mules and two draft horses. The animals were hitched to two massive wooden wagons with 7-foot-high rear wheels, carrying over 10 tons of processed borax apiece. Two fully loaded wagons with a full 1,200-gallon steel water tank and additional supplies weighed in at 36.5 tons. Just two men operated the wagons—one driving and operating the brake of the lead wagon, the other minding the rear wagon’s brake. The trip took 10 grueling days across the hot desert and was both monotonous—moving in a straight line was not much of a challenge—and dangerous on cliffside curves where an entire wagon train could fall off, driver and all. Specialized sections of the mule team were trained to angle their bodies while stepping sideways so that the preceding animals could navigate curves.

20 Mule Team Borax Soap Chips

 
Coleman got so much borax out of Death Valley that the market crashed. In 1890, he sold out for half a million dollars to Francis Marion “Borax” Smith. Coleman died broke three years later.

Encouraged by young employee named Stephen Tyng Mather, Smith capitalized on the “lore and mystique” of Death Valley by creating the 20 Mule Team brand in 1894. Never mind that by 1896 borate ore from the region was shipped entirely by rail; the company created personalities like feisty William “Borax Bill” Parkinson, who was hired and trained as a driver for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition and other promotional tour events across the U.S. When Parkinson died suddenly another man became the new “Borax Bill.”

Borax Bill, said an early brochure, spoke to his balky mules in language “that would not sound well in polite society.” If it seems strange that housewives of the time embraced the idea that a man with a dirty mouth would help them get their clothes clean and white, it helps to remember what hard labor laundry was before the advent of washing machines and sophisticated detergents.

Smith’s goal was to “put a box of borax in every home” and he succeeded at doing exactly that. By the 1920s the brand was considered a legendary triumph of American advertising, lauded for creating such demand that prices fell for consumers.

The brand’s popularity coincided with a push toward cleanliness and germ eradication in both the U.S. and Europe. Besides being promoted as a laundry detergent, borax was touted as an essential part of personal health, hygiene, and cosmetics. A 1919 advertising pamphlet titled Borax: The Magic Crystal read, “Perfect health depends on perfect hygienic cleanliness; and perfect sanitary cleanliness is secured by the use of nature’s greatest cleanser and most harmless antiseptic—Borax.” The product materials spoke in a kind of code to hard-working women who wanted to better their lot. Borax pitched itself as “a very popular powder for whitening the faces of ladies who are too much tanned, or have faded in some way.” The pamphlet said the product could remove freckles, be used as a sunscreen—or a deodorant—and soften hands that had done too much manual labor. The message that being clean—and paler—was the ticket to the American Dream was almost explicit in advertising of the time, which was aimed at a big melting pot of recent immigrants. As ad executive Albert Lasker told his staff in the 1920s, “We are making a homogeneous people out of a nation of immigrants.”

In 1930, the company pulled off another trick of turning itself into not just a shared soap but a shared memory of bygone frontier days, producing a radio show called Death Valley Days. These Western morality tales ran weekly for 15 years on the radio and then another 18 years and 600 episodes on television, where it was one of the longest-running Western programs in broadcast history. Ronald Reagan hosted the program from 1964 to 1965, and actors including Angie Dickinson, Clint Eastwood, James Caan, and James Coburn did guest appearances early in their careers.

Death Valley Days was Reagan’s last TV show before he ran for governor of California. In his ads hawking Borax, he is simultaneously a character of the old West, a glamorous actor, and the father of Patty Reagan, who shows how domestic Borax can be. It’s a neat trick, and it foreshadows Reagan’s uncanny ability to evoke a mythic past with a vision of domestic tranquility for political purposes.

But underneath all of the ideals of the frontier, of blockbuster marketing, and of the melting pot, what’s probably given 20 Mule Team Borax its sticking power is that it speaks to the core American value of hard, dirty work—even if it only took 18 mules.

The post How Ronald Reagan Peddled Laundry Detergent appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The National Center for Early Childhood Health and Wellness has recognized how important it is to engage and educate entire families in their own health. Improving health literacy means helping parents become better health decision-makers for their children. I’ve seen this firsthand working with Head Start agencies across the nation as the research director of the UCLA Health Care Institute.

The UCLA Health Care Institute, founded in 2001, has developed a way to use business management principles to improve the health of families. What that means in practice is that we’ve changed the way Head Start staff are trained to do health promotion. Over many years, we’ve learned that it’s not enough to just provide accessible written materials to families. Instead, families change their behavior when they get live interactive training sessions with the familiar staff at their child’s Head Start school. Through such sessions, staffers can show them how much they care and want to support the children and their families.

This work on health is part of a journey that began over 25 years ago, when the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where my teaching and research focuses on data analysis and statistics, started a program to provide leadership and management training to Head Start executives. I find teaching the Head Start directors and managers, who come from all over the country, extremely gratifying. Head Start executives typically have backgrounds in early childhood education, but tend to be less familiar with the particulars of managing an organization efficiently.

In the year 2000, I conducted a survey asking 600 Head Start directors what major barriers the families they served faced relative to health. And I got the same answer from an overwhelming percentage of those surveyed and those barriers were huge. The survey found very low attendance at Head Start health education programs, and Head Start directors told me they didn’t have the right kind of materials and training for families on health. The health materials they gave families often ended up in the trash.

That led us to create the Health Care Institute and expand our mission to include helping Head Start agencies plan effective health education sessions. Head Start started by holding special fun and engaging health events to attract families. We also created new health materials focused on prevention at home. These materials were easier to understand (they were pitched at a third-grade reading level) and could be adapted to the wide variety of communities and cultures they serve.

We’ve refined and expanded that program in recent years. At first, our health education focused on how to prevent and respond to common childhood illnesses and injuries that can be big burdens on families. But we soon saw that many families and children were suffering from poor oral health and added oral health trainings—sometimes the parents didn’t know what to do, sometimes there were very few dentists who could provide them with service. We expanded our offerings to include obesity prevention and mental health, and developed webinars for staff and toolkits to use with parents.

So far, we’ve trained more than 120,000 families across all 50 states, and we want to reach many more. The staff have also personally benefited from the health information. Since 2011, we’ve been supported by a federal grant from the Office of Head Start, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

One of the challenges of working with a program like Head Start is that so many different people and communities are involved. Head Start serves a million children annually which means hundreds of thousands of families, in thousands of communities. Expanding the reach for health education meant a new way of thinking about organizing and communicating through the organization and assessing the impact.

We learned we had to train teams of Head Start staff first, bringing the personnel from different states into one place, while integrating health training with management training. This was not merely training, we wanted to create a culture of health and an agency shaped by caring. To do that, we had staffers participate as parents in mock parent-training sessions. Stepping into the parents’ shoes helped staff understand how to make the program more engaging for parents. Once engaged, they were able to learn and interact with other parents, further enhancing the learning and reinforcement. We’ve found that when parents get the right information in the right way, they really use it.

What’s the right way? Well, business school professors and data analysts don’t often talk about “love,” but I do. It means offering information in a way that shows real respect for people. When people feel respected and cared for, they are open to learning. L.O.V.E. is a trademarked acronym for the core belief of the training: listening, observing, valuing, and encouraging.

The success of the local training requires marketing. That may not be a word people like, but marketing, particularly internal marketing, is vital inside institutions, to get buy-in from all staff in the management training and health education, to assure good attendance by families, and thus to maximize impact.

We collect data. We’ve found that when families can better manage acute illnesses in their children they feel empowered. Among the data we’ve seen is that parents use the health system more appropriately after training—decreasing emergency room visits by 58 percent, for example. We’ve also seen an increase in the use of health resource materials at home, and a 29-percent decrease in the amount of school missed by children whose families receive the health education. Parents also showed a 42-percent decrease in work days missed after attending the trainings and learning how to manage illnesses in their children at home. This is an important benefit for families on limited income.

As it takes this research and these implementation strategies for prevention and applies them to the child care environment, Head Start has even more potential to improve the health of more children and adults in this country. It won’t be easy, but Head Start is moving in the right direction by engaging entire families in their own health and prevention. Improving health literacy opens the door for improving health in our communities.

The post Head Start Can Make Entire Families Healthier appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Half a century later, we live in the world of negative political advertising that Daisy Girl pioneered, but there are some curious aspects to the story. First, though it is a famous ad, Daisy Girl, as the ad is known, only ran once. Secondly, it didn’t even mention Goldwater’s name. And finally, by the time the ad ran, Goldwater’s chances against LBJ were slim, even though the ad is often falsely credited with assuring the win. And there were two dozen other ads from LBJ’s camp—humorous, informative, dark, and neurotic. Daisy became the iconic spot of its era not because it was the first Johnson ran in 1964; we remember it primarily because of its brilliant, innovative approach to negative advertising.

Daisy and the other ads were made by Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), an eclectic group of ad men at a medium-sized Madison Avenue firm with a stellar reputation for groundbreaking campaigns for Volkswagen and Avis. They didn’t set out to revolutionize political advertising; what they wanted to do was to break the established rules of political ads—then dominated by stodgy 30-minute speeches mixed with shorter policy-focused spots—by injecting creativity and emotion.

Bill Bernbach, the firm’s principal founder, had long maintained advertising was an art, not a science. He favored intuition. He often reminded his employees, “Playing it safe can be the most dangerous thing in the world, because you’re presenting people with an idea they’ve seen before, and you won’t have an impact.”

Famously dismissive of advertising driven purely by research, Bernbach had written a revolutionary memo in 1947 that laid out the philosophy that would eventually characterize his firm’s work. “Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art,” he brashly told his then-employer, Grey Advertising. “It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.”

Inspired by Bernbach’s philosophy of relying upon instinct as much or more than research, DDB produced an extraordinary and memorable series of spots for Johnson. The firm capitalized upon Goldwater’s reckless statements by providing viewers with indelible images. DDB mocked Goldwater’s vote against the nuclear test ban treaty with a spot showing nothing but a girl licking an ice cream cone as a female announcer spoke ominously about the fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing and how it might enter the food supply.

Goldwater had once bragged that the nation might be “better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.” So, DBB served up a humorous 60-second spot of a saw slicing the East Coast from a Styrofoam model of the United States. In another spot, DDB mocked Goldwater’s statement about privatizing Social Security by showing a pair of hands ripping up a Social Security card.

Viewers had never seen anything like this. It’s not that previous presidential campaigns had only been polite affairs. Dwight Eisenhower ran negative TV spots against his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, in 1952, subtly tying him to alleged corruption in Truman administration officials. Stevenson’s spots attacked Eisenhower in 1956. John F. Kennedy attacked Richard Nixon’s record as vice president in the 1960 campaign. Goldwater’s attacks against Johnson in 1964 were unrelenting. In almost every case, however, the attacks were rational, fact-based arguments. DDB’s innovation was not negative advertising, per se. It was, rather, to help make emotions (primarily, fear) a staple of political spots. By 1968, political ads—by other agencies—were also transformed.

Even the spot itself was something of a DDB innovation. Before 1964, political campaigns had used 30- and 60-second spots, but not exclusively. Instead, campaigns, including Goldwater’s, pre-empted regular programming with dry, 30-minute speeches or campaign documentaries by candidates. Under DDB’s direction, Johnson’s campaign aired nothing but 30- or 60-second spots, with the exception of two four-minute commercials, including the “Confessions of a Republican” ad (which went viral recently) purporting to show that even Republicans found Goldwater uncomfortably extreme.

DDB broke another rule by recognizing that Goldwater was such a widely known figure that voters needed no education about him. They didn’t have to remind viewers that Goldwater himself had joked about lobbing a missile into the men’s room of the Kremlin. Or that he had written that the U.S. should not fear war with the Soviets. Or that he would give NATO commanders authority to use nuclear weapons without prior presidential authorization. Or that he had declared the nuclear bomb “merely another weapon.” America knew he voted against the Civil Right Act and that, at the GOP convention in July 1964, Goldwater even branded himself an “extremist.” So DDB never once had to mention Goldwater’s name in Daisy. It only had to find viewers’ emotional trigger.

Put another way, the firm believed that viewers should not be given too much information to put their minds and emotions to work. And Daisy Girl’s DNA has continued to provide instructions for today’s political advertising: Ronald Reagan’s famous 1984 “Bear” spot used the animal to symbolize the Soviet Union without explicitly making the association. In 2004, Bush’s campaign skillfully employed the same technique with a spot that used wolves to symbolize al Qaeda.

Voting is not a purely rational act. As the late journalist Joe McGinnis observed, it’s a “psychological purchase” of a candidate. It’s often no less rational than buying a car or a house. DDB understood that arguing with voters would be a losing proposition. To persuade someone, especially in the political realm, a campaign must target emotions. Voters don’t oppose a candidate because they dislike his or her policies; they often oppose the policies because they dislike the candidate.

Reagan’s optimistic 1984 “Morning in America” spot was a good example of this kind of appeal. So was George H.W. Bush’s dark, fear-inducing “Revolving Door” spot in 1988 that exploited the controversy over a prison furlough program of his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis. Bernie Sanders’ “America” spot is a current example. They are all very different ads, but are aimed at generating a non-rational, emotional response.

DDB also believed that giving data and facts was less persuasive than telling a story. The best spots provide an experience. In addition to evoking emotions and not repeating what the viewer already knew, many of the DDB spots from 1964 had a narrative arc to them. A good example in 1964 was a Johnson spot reminding viewers of the many harsh attacks on Goldwater by his former GOP opponents. The gold standard for subsequent spots in this genre may be Bill Clinton’s 60-second “Journey” spot from 1992, in which he touted his small-town American values by recounting his childhood in Hope, Arkansas.

Early in his career Bernbach perceived that although research had its place in persuasion, there was something more—something completely unquantifiable: “The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying; and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you; and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting. And you won’t be interesting unless you say things freshly, originally, imaginatively.”

For better or worse, the Daisy ad made emotions a much more potent weapon in our political campaigns, employing techniques that had previously only been applied to selling cars and soap. The next innovation, already with us to some degree, is nano-targeted TV spots, which will resemble the ads we see on the web but will be on TV. Soon, working with cable providers, candidates will offer up messages specially crafted for certain viewers. Five different people watching the same program might each see a different spot from the same candidate.

Meanwhile, social media has injected campaigns’ storytelling into communication between friends. Without Daisy, would the Facebook flame wars of Trump and Bernie fans have the same raucous fervor? But as campaigning moves further into the virtual world of computers and algorithms, it must overcome a paradox: Now, as then, the best ad campaign has a soul—and that’s something a computer or a poll can’t create for any candidate.

The post The Mad Men Who Invented the Modern Political Attack Ad appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s when I first understood businesses weren’t taking full advantage of the data available to them in marketing their products. Rather than relying on hard numbers to calculate the best way to turn consumers onto Oreos, Nabisco was guessing, just like everybody else. I wondered, could science help marketers understand what works and what doesn’t?

Today, that question, which I wasn’t the first and certainly not the last to ask, has transformed marketing as a profession. Over the past 40 years, the field has shifted from the Don Drapers of the 1960s to a much more analytic approach; advertising has become less of an art, more of a science.

Compared to almost all other aspects of business, marketing has been slow to adopt data-driven rigor. This is largely because data in marketing traditionally have been hard to track down. An automotive company always has had reliable numbers on how many cars it manufactures and at what cost, for instance, but data on why people buy certain cars is far more elusive—in terms of how it would be both quantified and collected. As a result, marketing was almost purely conceptual before the late 1960s. There were surveys and descriptive studies of how things work, but almost no scientific testing on real data. Mad Men captured the spirit well; there were guru-like figures on Madison Avenue who were supposed to create these fantastic advertisements that made everybody buy things. This belief in the marketing genius wasn’t really challenged—and a lot of money was spent in ways that probably could have been spent more productively.

All this changed right around the time I went to college and graduate school. Business as a whole already had been shifting toward a more scientific basis since the 1930s, when Taylorism, the study of worker behavior under various conditions, became influential in the organization of factory floors, and operations management implemented new mathematical optimization techniques developed for the military during World War II. Arguably the biggest breakthrough came in the ’80s, with the advent of barcode data. That allowed a business not only to track products it sold, but measure the conditions under which people buy particular items in various categories. Manufacturers and retailers could now assess the sales impact of temporary price cuts and other in-store promotion activities, leading to much improved supply chain management.

The ’90s brought “customer relationship management” data—tracking loyalty and rewards programs that analyze individual customers’ purchasing habits and tailor marketing strategies accordingly. And now, we have online data, which is so comprehensive that in some cases we can anticipate consumers’ behavior even before transactions are made. If collected, Google searches, Facebook likes, Tweets, etc., can be prescriptive or predictive of what people will purchase and how they feel about certain products.

There are marketers who argue that the field expects too much from scientific inference. Some believe every marketing decision is so unique and so purely artful that generalizations about its impact cannot be made. But there doesn’t have to be this tension between “art” and “science” in marketing. Human beings are very good at certain things; databases and models are very good at others. For instance, models are patient and humans are impatient, but humans have an intuitive ability to put things together that models don’t. The solution isn’t having two camps, one for scientific approaches in marketing and one against, but rather recognizing that some things are better done with data and models, and others with human input.

Thankfully, not everyone sees both sides as separate. When I gave a presentation on scientific approaches to marketing several years ago at a staff retreat for employees both on the creative and the financial sides of a large marketing agency, I assumed the creative types weren’t going to like what I had to say. But when I chatted with the staff after, it was exactly the opposite; the creative people appreciated the talk the most, because it gave them a sense of boundaries. Since data and models can point to the exact cause of the brand’s poor performance—for example, its products’ quality or price—a more “scientific” diagnosis of a brand’s weaknesses relieves marketers of being blamed for problems they can’t fix.

As modeling technologies continue to improve, I’m excited about how these technologies will also begin to integrate. I can picture a not-too-distant future when we have a single dashboard for a range of data streams: A marketer could monitor in real time all the different ways a product is appearing across media, what people are saying about it, and how its price is fluctuating relative to competing products. Tracing these factors in real time would show the marketer the best way to push the product out at any given time—when to tweak ads, when to talk to development engineers about customer dissatisfaction and when to adjust prices.

But improving marketing technology also poses numerous ethical concerns. As marketers’ ways of grabbing our attention keep expanding, ads are becoming more ubiquitous—and invasive. They appear everywhere from roadways to our inboxes, and increasingly rely on the personal data we give up online to target our individual habits and preferences. We’re in a transitional phase where all this intrusiveness is too indiscriminate. We need to go more in the direction of permission marketing, where consumers have the right to declare the categories of ads they’re willing to entertain. So, if you’re in the market for a new car, for instance, you could say you’re open to car ads popping up on your screens and on your commute, but then next month it may be ads for vacation destinations.

As science continues to shape the way we advertise and market, it’s important to remember that marketing remains a human activity, an intuitive blend of creativity and judgment. We don’t want to replace humans with more rigorous data-driven approaches, but rather help them make better decisions.

The post How Big Data Replaced Don Draper appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The nutshell: Carnegie Mellon University roboticist Nourbakhsh imagines a future in which ever more intelligent forms of artificial intelligence dictate the way we work, shop, play, and travel.

Literary lovechild of: Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis’ Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion.

The post The Shortcomings of Bad Stats, Clever Slogans, and Insane Robots appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post This Is Your Brain on Health Propaganda appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.