Why '90s ads are unforgettable

0:00Support for NPR and the following message come from Edward Jones. What does it mean to live a rich life? Maybe it's full of brave first leaps, tearful goodbyes, and everything in between. And with over 100 years of experience, your Edward Jones financial advisor can help. Edward Jones, member SIPC. This is Planet Money from NPR. okay do you guys remember any commercials from like our childhood or growing up the chia pet the cough drops the recola or meow mix the meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow these are my sisters Sasha and the twins Carla and Karina there's no like jingles anymore like I literally just had this conversation the other night.

0:54Surely some of you have thought this before, that they just don't make ads like they used to. And like, yeah, maybe ads in the 90s were cheesy and obnoxious, but they were memorable. We would sing their jingles. We knew their whole script. Like, my twin sisters used to reenact this one commercial over and over when they were seven years old. So you guys had these little, like, go-kart kind of things. And you guys would, like... Crash them into each other. to each other. Get out and get mad that one of us didn't have insurance. I just remember you guys going like, do you have car insurance? Why don't you have car insurance?

1:31Because insurance is too expensive. Get so low. Oh my God, Karina. We did not really watch that much TV when we were kids. And yet we remember these commercials fondly and like in weird detail. I like remember literally the phone numbers from like the bail bonds commercial. I remember the carpet cleaning company was 800-588-2300. Empire. Now, if we need a bail bondsman or a carpet cleaner, Karlyn knows the number. Yeah. I mean, you're remembering phone numbers from 20 years ago. Plus. Target customer base right there. Seven year old girl. For bail bonds. You know, whatever. Maybe we all just remember commercials from our era because it's our era, right?

2:20Or, or, hear me out here, maybe, for better or worse, there was actually something special about advertising in the 90s. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Sarah Gonzalez. And I'm Kenny Malone. Today on the show, the evolution of advertising. As told through two of the most bland, unexciting products, which also happen to be two of the most famously advertised products, soap and milk. And it all leads up to what some experts call the peak of mass marketing, the 1990s.

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3:50Like, is it, Is it me or is there something to ads in the 90s? I think it's both. Annie Wilson teaches advertising and consumer behavior at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. I think there's a little bit of nostalgia because it's part of your childhood and growing up. So I think it's a little bit you, but it's also there was something genuinely special about the 90s because of where it sits technologically. And that actually changed the creative strategies of advertisers that made them, I think, more fun or more memorable on a collective level. This was the thing about the 90s.

4:33The ads were ubiquitous. We all watched them collectively. And the 90s gave us some like real, real gems. Maybe she was born with it. Mentos? The Freshmaker. Mentos.

4:54I mean, come on. That's in your head all day. All day. And then there was, of course, this whole thing. What's that? This, of course, a commercial from Budweiser. Yo, who's that? Yo, you're picking the phone. Hello? What's that? There was a time when people were actually walking around being like, what's up? All right. Annie says that to understand how advertising got to its like 90s pinnacle and to what it is today, we can look back at one company that Annie calls the OG of advertising. So we're going to stop there. Is the origin story like there was a guy named Proctor. There's a guy named Gamble.

5:37And one thought he had the whiter soap than the other one. Like, is that? It was kind of. Really? This is Shane Meeker. I am the Procter & Gamble company historian and corporate storyteller. The corporate storyteller? Corporate storyteller. That sounds, you know, like it can be interpreted not well. Yes, yes. Shane is not a corporate spin master. He is a historian for Procter & Gamble, which is kind of a company known as a soap company. You know, hand soap, dish soap, laundry detergent. But they sell tons of products. Tide and Crest and Tampax and Pepto-Bismol and Swiffer and Pampers. So many brands owned by one company.

6:21Olay, Pantene, Old Spice. Like 10 companies control most of the brands in a grocery store. It's wild. Anyway, this part of the advertising story is all about the radio. The first on-air mass marketing. Good old radio. Now, when the radio became popular in the 1920s, Procter & Gamble was like, this is a whole new way to talk to our customers. Game changer. Now, in 1923, they sponsored a fancy new daytime radio show called Crisco Cooking Talks, which was 15 minutes of someone basically reading recipes on the radio that I assume contained a lot of Crisco. And housewives, oh, they were riveted. Then Procter & Gamble did some market research and learned that housewives wanted radio to be more than just instructional.

7:10They wanted it to be entertaining, too. So right around 1930, we decided to try a very new type of daytime radio entertainment, which was called the dramatic serial. The dramatic serial. These would offer, you know, a compelling storyline, which would encourage listeners to tune in day after day. This was like actors and a script, a whole dramatic plot that the company funded, paid for, just so they could advertise soap on the show. One of these dramatic serials was called Ma Perkins. Ma Perkins was about a self-reliant widow and her business problems and family concerns. And it quickly went national, one of the most popular daytime programs.

7:53Every day before Ma Perkins came on the radio, there would be usually one very, very long radio ad for, in this case, Oxidol. For a wash that's sparkling clean with less rinsing work, use new deep cleaning Oxidol. With just one rinse, Oxidol is deep cleaning, deep cleaning, deep cleaning. And now for Ma Perkins. And then the show started. Well, at last, Bay has begun to open up her heart to Ma about what happened during the two weeks she was in New York with Spencer Grayson. What did Spencer do in New York? You have to stay tuned, Sarah. That's the whole point. It's serialized. But yes, Oxidol was not the only product for which there was a whole radio drama created.

8:42Other companies were doing this, too, explicitly for the purpose of running ads on their shows. Colgate-Palmolive also had some as well. Why was it like soap people always? I honestly don't know why soap companies end up being the ones who necessarily came up with that other than, you know, it was a great way to bring your brands where your consumers were. And, you know, the consumers were housewives, so cleaning products. But anyway, people noticed this weird soap connection and the dramatic cereal got a whole new name. Mostly because soap companies were really kind of starting them, and they were dramas, which is where the opera bit comes in.

9:24So, soap opera. This is where the soap opera comes from. Dramatic shows created just to sell Housewives actual soap. Some people knew this. I had no idea. I also had no idea for what it's worth. As the popularity of Ma Perkins grew, a question began to be asked, which was, so just how many people are listening to this thing? And at that time, nobody really knew because the rating systems had not been perfected and was not even really developed yet. Yeah. So the company came up with a pretty clever way to try to get at some of this information through the Ma Perkins soap opera itself. Basically, what we did is we announced a promotion on the program, which we said was, you know, send in an Oxidol box top plus 10 cents and you get a packet of flower seeds back in the mail.

10:16Yes, eight packages of our own Ma Perkins favorite flower seeds, enough for a whole flower garden. Because the only way that they would know that offer is if they were listening to the program. The eight varieties include mixed petunias, giant mixed cosmos and harmony marigold, those exotic deep colored flowers. So over a million consumers actually sent in. That's how you guys tracked ratings? That's how we know. That's how actually, believe it or not, that was the first precise information ever obtained on radio coverage, even at that time. And as far as we know, that was the first evidence that radio advertising by itself was also selling goods.

10:52Yeah, this appears to be the first evidence that the radio could sell things because, you know, people were buying these flower seeds based on this ad they heard on this talky new radio thing. And then when the TV became commonplace in homes in the 1950s, the radio soap operas moved to TV soap operas, much bigger production, and brands started co-sponsoring the soap operas. So now we got multiple ads on one TV show. Like Colgate and Tide together? Colgate would be a competitor. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Ooh, ooh, sorry. You're Crest, right? What are you guys? Right, exactly. TV unlocked a whole new way to advertise to people.

11:32It was sound and video, like the most compelling form of advertising ever. Yeah, all these new advertising techniques start popping up. And decade by decade, you can see them develop. Yeah, like in the 50s, at first, the ads were mainly attribute focused. Like, our peanut butter is crunchy, salty, it's brown, whatever. Ads were just informative. But towards the end of the 50s, it becomes all about trying to differentiate your product from another extremely similar product. This is like a side-by-side. And you know what this is. It's an ad that goes something like this. Bill Thalby just shaved this side with new Schick Power Shave.

12:12This side with another method. Guess what? One side's better than the other. And by the 60s, ads are getting even more entertaining than that shave demonstration. The 60s through the 70s and into the 80s, depending on who you ask, is often thought of as the creative era of advertising. This is when we start to get into storytelling in ads. Let's get Mikey. Yeah. He won't need it. He hates everything. He likes it. Hey, Mikey. Taglines and jingles also really start taking off. My bologna has a first name. It's O-S-C-A-R. And we start to get ads that look like modern day advertising. After the break, the 90s.

12:59And one of the most popular ads of all time. An ad campaign that is so recognizable, you will probably know what it is if all we say is, it's two words and a question mark. It is an iconic ad that helps us consider the question behind all of advertising. Does it actually convince people to buy?

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16:45So they decided they needed a big new marketing effort. You know, milk advertising has been so serious. This is Jeff Manning, the guy who wanted to rebrand milk, step away from milk, it does the body good. Give me something edgier, give me something hipper. Jeff was the head of the California Milk Processor Board. And all of the milk processors in the state decided to basically tax themselves three pennies for every gallon of milk they processed to be spent mostly on TV ads. Their budget was over$20 million a year. Which is an insane amount of money. $20 million for a national program would be a big budget.

17:31Be a big budget. We're doing it in the state of California.

17:37Three ad agencies were going to compete for the milk gig. They all showed up at a hotel in Oakland, California to give their big pitch. The first agency goes, then the second, and eh. They were more about milk. Oh, milk. How boring. But then the last agency walks in, and ooh-hoo, these guys were cool. Yeah, I mean, you know, jeans, no socks, and penny loafers. Oh, that sounds so cool. Well, if you think about it, that's when everybody was wearing suits and ties. These cool ad guys in jeans, no socks, were from a firm called Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners. They walk into the boardroom, no socks, and they're like, all right, milk processor board, we did a little prank.

18:28We gave our colleagues at the ad agency fun late night food like cereal. And then we videotaped them. What they did was they cut a hole in the back of the refrigerators. They put a camera in there and they put in empty milk cartons. So the people grab the bowl of cereal. They open the fridge. There's a carton of milk and they lift it out. They shake it. Now this is all being taped, filmed. Yeah. They shake, it's empty. They pull the other one out. They shake it, that's empty too. And they go crazy. Okay. That was the brilliance of what we ended up calling the milk deprivation strategy. Give people the food, give them the food, the Cheerios or the Oreos or the fudge brownies, and then take milk away.

19:19Take it away. Don't let them have it. And they won the business, obviously. Yeah. Now, what is a peanut butter sandwich without milk? No, it's nothing. Nothing. This led to a very famous commercial. Some guy who is very into Alexander Hamilton, first head of the U.S. Treasury, is listening to the radio while making himself a smooth peanut butter sandwich, no jelly. And there's a$10 ,000 question that comes on the radio. Who shot Alexander Hamilton in that famous duel? All right, let's go to the phones and see who's out there.

19:59Hello? Hello, for$10 ,000, who's... Excuse me? But no, he's got peanut butter mouth. He tries to pour himself milk, but the carton is empty. I'm sorry, maybe next time.

20:23Got Milk. Got Milk, a classic. A national milk group then licenses Got Milk from the California Milk Group, and Got Milk goes national. Very soon, 91 % of adults know the campaign. Just, like, incredible awareness. But the California Milk Group also wanted to know kind of the same thing that the Procter & Gamble people wanted to know with their whole flower seeds thing on the radio. Were these ads getting people to change their behavior? Were people drinking more milk? So three whole years into Got Milk, the Milk Board looked at its effect on milk consumption. They looked at the per capita consumption in the U.S., which looked like a staircase, just down, down, down.

21:10And they looked at milk consumption in California. And Jeff says three years and$60 million later, milk consumption was still going down in California. A little less than the national numbers, but yeah, still down. I mean, it's not easy to change consumer behavior. And so it took at least those first three to get people to start to change behavior. But then five years in, the milk board looked at consumption again, and? We did not raise the per capita consumption, but we flattened it. So they did not get people to drink milk more, but Jeff says they didn't lose milk consumers either. And that was worth a lot of money.

21:54Exactly. Right. A packaged goods company would say we defended our share of the market. Jeff says the genius of Got Milk is that it took this totally dull, been around forever, not new thing, and made people feel something about it. There was no emotion around milk. It's a commodity. It's white. It's in the fridge. It comes in gallons. And then suddenly you were laughing and smiling and there was some emotive connection with milk that simply did not exist before. Milk got its moment. It became cool. And Got Milk was used in all the glossy magazine celebrity milk mustache ads. For people who were not around to see these ads, it was basically just every big celebrity rocking what I can only assume was Elmer's glue on their upper lip parading as a milk mustache.

22:46I do remember like ripping out the Got Milk ads and like putting them on my wall and in my locker. Again, our ad expert, Annie Wilson. Like you would not do that now. Now, Annie says the milk mustache is basically the beginning of modern influencer culture. And yeah, we were just feeling good feelings about good old milk. And people call this type of advertising brand or image marketing. And Annie says there are no direct sales goals with these types of ads. It is just I want you to see the product or the brand and feel good when you do. The milk people, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, they are experts at brand and image marketing.

23:29When you think Coca-Cola, you think happiness, you feel good. But I can't measure the return on that every time you see a Coca-Cola billboard or a Coca-Cola commercial, whether you're going to go out and actually buy Coca-Cola or not. Yeah, it's really hard to measure the results of this kind of ad. But Annie says that in the 90s, brands were really, really focused on this brand and image marketing because companies were launching so many new products in the 90s. There was a lot of competition. So Annie says brands were just trying to capture mind share over wallet share even. They wanted you to just know their brand over even buying their products because brands were playing the long game.

24:08They wanted to be around forever and they just needed you to know who they were. And, you know, the 90s were kind of the perfect time for building up these brands because advertisers knew exactly where to find our eyeballs. Like we were all watching and reading sort of the same two things, TV and glossy magazines. And also by the 90s, advertisers had developed this whole arsenal of advertising tricks. They'd gotten unbelievably good at writing taglines and jingles. And I mean, just just listen to some of these bangers that were running in the 90s. The part of waking up is Folgers in your cup. That's me lucky charms.

24:50Celastically delicious. Mommy, wow! I'm a big kid now. There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's platinum MasterCard. These are exactly the kinds of catchy ads that I feel like we just don't hear anymore. And Annie says that's because pretty soon after the 90s, the whole ad ecosystem changed. The reason that we think about it as this apex is probably less that it was like this big height so much as it died down after. Yeah, brand advertising is built on mass viewership and the idea that we would all repeat product taglines and jingles because we would all unavoidably see the ads over and over again.

25:37But mass viewership started to disappear when, among other things, the DVR came out in 1999. Now we could fast forward commercials. Ooh, that one hurt advertisers. Yeah. A whole bunch of things then started happening that continued to keep us from all watching the same commercial. So, you know, the Internet starts stealing more of our attention. Streaming sites with options for no commercials come out. Smartphones, social media. Today, the chances that two people have seen the same ad for the same product are pretty low. Which is why companies don't really even attempt to make a new jingle or tagline take off the way that they used to, because it is just harder to get complete awareness of a product today.

26:28But there are a few exceptions, a few companies that do still have this goal. Like, you can all probably name a lot of credit card companies or car insurance companies because they still do big mass brand marketing. They spend so much money to make sure that everyone knows their name. And so, for example, I might want to advertise my insurance brand or my credit card company on a kid's channel, not because I think kids are going to buy it and not because I even think their parents are going to buy it, but because when the kid turns a certain age and they need a credit card, for some reason they just think MasterCard or they have this good feeling about MasterCard.

27:07This is why my twin sisters could recite car insurance commercials when they were seven years old. It was all intentional, kind of dark. Now, after the 90s, brand marketing started having to share the stage more with a different type of advertising called performance marketing. These ads do have an immediate sales goal. This would be like, you know, how many people clicked through on your digital ad? And this is now what a lot of companies focus on. Yeah. And these ads, they are not really designed to appeal to the masses. They are targeted, super targeted, because Annie says a lot of brands don't care about everyone knowing their product anymore.