ADNAUSEAM

...The other booklet portrayed the system in equally cheery terms...

...it reflected it to Americans—and legitimated the ideal—in the same way that movies, literature, and television were celebrating personal amelioration...

...For example, its "Confidence in a Growing America" campaign was designed to persuade Americans that the severe recession of 195q was caused by "depression psychology," not high interest rates and "an excess of productive capacity," as President Eisenhower maintained...

...The Council even went sp far as to promote "personal preparedness" for atomic attack: If private action ccjuld fill up the blood banks, enrich the Treasury Department, and reduce the incidence of forest fires, it could presumably saye the citizenry from nuclear holocaust...

...Council spokesman Greenberg is optimistic: The willingness of newspapers, magazines, and other unregulated media to use Council ads suggests, he says, that broadcasters will continue to run them even after deregulation...

...A smaller increase could be detected in the percentage of Americans who blamed the Government for inflation: 29 per cent in 1979, 33 per cent in 1980...

...Just as the advertisers were planning to implement Young's vision, they were asked by the Government to assist in the war effort...

...We're directing our message to individual people around the country, telling what they can do," says Council spokesman Benjamin Greenberg...

...To the A d Council, urban rebellions, the women's movement, and the Vietnam war were just new crises that could be addressed with oldstyle individual solutions...

...But the affiliates carried only 14.6 per cent of the network-fed spots, choosing instead to use the PSA time for local commercial or public service advertisements (a few stations rejected some entire network programs and therefore also the PSAs at those times...

...The sessions addressed such questions as whether the United States should be defined as a "people's capitalism" because of its ostensibly uniform high standard of living...

...ADNAJSEAM BY KEENEN PECK The nation's second-largest advertiser is not Sears, Roebuck & Company, as the trade statistics indicate, nor is it General Foods, General Motors, or McDonald's...

...This narrow notion of what it means to be "involved" took hold in the 1950s and has prevailed ever since...

...The pollsters concluded that though "few Americans are faulting the U.S...

...The tract's solution to inflation was: "Keep the lid on wages and prices...

...It's like in commercial advertising they're telling you that you can buy aspirin to get rid of a headache...

...Major corporations contribute just under $1 million annually to sustain Council operations...

...Rather, it hawks ideas and causes to Americans, and it does so without ever purchasing an inch of space in newspapers or magazines or a second of broadcast time...

...There is evidence that the Council is not as effective in distributing PSAs as it claims," Singsen notes, citing a 1979 study1 by graduate students in the American University's public relations program...

...The War Advertising Council was born and went on to conduct more than 100 win-the-war campaigns, including the well known "Loose talk can cost lives" drive...

...And because of the way they've been able to set the tone for public-service announcements, by making them noncontroversial and nonpolitical, they've been able to get a lot of stations to buy into the notion that PSAs should be noncontroversial and nonpolitical...

...Each suggested that Americans benefit from—and have power in— the system...

...The aggressive strategy persuaded many stations to keep the "Write Hanoi" spots off the air...

...The Council runs the antipollution campaign in conjunction with Keep America Beautiful, Inc., a private organization sponsored by more than a hundred industrial corporations and trade associations...

...They are promoting a vision of America that is not susceptible to solutions by government, that solves its problems through volunteerism, and is very middleclass in its orientation," says Andrew Schwartzman, executive director of the Media Access Project, a public-interest law firm in Washington, D . C . G. William Domhoff, professor of sociology and psychology at the University of California-Santa Cruz, says of the Advertising Council, "They feel that we're one big happy family, that there are no serious differences among people of different social classes...

...Keenen Peck is an associate editor of The Progressive...

...You can't motivate individuals to stop industrial pollution," counters Greenberg, who also insists that smokestacks are visible in the background of some spots and that ads in business publications once promoted a booklet which addressed factory pollution...

...the authors' question, "How do government regulations make prices go up...

...Simply by occupying this [PSA] space, the Council has enabled television stations to argue that they've discharged their public service responsibility," Gitlin points out...

...But when it was seriously challenged in the 1960s and 1970s, the Council's claim to be acting in the public interest came under challenge too...

...They present the image that solving every problem is a matter of good will, that no group or class has to make any particular sacrifice...

...Advertising executives embraced the concept after their product's impact on prices and social values came under heavy criticism from economists and the general population...

...Today, the Council is promoting the concept of productivity because "in the long run productivity makes the whole economic pie bigger, so that everybody's piece is bigger...

...In other ads, American businesses were encouraged to provide jobs to poor blacks...

...That American spirit—the bootstrap ideology—was more accurately described as "the myth of individual influence, the il lusion of individual political competence' by the authors of a 1977 study, Politics in Public Service Advertising on Television 'PSAs encourage pseudo-participation," the Duke University political scientists wrote, "by exhorting Americans to act in a imited and predetermined manner...

...People who watch conventional television, read magazines, ride mass transit, or listen to the radio—in essence, most of us—will also continue to be exposed to large doses of the Council's individualist vision of America...

...Addressing a "survival" conference of the Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Young remarked, "John D . Rockefeller did not escape the charges of being a Robber Baron until he became a Philanthropist...

...According to the report, "the profit motive proved most dangerous to network-fed PSAs...

...Though the Council itself is relatively unknown, its work is ubiquitous: Smokey the Bear, Crime Dog McGruff, television spots for the Red Cross and the United Way, and the slogans "Take stock in America," "Give to the college of your choice," and " A mind is a terrible thing to waste" are some of the Council's creations...

...Increase productivity...

...It's more of an insidious nature than an overtone...

...The Advertising Council, a New Yorkbased nonprofit corporation, ranks second among advertisers (behind Procter & Gamble) thanks to about $650 million worth of space and time the media donate each year for its "public service" campaigns...

...The organization sought broadcast time from stations to present its side by invoking the Fairness Doctrine, which compels broadcast license-holders to afford "reasonable opportunity" for the expression of conflicting views on important issues...

...And though alternative organizations have had only scattered success employing the Fairness Doctrine to secure air time for their ads, they have changed many broadcasters' opinions about the Council...

...Without exception, Council ads and Council-backed organizations con- * vey one theme: Personal charity can untangle any mess, solve any problem...

...The crusade began with a survey, conducted by Compton Advertising, Inc., of 3,000 Americans and their attitudes toward capitalism...

...its politics are so unthreatening to business that Ronald Reagan narrated a documentary film for the group in the early 1960s...

...On November 14,1941, James Webb Young, senior consultant to the J . Walter Thompson advertising agency, laid out a strategy for an offensive against the carpers: mass "education" and civic persuasion through advertising...

...The damage done by litter is, of course, inconsequential compared to the damage done by industrial pollution, but the images and the Ad Council's slogan— "People start pollution, people can stop it"—suggest that individuals, not government or industry, are responsible for the foul condition of the environment, and are therefore personally responsible for finding a solution...

...Indeed, four decades later, Advertising Age magazine would note that the Council "became advertising's best public relations instrument...

...A twelve-page booklet, Dollars and Sense, was distributed and, not surprisingly, it too blamed the individual and the Government for the nation's economic woes...

...According to both Singsen and Domhoff, the Advertising Council does not induce direct changes in attitude or behavior...

...While members of all three groups— consumers, producers, and governments— make decisions in our economic system, the key role that really makes everything work is played by you, in your role as a consumer," beamed The American Economic System...

...Founded in 1942 by a group of leading advertising executives, the Council promotes voluntary, individual actions "to help solve national problems...

...And Smokey will still be with us, and McGruff, and all the other cute or compelling critters in the Council's stable, assuring us that all is well in America or, if it isn't, that we can fix it by sending a dollar here, ordering a pamphlet there, doing something, anything, except rocking the boat...

...Through its television and radio spots, billboards, subway and bus signs, and advertisements in the press, the Council dominates the public service advertising (PSA) market—and reaches millions with its diverse but remarkably consistent set of mesy sages which, taken together, make up a distinct view of what American society is and ought to be...

...barely needed an answer to make a case against regulatory activity...

...It also brought scholars and business leaders together for a series of nine "American Round Table" discussions to popularize the wonders of the system—to "create a consensus that could become thb possession of the average man...

...Says Public Media Center's Singsen, "More pub-| lie affairs directors know about the Ad J Council and are less likely to pick up every- 4 thing it gives them...

...It is difficult to gauge the precise extent of the Council's influence, since "you can't hold the rest of the world constant," as Gitlin says...

...But the organization clearly had a hand in shaping political discourse by making "big government" and inflation central issues...

...A plausible case can be made that the AES and anti-inflation campaigns contributed to the public mood that sent Ronald Reagan to the White House and a Republican majority to the Senate in 1980...

...For example, if the courts let stand the FCC's plans to deregulate radio, owners of multiple stations will increasingly make use of satellitebeamed national programming—which is cheaper than local programming...

...For example, 43 per cent thought there should be more government regulation...

...Greenberg says the Council had "no knowledge" of the C I A connection...

...In each case, an ad agency volunteers to produce a campaign for the Council and its client...

...What's more, some of the Council's work renders direct assistance to specific segments of corporate America...

...We don't consider them as political," Frichten said of the "Write Hanoi" ads...

...But more important, all three emphasize, is the Council's role in keeping alternative—more systemic—visions from gaining access to the media...

...The organization calls itself "a mirror that reflects the conscience of American business," and it has spent years trying to prove that business has a conscience...

...You know," he told the organization last November, "those words, 'the Ad Council,' evoke for me the whole idea of what our American spirit and volunteerism are all about...

...The number-two huckster does not peddle autos, cigarettes, washing machines, or hamburgers...

...in 1979, 50 per cent, and in 1980,60 per cent...

...Yet, at the request of the Nixon Administration, the Council carried out a "Write Hanoi" campaign, urging Americans to press for better treatment of American prisoners of war...

...In the Council's rosy cplored perspective, all problems in the 1950s—and, indeed, in any era—could be solved through personal sacrifice, integrity, and ingenuity...

...Who hasji't heard of Smokey the Bear or 'Don't be a litterbug...

...A companion campaign to A E S was launched in 1979 to "alert the American public to the dangers of continued inflation, and to suggest ways in which the public can help contribute to the solution of this problem...

...Most Council ad campaigns are not so clearly linked to a specific interest...

...Says Erik Barnouw, author of Tube of Plenty and other books about broadcasting, "At the time Radio Free Europe was a C I A subsidiary— and denying it—the-Ad Council was, in effect, covering for it by sayiiig it was a private operation supported by private donations...

...To be sure, the Council did not formulate the individual ethic of postwar America...

...The current ad campaign is being coordinated for Keep America Beautiful and the Council by Marshall Lewis, director of public relations for Union Carbide, a chemical manufacturer— and major polluter...

...Approximately seventy million Americans were made aware of the anti-inflation campaign and at least 600,000 sent for the booklet, according to Compton Advertising (which, as the creator of Dollars and Sense, presumably had an interest in detecting a significant impact...

...Those who wished to make big business and unemployment important themes in popular debate had no way of reaching similar numbers...

...It sponsored ads for the National Committee for a Free Europe and threw its weight behind Radio Free Europe with the slogan "No Iron Curtain Can Stop It...

...collective or governmental action is never necessary in a land of good neighbors...

...The vitality of the American economy is based on competition between producers," they asserted, adding that "economic freedoms and personal freedoms have a way of interlocking...

...The A E S campaign was "a success story unparalleled in Advertising Council history," Council President Robert Keim has said...

...Modern business must study on what terms the partnership can be made mutually beneficial...

...The cable television market is, in fact, currently wide open to Ad Council PSAs...

...Until the recession eases its grip on advertisers, and until the competition among the twenty-odd national cable networks is reduced in a "shakeout," cable operators will find they have vacant minutes on their hands...

...Conflict and suspicion are injurious to both...

...Keim said in 1977 that "the simple fact that the media is conveying a certain message is enough to condition the public to accept it as a matter of truth and importance...

...At times, the Council's insistence on personal responsibility for societal ills led it to absurd lengths...

...Government spending was listed as the first cause of inflation...

...The Council refused to sponsor ads on behalf of the National Organization for Women in 1972, because, in the words of then Council Vice President Dean Frichten, "they are kind of political...

...But recent F C C moves to deregulate radio and television are reducing broadcasters' obligation to serve the public interest, maintains Les Brown, editor of Channels of Communications magazine...

...In 1965, for instance, the Council suggested to blacks, "Put your racial problems on the table— keep them off the streets...

...But one organization of G I relatives was outraged: POW/MIA Families for Immediate Release declared that the ads were meant to "focus attention away from the real goal, which is to end the war and bring the men home, and onto a goal that would at best let American prisoners rot in comfort...

...Not surprisingly, the Council enlisted enthusiastically in the Cold War...

...The Council's actions during the war did much to persuade Americans that it was operating in the public interest...

...The faith in charitable stop-gap measures as a substitute for structural reform sustains the status quo and the entrenched position of American business...

...To that end, the Council itself distributed at least a million copies of its tract Miracle of America, and it propagandized about "Our American Heritage...

...In the decade after World War II, the Council refined its techniques and directed its individualist approach toward peacetime problems...

...in 1978,44 per cent...

...The value of corporate public relations was a matter of lively debate in the years following publication of Bernays's book, but Depression-era distrust of business and New Deal initiatives finally persuaded all but the most parochial business leaders of the need to sell business itself...

...The survey results provided the basis and rationale for two free booklets, The American Economic System . . . and your part in it and YOU are the American Economic System...

...in the following decade, the Council brought its Roundtible discussions directly to several Third World nations...

...The best government, the ads implied, was unobtrusive and even superfluous...

...In terms of PSAs, broadcasters will probably run fewer in the future...

...the client pays agency out-of-pocket expenses, estimated at $150,000 to $200,000...

...The term "people's capitalism" was disseminated abroad by the United States Information Agency and incorporated into the then influential economics of Massimo Salvadori...

...The trend toward greater reliance on national programming will mean more nationally oriented PSAs, that is, more Advertising Council PSAs," he says...

...Young said advertising had a mission: "Use it to create an atmosphere in which business can hope and plan and dream again...

...It must explain itself, its aims, its objectives to the public in terms which the public can understand and is willing to accept...

...In the 1970s, a movement to counter the influence of the A d Council drew increasing support...

...The PSAs assured members of America's expanding middle class that they could be upstanding citizens in their freshly built suburban communities simply by contributing to an approved cause...

...The Council was validating the individual approach to social problems just as Joe McCarthy and the anticommunists were proscribing the collective one...

...The broadcasters, he says, "are behaving less like public trustees than they used to...

...Indeed, the preeminent partisan of na tional consensus and diminished govern ment, Ronald Reagan, has called the Council "indispensable...

...Government regulation, readers were told, could lead to higher prices and has already adversely affected "our rate of capital investment...

...By refusing to back controversial causes, the Council has persuaded most media enterprises that its products are safe because they are nonpartisan, nondenominational, and noncommercial—and in a literal sense that is correct...

...A different kind of testimonial came from Berlin, where Allied officers reported blowing open the safe of a top Nazi and finding two things: a list of Nazi party members and James Young's book, A Technique for Producing Ideas...

...Rising energy and food costs were blamed not on monopolistic pricing practices but on "bad weather" and increases in the cost of foreign oil...

...Public-interest organizations are going to have a very tough time in a deregulated environment," predicts Brown...

...The Council's campaigns include pitches on behalf of the Peace Corps, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alliance to Save Energy, and the National Alliance of Business...

...The A d Council efforts may have helped shape voters' attitudes toward the relationship between business and government: In 1975, Compton found that 22 per cent of the public thought there was too much government regulation...

...In that investigation, a broadcast day in eleven television markets was monitored: The three television networks sent out a total of fortyseven public service spots—70 per cent of which were either produced or endorsed by the Advertising Council—to the local affiliates in those markets...

...Cable networks have been unable to attract enough commercial advertising to fill available slots, so many are using Council ads to round out the hours—even during peak viewing periods...

...The Council also wrote a guide for American businesses advertising in foreign countries, Advertising, a NeW Weapon in a Worldwide Fight for Freedom, and one of its consultants urged advertisers to "develop <an informed U . S . public opinion on communism, stimulate imports, and build more appreciation of the Arherican way...

...Several enterprises^ sprang up to publicize ideas at odds with the Council s— in some cases to place PSAs that directly challenged Council campaigns—and existing social-action organizations honed their opinion-making skills: Clergy and Laymen Concerned produced and distributed slick PSAs to "Unsell the War" (Henry Fonda was tapped to do s?me of the voice-over work...

...Regardless of how the public eventually reacts, they now know that such and such a subject is important, with a capital T.' " When five advertising executives met on November 27, 1941, to lay the groundwork for an advertising council,1 they were responding to three phenomena: the business community's growing acceptance of "public relations," the public's increasingly negative attitude toward advertising, and the exigencies of an approaching war...

...Because of its dominance," Singsen says, "a lot of other ideas do not get out...

...it simply reinforces existing conceptions of acceptable civic activity...

...To the extent that broadcasters have been running PSAs at all—whatever the origin of the ads—they have been doing so out of obligation to Federal Communications Commission guidelines...

...Indeed, according to a recent issue of the Council's Bulletin, the A d Council is undertaking the largest number of new campaigns in its history...

...This means that while broadcasters will r apparently run less public service advertising, the Council will retain its dominant, if slipping, position...

...Edward Bernays, often called the father of modern public relations, defined the profession's goal in his 1928 book, Propaganda: "Both business and the public have their own personalities which must somehow be brought into friendly agreement," he wrote...

...Keep America Beautiful encourages "entirely voluntary" initiatives to reduce litter...

...The Council's apparent success in persuading Americans to keep secrets, buy war bonds, donate blood, or in some other way contribute to the war earned the praise of President Roosevelt, who called for the partnership between business and government to continue after the war...

...economic system on philosophical or ideological considerations," many believed the system has "malfunctions...

...Each year it conducts about two dozen "non-partisan public service campaigns in the interest of Americans generally," some in cooperation with government agencies, others in conjunction with private organizations...

...Schwartzman, too, thinks deregulation will mean reduced access to the airwaves for alternative organizations...

...According to Singsen, only about 50,000 people obtained an economic primer offered by the Public Media Center that addressed shortcomings of the system...

...In 1939, Fortune magazine noted that public relations had "struck home to the hearts of a whole i ? can prevent u 3 generation of businessmen, much as first love comes mistily and overpoweringly to the adolescent...

...Shop carefully...

...Public Interest Communications prepared ads for Advocates for Women and the United Farmworkers, and later, as the Public Media Center, successfully distributed antipollution PSAs with an antic?rporate slant...

...the Los Angeles-based Public Advertising Council developed radio spots for the Vietnam veterans' Discharge U p grading Project, and the People's Bicentennial Commission spread the word about the nation's radical democratic heritage...

...Some thirteen million copies of The American Economic System were distributed, it was reprinted in newspapers across the country, and several corporations reproduced it for their employees...

...It promotes the prevention of child abuse, support for colleges and universities, education about high blood pressure, "equality for all," and other ways to make "our system work better...

...In 1974, the Council launched an ambitious campaign to persuade Americans that the system as a whole is responsive to human needs...

...Of course, people do not embrace a particular view of the world—or purchase aspirin—simply because a television spot urges them to do so, "but a message gets repeated over and over and it becomes part of the lexicon of images we're exposed to," notes Michael Singsen, media director of the San Francisco-based Public Media Center, which prepares PSAs for social-action organizations...

...For example, the familiar antipollution ads featuring an Indian shedding tears over roadside trash have been employed for more than two decades to persuade Americans that pollution is primarily a problem of careless littering...

...The Council is also preparing for the future, he notes, by distributing videotapes containing its major PSAs to about ninety cable television operations...

...And since the Ad Council is supported by the same big advertising agencies that produce commercials for major sponsors, "if a station is going to draw from a public service ad pool, it's going to draw from a pool that it feels a kinship to," he says...

...Because of the weak market, residents of the almost thirty million homes wired to cable will be receiving a heavy fare of Council messages in the coming months...

...As a consumer, producer, and voter, YOU decide what your economy will produce," the tract's authors wrote, adding, "You choose how the benefits of your economy will be distributed...

...The American Economic System (AES) drive was started with seed money from the U . S . Department of Commerce, ostensibly to educate Americans about economics...

...Use it to confound the critics of advertising with the greatest demonstration of its power they have ever seen...

...longer in business, but the movement is still chipping away at the Council's "stranglehold" on PSAs in all media, according to the Media Access Project's Schwartzman...

...As University of California-Berkeley sociologist Todd Gitlin puts it, the Council "contributes to the general cultural stock of symbols...

...Moreover, a quarter of the respondents said "they had no say or influence in the system, specifically mentioning they had no influence on prices, government, business and production, among other things...

...The colorful "Peanuts" characters that graced the booklet generously defined producers as workers, managers, and investors...

...It conducted campaigns on behalf of C A R E and the Community Chest, and encouraged auto safety, food conservation, better education, military enlistment, nurse training, and religious worship ("Take your problems to Church this week—millions leave them there...

...Compton Advertising, in a follow-up survey, estimated that thirty million adult Americans "were able to recall specific and unique elements of the advertising or the newspaper supplement...

...But the Council's campaigns are, in fact, intensely if subtly political, for they assert that private interests can invariably meet the demands of the public interest...