Ad Council Research Articles

Backfire: the settler-colonial logic and legacy of Smokey Bear

ABSTRACT Since the 1940s, the United States Forest Service’s (USFS) national fire suppression efforts have been bolstered by a public-facing ad campaign led by the Ad Council, most notably through the iconic rise of Smokey Bear. The consequences of decades of strict fire suppression, promulgated and solidified by this highly successful campaign, have been ecologically disastrous, and especially detrimental for fire-dependent Indigenous communities and ecosystems. Scholars have examined the Smokey campaign’s racialized, nationalist discourse, yet none have grappled with the campaign’s settler colonial logic, itself replete with gendered exclusion and speciesism. In this article, we combine intersectional theoretical frameworks with settler colonial and Indigenous studies to carry out a systematic content analysis of 201 unique campaign documents. We demonstrate how the campaign’s production of the careful citizen – one rooted in mid-to-upper class, settler masculinity – hinges on interlocking narratives of Indigenous erasure, low-class criminality, and the helpless victimhood of women and more-than-human species.

Project creates messaging efforts about MH to boost 988 use

Informing culturally sensitive, responsive, and effective messaging development to help individuals access the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in times of crisis is just one of the major aims of a new project borne out of a collaborative partnership that includes the Ad Council Research Institute, the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention and the Suicide Prevention Resource Center, with support by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

In Case You Haven't Heard…

The Ad Council, in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Council for Mental Wellbeing and Shatterproof, is inspiring millions to “Start With Hope” in a national public service campaign, a news release from the Ad Council stated. This vital new effort aims to deliver a message of hope to those living with substance use disorders (SUDs), as well as those at risk of developing an SUD. A focus of the program is supporting Black and Hispanic/Latinx populations by connecting them with harm reduction strategies and treatment resources to start their journeys to well‐being and recovery, Ad Council officials stated. Informed by foundational research from the Ad Council Research Institute and experts from the CDC, the National Council and Shatterproof, the new campaign was developed pro bono by Accenture Song, the creative group of the information technology company, Accenture. The campaign leans on research insights that people with SUDs find immense value in hearing from those who have been through similar experiences. This new campaign emphasizes that recovery is not a one‐size‐fits‐all journey, and highlights that working toward well‐being often begins with harm reduction strategies like carrying naloxone, using substances less, or engaging in evidence‐based treatment options.

Saving Lives with AI: Lessons in Personalization and Engagement

Rex Briggs, Stefanie Friedhoff, and Erik Lundberg describe how the Ad Council rose to the challenge of educating people about the COVID-19 vaccination by using AI personalization to get the right message to the right person. The council’s work not only saved lives and reduced hospitalizations, it also demonstrated that AI personalization can increase engagement and improve advertising results.

Using Location Intelligence to Evaluate the COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign in the United States: Spatiotemporal Big Data Analysis.

Highly effective COVID-19 vaccines are available and free of charge in the United States. With adequate coverage, their use may help return life back to normal and reduce COVID-19-related hospitalization and death. Many barriers to widespread inoculation have prevented herd immunity, including vaccine hesitancy, lack of vaccine knowledge, and misinformation. The Ad Council and COVID Collaborative have been conducting one of the largest nationwide targeted campaigns ("It's Up to You") to communicate vaccine information and encourage timely vaccination across the United States. More than 300 major brands, digital and print media companies, and community-based organizations support the campaigns to reach distinct audiences. The goal of this study was to use aggregated mobility data to assess the effectiveness of the campaign on COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Campaign exposure data were collected from the Cuebiq advertising impact measurement platform consisting of about 17 million opted-in and deidentified mobile devices across the country. A Bayesian spatiotemporal hierarchical model was developed to assess campaign effectiveness through estimating the association between county-level campaign exposure and vaccination rates reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To minimize potential bias in exposure to the campaign, the model included several control variables (eg, age, race or ethnicity, income, and political affiliation). We also incorporated conditional autoregressive residual models to account for apparent spatiotemporal autocorrelation. The data set covers a panel of 3104 counties from 48 states and the District of Columbia during a period of 22 weeks (March 29 to August 29, 2021). Officially launched in February 2021, the campaign reached about 3% of the anonymous devices on the Cuebiq platform by the end of March, which was the start of the study period. That exposure rate gradually declined to slightly above 1% in August 2021, effectively ending the study period. Results from the Bayesian hierarchical model indicate a statistically significant positive association between campaign exposure and vaccine uptake at the county level. A campaign that reaches everyone would boost the vaccination rate by 2.2% (95% uncertainty interval: 2.0%-2.4%) on a weekly basis, compared to the baseline case of no campaign. The "It's Up to You" campaign is effective in promoting COVID-19 vaccine uptake, suggesting that a nationwide targeted mass media campaign with multisectoral collaborations could be an impactful health communication strategy to improve progress against this and future pandemics. Methodologically, the results also show that location intelligence and mobile phone-based monitoring platforms can be effective in measuring impact of large-scale digital campaigns in near real time.

In Case You Haven't Heard…

The Ad Council launched a multimillion dollar Mental Health Initiative earlier this month that will enlist a range of partners for communications campaigns and other resources on a national basis, the newsletter MM+M (Medical Marketing and Media) reported Nov. 8. The initiative, designed to encourage more people to seek support for their mental health challenges, is backed by a founding gift of $15 million from Huntsman Mental Health Institute and has a goal of reaching $65 million over the next seven years. The effort comes on the heels of the nonprofit's national COVID‐19 vaccine education campaign, which it claims reached more than 75% of those eligible to be vaccinated. Mirroring its COVID‐19 approach, the Ad Council is planning a coalition‐based and multi‐audience model. Organizations such as the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, American Psychological Association and National Alliance on Mental Illness have signed on. In addition to discreet communications campaigns, the Mental Health Initiative aims to be multi‐pronged and will include such resources as an “insights and analytics engine” to inform and evaluate the impact of relevant content. There will also be open‐source partner toolkits, a “trusted messenger” program, employer‐workplace resources, and grassroots community activations, reported MM+M.

Review: Green Persuasion: Advertising, Voluntarism, and America’s Public Lands, by Jeffrey K. Stine

Review: <i>Green Persuasion: Advertising, Voluntarism, and America’s Public Lands</i>, by Jeffrey K. Stine

Campaign aims to prevent veteran suicide, stresses safe firearm storage

“Service Never Stops” is the message conveyed by a new advertising campaign launched by the Ad Council — a nonprofit organization that merges creativity and social causes — and Brady, a foundation whose mission is to unite the American people against gun violence, We Are the Mighty reported Oct. 25. Through Facebook Creative Shop and Gig Line Media, they aim to reach as many people as possible in order for their message to fulfill the mission for which it was created. Through a series of public service advertisements, real veterans address the threat of gun suicide within their community. Placing emphasis on the importance of safe storage of firearms in the home, the campaign aims at helping veterans protect themselves and those around them by interrupting a momentary crisis, delaying an impulsive act and hopefully ensuring it doesn't turn into a permanent tragedy. “Our hope is these PSAs will help bring awareness to the need for safe storage to reduce the risk of suicide by gun by placing time and space between a veteran thinking of suicide and an accessible, usable firearm,” said Kris Brown, president of Brady. “Our veterans have already served our country and we cannot abandon them as they undergo this fight here back at home.”

Butchering the fat body: Enacting and engaging fatness in an American “anti-obesity” campaign

ABSTRACT While public concern with body weight is not simply a recent phenomenon, the past several decades have witnessed the intensification of a set of discourses that frame the fat/ness of bodies as a public health crisis, particularly in the United States. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the US-American Advertising Council (Ad Council) co-produced a series of print, radio, and television “public service announcements” as part of a self-described “obesity prevention” campaign, which deploys a cultural framework of healthism to present fat as a pathological entity in need of elimination through the efforts of the responsibilized citizen. In this paper, I bring methodological guidance from Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology together with the work of other critical theorists to consider how fat/ness is represented by this campaign as an index of the undisciplined body-self, as a space of abjection, and as a basis for the exclusion of fat bodies as both desired objects and desiring subjects. However, scope may also exist for disruption of the “prescribed” enactments and for new, “queer” orientations toward fat/ness and fat bodies to emerge.

Editorial Introduction

Editorial Introduction Edward Timke It is difficult to write an editorial introduction at the end of one of the most challenging years in recent history. There is hope for an end to the pandemic with the distribution of various COVID-19 vaccines around the world, but tremendous uncertainty remains. Some people are questioning the safety or effectiveness of these medicines, and the rollout of vaccines is slower than expected. Even though many Americans' financial situation is still quite dire, US politicians delayed the release of much-needed aid. A caustic political climate has kept the US divided, especially about diversity and inclusion in society. Erratic weather patterns continue to remind everyone that climate and environmental issues are as urgent as ever. Even during this unsettled year, Advertising & Society Quarterlyis optimistic for better days to come through our community's shared concern about how advertising might bring positive changes to our society and culture. As one recent Microsoft holiday ad reminds us through the story of a family dog named Rufus, we can all find joy and hope during hard times by staying connected. Video 1. In one of Microsoft's 2020 holiday ads, a dog named Rufus reminds viewers that despite the social isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to keep hope alive by dreaming big. We can also stay connected during these difficult times through technology and digital tools. 1 Click to view video This final issue of 2020 focuses largely on race, ethnicity, and diversity in advertising and American society. Although the journal hoped to host its fourth annual colloquium in person this October, staying true to the Quarterly's focus on digital publishing, we held a virtual meeting on December 3–4. This year's theme was Race/Ethnicity/Diversity in Advertising. To fully contextualize and analyze this topic, the colloquium was broken into three sessions. The first session had Smithsonian museum curators discuss their collecting strategies to preserve and tell the stories of race, ethnicity, and diversity in American advertising. 2In the second session, advertising practitioners discussed their public service advertising (PSA) campaigns about COVID-19 safety and concerns among Black, Brown, Asian, and Latino communities. 3The last session featured notable scholars critically unpacking the place of race, ethnicity, and diversity in the advertising industry's business and creative work. 4All three sessions were recorded and published in this issue. 5 Several other pieces in this issue relate to the colloquium's theme about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Marketing professor Yvette Bonaparte (North Carolina Central) and sociology professor Martha Reeves (Duke) examine if and how brand messages can represent concerns from the #MeToo Movement. In addition to providing background details about the #MeToo Movement, Bonaparte and Reeves analyze what Gen Z and Millennial students think about marketers' inclusion of issues such as pay disparity and sexual violence toward women in their messaging. Communication and advertising scholars Jackson Carter (South Carolina and Ouachita Baptist University) and Taylor Jing Wen (South Carolina) provide a detailed qualitative content analysis of a topic rarely assessed in advertising: adoption public service announcements. Adoption PSAs do not adequately represent the foster care system's realities. Carter and Wen worry that such inaccuracies could deter would-be parents from adopting. A reprinted chapter from Inger L. Stole's book Advertising at War: Business, Consumers, and Government in the 1940s(University of Illinois Press, 2012), provides some useful context about how the advertising industry navigates and adapts to various crises in American history. The chapter covers how the advertising industry's efforts to convince the public about advertising's benefits before and during World War II. The chapter also explains the origins of the Ad Council. This history, which we were able to illustrate in color, helps us understand why the organization still plays a vital role in addressing significant social issues while helping the advertising industry defend how it benefits society and culture...

Democracy’s Adventure Hero on a New Frontier: Bridging Language in the Ad Council’s Peace Corps Campaign, 1961–1970

ABSTRACT Since its birth in 1942, the nonprofit Ad Council viewed its public service advertising campaigns as important propaganda weapons to fight communism. The 1961 Peace Corps program trained newly recruited volunteers to recognize communist propaganda tactics abroad and guard against them. Both institutions used direct language when discussing communism in their internal documents but made no mention of communism in the outward facing Peace Corps campaign press releases, fact sheets and advertisements. Instead, each used bridging language where the theme of promoting democracy abroad created a contextual meaning based on myths about heroes, frontier conquest, adventure, and renewal. The bridging language allowed the Peace Corps to use the ad campaign to recruit volunteers as adventure heroes promoting democratic values on new frontiers while artfully masking the true purpose of the program—to help the John F. Kennedy administration slow or halt the march of communism in the Third World.

“Why Do You Think They Call It Dope?”: Richard Nixon’s National Mass Media Campaign Against Drug Abuse

This monograph explores how corporate, political, and public health concerns shaped the Nixon administration’s public service advertising campaign against drug abuse. Between 1970 and 1973, the Nixon administration worked with the nonprofit Advertising Council to orchestrate a national, “one-voice” mass media campaign to change Americans’ attitudes toward the use of drugs. Papers preserved in the archives of the Advertising Council and by Nixon administration officials expose behind-the-scenes conflicts over the government’s drug-abuse message among the White House, federal agency staff, and private partners in the campaign, including drug companies and the advertising and broadcasting industries. Controversies included whether to include alcohol, marijuana, legally marketed prescription drugs such as amphetamines, and dangerous retail drugs such as headache medicines and caffeine, and whether the campaign should promote safe drug use or only discourage “abuse.” Archival records reveal the president’s power to set the government’s message, despite bureaucratic and expert resistance. However, government control over the propaganda campaign was limited by reliance on the Ad Council and the voluntary participation of networks and broadcasters to distribute public service announcements (PSAs). Through the Ad Council’s process of reviewing and obtaining broadcast network clearances for individual PSAs, advertisements that disparaged alcohol and other legally advertised products were weeded from the national campaign. Ultimately, the White House’s vision of a mass media offensive against drug abuse in all its forms was implemented primarily as a campaign against the use of illegal drugs, particularly by youth. Although successful with broadcasters, the campaign was terminated in 1973 amid concerns it was actually stimulating illegal drug use.

Interview with Bob Greenberg

Interview with Bob Greenberg Bob Greenberg (bio), William M. O’Barr (bio), and Edward Timke (bio) Keywords art, creativity, data, digital advertising, global operations, technology, R/GA Video 1. Interview with Bob Greenberg. Click to view video Bob Greenberg is a pioneer in advertising and communication. As Founder, Chairman, and CEO of R/GA, Greenberg has transformed a motion graphics and video production company (founded in 1977) into an award-winning global firm that leverages technologies and communication tools to help its clients reach their audiences and solve various problems. In the following interview, Greenberg weaves stories and examples from his life and career to define what “digital” means for advertising. He describes R/GA’s place in digital advertising’s evolution. He also explains how technology, data, creativity, art, and inspiring workspaces can and should come together to push agencies beyond the scope of advertising-as-selling. Greenberg asserts that advertising is one piece of the larger pie, especially as firms become global. For the industry to succeed now and in the future, agencies need to recognize how data, technology, and creativity intersect intelligently to bring their clients and publics together in mutually beneficial ways. The Editors thank Barry Wacksman for arranging the filming of this interview at R/GA, New York. Bob Greenberg Bob Greenberg—Founder, Chairman, and CEO of R/GA—has been a pioneer in the advertising and communications industry for nearly four decades. He leads the vision for R/GA, an agency that serves as the digital partner for Fortune 500 companies and world-renowned brands, including Nike, Beats by Dre, Unilever, Samsung, Google, and Johnson & Johnson. R/GA is one of the world’s most influential agencies, emphasizing the importance of business transformation, product/service innovation, and breakthrough communications. The agency has offices in New York, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland, and internationally in London, Bucharest, Istanbul, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Singapore, and Shanghai. Bob, along with his brother Richard, founded R/Greenberg Associates (R/GA) in 1977 with the idea of creating a company that valued design, but also focused on developing leading-edge motion graphics and live-action film and video production. The company created groundbreaking visual effects for movies such as Alien, Predator, Se7en, and Zelig. To date, R/GA’s body of work spans 400 feature films and 4,000 television commercials. Bob has evolved the company several times since its founding, transforming it from a world-class movie title shop, to a digital studio, to a major digital advertising agency, and today, to an all-in-one, full-service agency, product and service innovator, and consultancy. Now in its fifth business model, R/GA has become one of the most successful integrated marketing services companies, creating everything from new products and digital services, to social and mobile campaigns, to broadcast commercials. Bob serves on the boards of numerous schools and organizations, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Ad Council, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (Dean’s Council advisory board), NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, Parsons School of Design, and the Berlin School of Creative Leadership. He is also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Bob has won almost every industry award for creativity, including the Academy Award, D&AD Pencils, and Cannes Lions. Among his most notable accolades are the Cannes Lions lifetime achievement Lion of St. Mark, the honorary title Royal Designer for Industry (Hon RDI) from the Royal Society for Arts, the ANDY Bravery Award, the 2007 BDA Lifetime Achievement Award, the CLIO Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communication in 2003, and the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. Bob was also recently inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame, Marketing Hall of Fame, and the Creative Hall of Fame. For the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, he served as Cyber Jury President in 2004 and 2013, as a member of the 2005 Titanium Jury...

Selling Under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany by Pamela E. Swett

Reviewed by: Selling Under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany by Pamela E. Swett Anne Berg Selling Under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany. By Pamela E. Swett. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 344. Cloth $65.00. ISBN: 978-0804773553. Nazi Propaganda reiterated and disseminated grandiose political visions but was hardly able to insinuate such visions into the many mindless chores and simple pleasures that characterized everyday life in the Third Reich. Advertisements for the laundry detergent Persil, Nivea skin cream, Osram light bulbs, and many other brand products, however, accomplished just that. In this important book, Pamela Swett examines the “bounded relative autonomy” of corporations and the complex relationships between the commercial sector, consumers, and the regime (2). Rather than focusing on the negotiations between bureaucrats and commercial agents alone, she demonstrates that consumers were fully engaged in the market—all in preparation for the “new order” that the National Socialist regime promised and actively began to forge (2). Spanning the period from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, the book makes visible important continuities between the commercial culture of the 1930s and the economic miracle of the 1950s. When it comes to advertising, the real break, Swett suggests, occurred in 1943 as the regime put a moratorium on new advertisements. The subsequent dearth of both ads and goods enabled memories that decoupled consumer products from the politics of Nazism and extended the ubiquitous Persilschein (denazification certificate) to even the most popular laundry detergent manufacturer Persil as a surrogate for the commercial sector more generally. After a brief overview of the advertisement industry during the late Weimar years that highlights the industry’s tenuous reputation and excessive self-doubt of its staff, Swett demonstrates that National Socialism facilitated the advertisement industry’s ability to cast itself in a more positive light in part because propaganda, with which advertisements had often been conflated, attained a more positive connotation, at least officially. Although the Ad Council (Werberat) “relied on Goebbels patronage, it was a nongovernmental body that existed outside of the Reich’s Chamber of Culture” and therefore its members, both business leaders and party officials, enjoyed a modicum of independence (56–57). Swett scrutinizes commercial culture as it took shape in the 1930s, assessing the industry’s ability to tap into pervading consumer trends while articulating National Socialist priorities at the same time. The staffs responsible for advertising and sales were crucial here, particularly because their “self-professed aims,” as Swett convincingly argues, evidenced striking, and perhaps surprising, [End Page 409] continuities between the Weimar and Nazi periods (91). In fact it seems as though the Nazi regime unfettered German advertisement from its previous strictures and facilitated a more “scientific” approach to advertisement, pushing German advertising into the realm of market research in 1935. Ad men and sales staff nonetheless remained outsiders in Nazi Germany, sub-professionals who were seen as “dishonest in commercial dealings” and always in danger of resembling “Jewish peddlers from an earlier era who were considered racial pariahs” (161). Trying to represent their company and its racial credentials, traveling sales staff, Swett argues, played a crucial role in commercial life; and their purportedly apolitical dealings helped cement the Volksgemeinschaft through routine interactions between sales staff, retailers, and consumers (161). Swett is thus able to demonstrate that German firms—who generally designed advertisements for their products in house—took great care to listen to, learn about, and directly address their customers (139). Following Peter Fritzsche’s Life and Death in the Third Reich (2008), Michael Wildt’s Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung (2007), Andrew Bergerson’s Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times (2004) and others, Swett brings into view a society in which individual consumers, companies, and their staff as well as local collectives not only wrested liminal agency from the regime but actively articulated visions for their communities and the nation—in other words, a society where people not only made do with Nazism but keenly shaped it. Instead of merely being enthralled by fascist spectacle, seduced by power, or bought with trifles stolen from the East, Swett demonstrates that Germans developed their loyalty to the regime through...

Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images by Finis Dunaway

SEEING GREEN: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images. By Finis Dunaway. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2015.Historians of environmentalism have often overlooked visual culture, focusing instead on policy and grassroots politics. But, as Finis Dunaway shows in this excellent book, scholars interested in environmentalism ignore the role of green imagery (photography, documentaries, Hollywood movies, cartoons, television news broadcasts, and other media representations) at considerable peril. Environmental visual culture, he argues, did not simply reflect the environmental crises of the last fifty years, but also subtly and powerfully shaped and delimited environmental politics.Dunaway starts by reminding us of the importance of images in early- and midtwentieth-century American conservation (the subject of his superb first book) and introducing us to the outsized role that visual culture played in the environmental politics of the 1960s. The rest of the book is divided into three sections. Section one looks at the early 1970s and representations of the Santa Barbara oil spill, Earth Day, anti-littering imagery (including the infamous crying Indian advertisement), and the recycling logo. Section two brings us into the mid and late 1970s and the circulation of imagery related to energy: Associated Press photos of cars lined up at gas stations, Ad Council spots blasting fuelishness, the Hollywood blockbuster The China Syndrome, ominous visual representations of the Three Mile Island cooling towers, and efforts by President Carter to frame the energy crisis on television. The last section brings us up to the 1980s and beyond, and analyzes media representations of toxic contamination, the New York garbage barge, the Alar scare, the Exxon Valdez disaster, and Earth Day 1990. Dunaway also offers us a novel reading of Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.Dunaway argues that during the last half century, mainstream environmental imagery has done significant ideological work. The dominant visual culture painted all Americans (typically represented by white children and their mothers) as universally vulnerable and in so doing obscured the fact that some communities were far more exposed to environmental hazards than others. The reigning green iconography tended to absolve the state and corporations of environmental responsibility and placed blame at the doorstep of consumers, who were told that they could save the environment by buying, conserving, and recycling. …

Advertising in the Age of Persuasion: Building Brand America, 1941‐1961DawnSpring. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Advertising in the Age of Persuasion: Building Brand 1941-1961 Dawn Spring. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.Advertising in the Age of Persuasion, written by independent designer and interdisciplinary scholar Dawn Spring, traces the institutionalization of advertising in American politics and culture during the 1940s and 1950s. Spring charts how, after World War Two, a coalition of advertisers, businessmen, media moguls, politicians, and religious leaders became the invisible hand that guided the global expansion of free enterprise (6). This ideology collapsed the divides between name-brand products, American diplomacy, and foreign relations to envision brand America, arguing that mass production and mass consumption would create national cohesion and spread American democracy abroad (4). Ultimately, Advertising in the Age of Persuasion reveals how both advertisers and politicians at the start of the Cold War worked together to facilitate a long-las ting network and process for disseminating persuasive information now engrained in American culture.Over the course of eight chapters Spring charts the formation and praxis of the free enterprise ideology and roots its success in advertisers' multiplatform, multimedia approach which was developed during the 1940s. Speeding through the turn-of-the-century, Spring argues that advertisers faced an unfriendly climate during the Depression, which propelled companies like Procter and Gamble and J. Walter Thompson to market their services to the American government by World War Two (15). Advertisers, broadcasters, and brand-name manufacturers who formed the War Advertising Council framed advertising as a political tool to raise money, organize resources, and stabilize wartime production to garner governmental support. As the peacetime Ad Council, the organization helped construct and implement two national branding campaigns: the Freedom Train and Miracle of America. The Ad Council, the American Heritage Foundation, and the American Economic System sent templates of prepackaged advertising to churches, schools, local newspapers, and stores to encourage workers and families to interact with these experiential forms of advertising and marketed them as educational programs to thwart allegations of propaganda.In the second half of the book, the author charts the parallel histories of corporate advertising and American diplomacy, revealing their explicit intersections during the start of the Cold War. These initial postwar service campaigns helped structure a national public diplomacy apparatus that enabled companies to use the themes of brand America to market their name-brand products domestically and internationally (45). In examining the methods and evolution of this increasingly intertwined economic and political relationship, Spring evidences the power of diversification. …

The Committee on Public Information after WWI: The Failure to Develop into a Peacetime Organization

This paper is part of a project to understand the development of public advertising by the American bureaucracy. Their widespread use is a modern phenomenon, generally dating to the work of the War Advertising Council (later the Ad Council) following the end of World War II. This paper adds to the work on the development of public advertising by comparing the development of the War Advertising Council with the Committee on Public Information, which was established by President Wilson to influence public opinion in favor of the involvement of the United States in World War I. The Committee on Public Information used wartime public advertising — along with a slew of modern persuasion techniques — but it did not evolve into a peacetime organization and was disbanded after the war. Through an analysis of theoretical factors and a factual comparison of the relevant events, this paper explores why the Committee on Public Information did not develop into a peacetime organization as the War Advertising Council would do two decades later. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for the building of theory on the development of public advertising.

Book Review: How McGruff and the Crying Indian Changed America: A History of Iconic Ad Council Campaigns, by Wendy Melillo

How McGruff and the Changed America: History of Iconic Ad Council Campaigns. Wendy Melillo. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2013. 240 pp. $27.95.What Wendy Melillo wants you to know about the Ad Council is that it is not about the ad.[The] objective has never been solely to improve society, Melillo concludes in this survey of five legendary each a case study of the Council's agendasetting scope and reach. In fact, as Melillo details throughout, the Council has doubled as a public relations device deployed by the ad industry since the Council's founding in 1942.Melillo is an assistant professor in the School of Communications at American University and a Pulitzer Prize-nominated former staffwriter for the Washington Post. As the book's well-sourced and engagingly written first two chapters explain, formation of the non-profit Ad Council-which in 2010 generated $40.5 million in revenue- was strategic: Aligning the Council's brand with messages to reduce litter and wear seatbelts (to name just a few successes) blunts criticism that Mad Men advertising is to blame for our unsustainable consumerism. Melillo also sees a link between the Council's regular conferences with high-ranking government officials and its ability to serve U.S. policy by shaping public opinion.While the book spends too little time contemplating how the Council's purpose and methods will evolve in a digital age, readers are indebted to Melillo for analysis even as we are lefthoping for more narrative. Just about every case study is introduced by some version of, To understand why campaign X focused on issue Y, a brief history lesson in ABC is in order . And a good story certainly exists: amply presented are the geopolitical hazards, board room dissensions, ad agency frustrations, frail egos, and sleights of hand (that teary is the son of Italian immigrants) that form the Council's history.The way Americans think about social problems and how these problems should be solved (have) been directly influenced by messages in Ad Council campaigns, Melillo observes. She devotes one chapter each to placing hallmark campaigns in historical context: Smokey the Bear (1944), Crusade for Freedom (1950), Crying Indian (1971), A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste (1972), and McGruffthe Crime Dog (1980).The Ad Council has five regional offices and main headquarters in Washington, DC, and New York; represented on the board are corporations like Apple, MasterCard, the Spanish Broadcasting System, JPMorgan Chase, FedEx, and KraftFoods. According to the Council's mission, suitable issues must involve a significant public matter. They must lend themselves to messaging that stimulates action that makes a measurable difference. …

‘I am an American’: protesting advertised ‘Americanness’

How are citizenships and nationalisms constructed, connected, and contested in the post-9/11 USA – performatively, affectively, and visually – and how do their relationships figure ‘Americanness’? This article takes up this question (1) by tracking how Americanness was advertised in the American Ad Council's ‘I am an American’ campaign and (2) by introducing the multimedia project ‘I am an American’: Video Portraits of Unsafe US Citizens, which engages the Ad Council's campaign as a practice-based protest of the Ad Council's advertised ‘Americanness’. The article traces how the Ad Council's campaign advertises what Evelyn Alsultany calls ‘diversity patriotism’. It also constructs a complex, mobile system of differentiation that marks some citizens as ‘safe’ and others as ‘unsafe’, which runs counter to the idealized notion of a unified ‘Americanness’ that it advertises. The article then examines how the practice-based protest project ‘I am an American’ takes these ‘unsafe citizens’ – US citizens who either will not or cannot make their differences normatively conform to the national ideal of the ‘One’ composed of the ‘Many’ propagated by the Ad Council's campaign – as its point of departure to reflect upon how citizenship protests function for and against citizenship, nationalisms, and various figurations of Americanness.

Who Is an American?

Cynthia Weber's documentary “I Am an American” is an audacious and creative intervention into the field of international relations (IR). It bypasses the usual conceptual boxes that the discipline imposes upon us since day one of graduate school: for example, only abstract arguments have force, only written articulations are acceptable, and only topics of “high politics” matter. With her documentary, Weber shows that we gain richer debates and insights if we extend these maxims: for example, abstract arguments and concrete emotions have force; indeed, one often informs the other; sometimes, visual images articulate what the written form cannot; and topics of “high politics” are not so “high” or “political” only when ordinary lives are marked forever, like losing a loved one to war or the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) (viz. Weber 2005). In form alone, Weber's project shakes the discipline from its tendency to remain removed from and complacent about the very subject that accounts for it: that is, relations international. But, this documentary bears more import than mere form; its content blazes a pioneering path as well. Weber's documentary conveys at least three layers of meaning. 4 The first offers a dissenting voice to a series of images produced by the American Ad Council to promote unity through patriotism in the United States shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. These, she felt, gave an incomplete understanding of what it meant to be an American, especially for those designated as “unsafe citizens” (Weber 2008). The Ad Council's campaign, for example, did not include the poor, the illegal, the dissenting, the grieving, or the hateful in its multi-ethnic, multi-cultural pastiche of America. In omitting these Americans, Weber implies, the Ad Council risked propagating the very notion of an America that has no relation to the furies that unleashed 9/11. …