CHAPTER 12
THE GREAT REFUSAL
In the spring of 1966, a forty-six-year-old former Harvard instructor named Timothy Leary, wearing a jacket, a tie, and a distant look, strode up the red-carpeted steps of the Plaza Hotel on New York’s Fifth Avenue and into the Oak Room for lunch. Waiting for him was a man Leary knew only by reputation: another academic, Marshall McLuhan, almost a decade older, graying a bit, but not yet wearing the mustache that would become his signature in the 1970s.
To their respective followings both men sitting in the ornate oak-paneled restaurant were “gurus,” a word just come into currency in the West. McLuhan was a scholar of the media from the University of Toronto who’d become famous thanks to his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which was full of intriguing pronouncements somehow both bold and enigmatic at once (example: “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium”). He was referred to, variously, as the “Guru of the Boob Tube” and the “Oracle of the Electronic Age.”
Leary had, at the time, the more traditional claim to guruship. Having been fired from his teaching position at Harvard, he now lived in a fortresslike mansion in upstate New York, where he was overseeing the development of a grand synthesis, part scientific experiment, part new religion. He and a friend from Harvard, Professor Richard Alpert, who was likewise defrocked and later would take the name Ram Dass, called their project the “International Federation for Internal Freedom.” The two men had successfully attracted a large band of devoted followers and their ambitions were grand. As one of them, a British doctor named Michael Hollingshead, explained, “We felt satisfied that our goal was Every Man’s, a project of Every Man’s private ambition. We sought for that unitary state of divine harmony, an existence in which only the sense of wonder remains, and all fear gone.”1
Among other things, Leary and his followers were deeply committed to what might fairly be termed an attentional revolution. They wanted the public to block out the messages of the mainstream media and other institutions, which they saw as little more than tools of mass manipulation. Instead the Federation was setting forth on an inward voyage, with a bit of help: to reconfigure the public mind and its priorities, Leary believed in the great potential of taking psychedelic drugs—like LSD—still legal then.
By the time of his lunch with McLuhan, Leary was growing in fame and wanted to bring his ideas to a broader audience; his great ambition was to reach the young, now understood to be broadly disillusioned with how things were and looking for something different. As he would describe it, “For the first time in our history, a large and influential sector of the populace was coming to disrespect institutional authority,” giving rise to a contest between “the old industrial society and the new information society.” He believed that McLuhan might be able to tell him how he could reach all the disaffected.2
McLuhan was fairly sympathetic to Leary’s project. For McLuhan saw the media as having become “extensions of man”—as much a part of us as our skin. To take control of one’s media consumption was therefore a form of self-determination, a seizing of one’s own destiny. And so after hearing Leary out, he finally gave him some counterintuitive advice: “You call yourself a philosopher, a reformer,” said McLuhan. “But the key to your work is advertising.” If Leary truly wanted to wean great numbers from the pernicious effects of the existing media, he needed first to reach those people by the media’s most pernicious means. Most of all, he needed some kind of a catchy line, and to show him how it was done, McLuhan composed a jingle for him then and there, based on an old Pepsi ad: “Lysergic acid hits the spot / Forty billion neurons, that’s a lot.”
That meeting, Leary would remember, “got me thinking further along these lines: the successful philosophers were also advertisers who could sell their new models of the universe to large numbers of others, thus converting thought to action, mind to matter.” Taking McLuhan’s advice seriously, he made a list of the most revolutionary American slogans: “Give me Liberty or Give Me Death” came to him first, and then “A Nation Cannot Exist Half Slave and Half Free,” “The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself,” and finally “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco” (the latter had been used over the 1940s and 1950s, replacing “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet”). But he needed his own slogan. Later that day, in the shower, the answer suddenly came to him. All he needed was the right occasion to bring it to a broader audience.
Late in 1966, a “psychedelic artist” named Michael Bowen invited Leary to an event in San Francisco meant to unite various emerging countercultural and “alternative” groups—alienated students, poets, rock musicians, jazz hipsters, and members of biker gangs. His advertising posters billed the event as “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.” And so it was on January 14, 1967, in Golden Gate Park that Leary first took his carefully constructed message to a broader audience. His speech centered on the infectious refrain, repeated over and over:
“Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.”
McLuhan’s advice worked. Leary’s line caught on as well as any advertising slogan and became, effectively, the motto of the counterculture.
Most would take Leary’s words as a call to pay attention to where your attention is paid; mind what you open your mind for. If this was not America’s first call to attentional revolt—Packard and Lippmann had each issued his own, as we’ve seen—Leary’s proposed a far broader compass of things to ignore, not only messages from television and government but college, work, parents, as well as other sources of authority. He called for a complete attentional revolution.
Some two decades on, Leary would write that “unhappily,” his ideas had been “often misinterpreted to mean ‘Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.’ ”3 Indeed, in the 1960s it was earnestly asked where one was supposed to go after dropping out. But enough who got the message understood that it referred to something more profound, and were able to connect Leary’s prescription with the vision of other social critics. Among the most influential of these was another guru of the counterculture, Herbert Marcuse of the “Frankfurt School,” one of a set of German philosophers who’d fled the Third Reich in the 1930s. Marcuse believed that he was witnessing a “Great Refusal”—a term he first coined in the 1950s to describe “the protest against unnecessary repression, the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom—‘to live without anxiety.’ ”4
Like Leary—whom he may have inspired in part—Marcuse tended to believe that liberation could not be achieved from within the system, but required its fundamental reconstruction. “Intellectual freedom,” he surmised in 1964, “would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination” and also the “abolition of ‘public opinion’ along with its makers.” And so the youth movement held out the promise for something never achieved except in mythology—the radical liberation of the human condition. It was a far more ambitious aim than anything hoped for even by Karl Marx and his followers, who simply sought liberation from an unfair economic system. Marcuse envisioned an end to all forms of repression, whether social, economic, or technological—a sort of return to the Garden of Eden. By this Great Refusal, he dared hope, the people might “recognize the mark of social repression, even in the most sublime manifestations of traditional culture, even in the most spectacular manifestations of technical progress.” The result would be “solidarity for the human species, for abolishing poverty and misery beyond all national frontiers and spheres of interest, for the attainment of peace.”5
But on the way to paradise, where should one direct his attention if not to the ubiquitous media? What should people be doing with their lives? For his part, Leary offered an answer from a far older and more mystical prophetic tradition, locating the proper focus of attention with things of the spirit. “The wise person devotes his life exclusively to the religious search,” Leary said, “for therein is found the only ecstasy, the only meaning.” This was the ultimate sense of his great exhortation, as he would explain in one speech: “The message of God never changes. It may be expressed to you in six simple words: turn on, tune in, drop out.”6
Leary forecast that enormous resistance would meet those trying to take his advice. “The directors of the TV studio do not want you to live a religious life. They will apply every pressure (including prison) to keep you in their game. Your own mind, which has been corrupted and neurologically damaged by years of education in fake-prop TV-studio games, will also keep you trapped in the game.”7 He was right in seeing that American commerce, and the attention industries in particular, would view what Leary advocated as a mortal threat. But he seems not to have anticipated that just as he had appropriated the tools of advertising for the promotion of his cause, the side of the advertisers might just as easily appropriate his cause for their purposes.
Before Leary, there was Pepsi. In 1963, Alan Pottasch, a newly hired advertising executive at the Pepsi Cola Company, was sitting in his office, pencil in hand, desperately brainstorming ideas for a challenge he might mount against Coca-Cola, the establishment soft drink par excellence, known then as “the brand beyond competition.”
Decades of experience had shown that competing with Coca-Cola was a Sisyphean undertaking. Like other giants of the 1950s, Coke had invested millions in advertising meant to cultivate a fierce brand loyalty. Along the way it had succeeded, as few firms do, in transcending mere persuasion and instead convincing people that Coke was not only the better choice but also somehow the only choice. As historian Thomas Frank explains, “Coke built an unrivaled dominance of the once-localized soft-drink marketplace: it offered a single product that was supposed to be consumable by people in every walk of life—rich and poor, old and young, men and women—and in every part of the country.” Coke managed to create a phenomenally low “brand elasticity”—the economist’s term for the willingness of consumers to accept a substitute, a matter proven by the fact that Pepsi was similar, cheaper, yet remained unable to build market share.8
Coke had succeeded by identifying itself with everything wholesome and all-American, drawing on the deep American self-regard and desire to belong—and somehow making it feel that to drink something else might be vaguely treasonous. At Christmas, it even associated itself with Santa Claus, and in fact the company helped cement the modern image of Santa Claus in the public consciousness as a rotund bearded man with a broad belt, clad in Coca-Cola’s red and white.
Pepsi, meanwhile, was the perennial underdog. First bottled in 1893, when it was called Brad’s Drink, Pepsi was originally sold as a minor-league patent medicine: the “healthy” cola. The name was a play on its claim to treat dyspepsia, or indigestion. As the trailing brand, Pepsi was willing, early on, to try innovative promotional techniques, like catering to the disenfranchised. Coca-Cola advertised itself as the all-American drink, but by this it meant the white American drink, and so Pepsi in the 1940s briefly experimented with niche marketing by creating an all-black marketing department, known as the “negro-markets” department.9 Over the 1950s, Pepsi depended entirely on identifying itself not as healthful, or even better tasting, but the cheaper cola, occupying the market niche that generic colas hold today. Its most successful jingle, the one McLuhan borrowed for Leary’s psychedelic venture, had gone like this: “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot; 12 full ounces, that’s a lot.” Truth in advertising: Pepsi was sold in a 12-ounce bottle for 5 cents, the price of 6.5 ounces of Coke. By 1957, when Pottasch joined the company, despite all its efforts Pepsi was being outsold by a factor of nearly six to one, giving a classic demonstration of the power of brand to undermine the concept of choice—but without anyone feeling they had sacrificed any freedoms. They were just choosing Coke, that’s all.
Pottasch had begun to persuade his management that selling Pepsi as a cheaper alternative was not, in the long run, a winning strategy. But what else could Pepsi be? Like Leary, Marcuse, and others, Pottasch noticed that there was something going on with the young people, who were listening to different types of music and dressing differently than their parents, and—while this was still the early 1960s—giving some signs of rebellion against the consumer culture constructed over the 1950s. But if Leary or Marcuse sought to ride the swirling social movements to challenge the established social order, Pottasch thought he could employ it to sell Pepsi Cola.
“We made a decision,” he later recalled, “to stop talking about the product, and start talking about the user.”10 He thus conceived of marketing Pepsi without reference to its inherent qualities, focusing instead on an image of the people who bought it, or who should be buying it. They were the people of the moment: the young, the rebellious, those who (to borrow a later slogan) “think different.” They would be known, in Pottasch’s new formula, as “the Pepsi Generation.”
The new ads were the picture of vitality: beautiful young people casually dressed, hanging out, and having fun. “Come alive!” the text read, “You’re in the Pepsi generation!” Others read, “For a generation really on the move.” Printed in 1964, they look nothing like the more staid advertisements of just a year earlier. Following up on popularity it had won among African Americans, Pepsi also ran similar ads with African American models, also building what would become the brand’s countercultural bona fides.
“For us to name and claim a whole generation after our product was a rather courageous thing,” Pottasch would later remember, “that we weren’t sure would take off.”11 But his intuition would prove correct. “What you drank said something about who you were. We painted an image of our consumer as active, vital, and young at heart.”12
Pepsi, of course, did not create the desire for liberation in various matters from music to sex to manners and dress. Rather, it had cleverly identified with a fashionable individualism. All individualisms, of course, harbor a strain of narcissism, and Pepsi had implicitly understood that, too. For ultimately what the Pepsi Generation were consuming wasn’t so much cola as an image of themselves.
Whether Pepsi’s approach was truly original is a good question; advertisers are continually claiming to invent things that, on closer inspection, have long existed. But clearly, this campaign had nothing to do with the traditional hard sell, with the product, and what it might do for you, front and center. Pepsi’s advertisements and their imitators were in some sense just an even softer version of the soft sell, which pictured an ideal and associated it with the product. Into this category one might put both the “Arrow Man,” a dashing figure who wore Arrow shirts in the 1920s, and the Marlboro Man, solitary smoker of the Great Plains. But no one who smoked Marlboros wanted or expected to become a wrangler. The Pepsi difference was to suggest that consuming the product somehow made you into what you wanted to be.
In any case, by the end of the decade the Pepsi Generation campaign would start steadily closing the gap with Coke, reaching comparable market share, even if Coca-Cola remained ahead. Meanwhile, Pepsi kept riding the wave it had caught, engineering an ever fuller embrace of the counterculture, even its psychedelic aspects. The company aired a bizarre television spot in which a young woman wearing a sequined dress dances through a night in New York punctuated by abrupt flashes of lights and sound, resembling an LSD trip, with an occasional Pepsi logo thrown in. But Pepsi had greater success with the “Live–Give” campaign, playing on more appealing countercultural values, like a return to natural, simple pleasures and living in peace. Here was consumption coaxed with an anti-consumerist ethos; it was Pepsi selling the counterculture to mainstream America, as Leary and others had only aspired to do.
Consider a typical spot from 1969 that opens with a toddler atop a horse, followed by a long-haired man drinking water (not Pepsi) from a stream using his bare hands. “There’s a whole new way of living,” sings a voice, “Pepsi helps supply the drive.” Then a rapid succession of images: children frolicking in nature, a young couple walking on the beach, a child milking a cow—ordinary people doing regular, yet fulfilling things. A voice-over goes:
“Recognize it? This is the world you live in. Packed with simple pleasures. Places to see. People to love. And Pepsi-Cola is the one cola that belongs with every happy, hopeful moment you love.”
The chorus chimes in with the new slogan: “You’ve got a lot to live…and Pepsi’s got a lot to give…”
It’s a truly remarkable compilation of hippie-era images and values. There are no status symbols, workplaces, or wealth; instead, all that is indulged in are natural, easy pleasures, mainly outdoors. The people are attractive but not unattainably so, and the various races and ages mingle in harmony.
What Pepsi pictured (or co-opted) was essentially Marcuse’s imagined earthly paradise—unrepressed joy, activity, and love, a life altogether free of anxiety or oppression. There are no technologies, only Frisbees and flowers; love, both familial and romantic, is experienced without hindrance or implied hierarchies. In essence, Pepsi advertised liberation.
The commercials were famous for their music, which sounded like a mixture of the Beatles and Sesame Street. Here is how the company described them:
Exciting new groups doing out-of-sight new things to and for music. It’s youth’s bag and Pepsi-Cola is in it. There’s a whole new way of livin’ and Pepsi’s supplyin’ the background music…It’s a radio package that obliterates the generation gap and communicates like a guru.13
It is interesting to consider what vision the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s might have achieved if it could have reversed the commercialization of human attention. Its leaders aspired to an age when commercial television and its advertising would face mass indifference and wilt into irrelevance. Once people had tuned out the “establishment” sources of information, advertising would be recognized as a form of propaganda and carefully avoided. Starved of requisite attention, it would collapse as it nearly did in the 1930s. In its place, the public mind would attend to realities that weren’t commercial contrivances—nature, spiritual paths, friends, family, and lovers. Media, if any were needed, would be things like live concerts or perhaps programming in the public interest. A cynic might say the 1960s vision of the alternative future was just sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, with, perhaps, some public radio thrown in.
There’s little question that the revolt of the 1960s did lead part of a generation away from the attention merchants of the 1950s. But industry calibrated an effective response and perhaps ultimately read the public mood more accurately than any guru. For they had detected the essence of the spirit of liberation: for most people it was not an end of desire (as in some Buddhist sense), or a wish for solitary withdrawal (in a monastic sense), or even, as Leary had hoped, a spiritual longing equal to motivating an inward turn. Rather, after decades of relative conformity and one of ultimate conformity, what had been uncorked was powerful individual desires and the will to express them. Above all, most simply wanted to feel more like an individual. And that was a desire industry could cater to, just like any other.
The most confident among the advertisers knew that the 1960s would not extinguish consumerism, for a simple reason: desire’s most natural endpoint is consumption, and advertisers, after honing their art for half a century, knew how to convert all manner of desire into demand for products. And young people’s desires were no exception. In fact, as one advertising executive, John Adams, put it in 1971, “They [the hippies] are in the peak acquisitive years, and their relative affluence enables them to consume goods and services at a rate unheard of for their age level.”14
Marcuse, who was the kind of idealist given to unrelenting pessimism, predicted in 1964 that the promise of liberation would be used for further repression. “Liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination,”15 he argued, for “free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves” and “free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear.”16 This is where an intellectual loses his guruship: leading his followers toward a conceptual bridge too far. If the people wanted liberation, and if Pepsi was selling it, most people seemed to think, why not just buy it from them?
Of course, to succeed at selling a new snake oil, albeit one with a spiritual flavor, advertisers would still need one thing—access to the public mind. That they would have it points to the main reason why the hoped-for attentional revolution of the 1960s and 1970s ultimately failed. It was nothing to do with the message, which was, in fact, powerfully delivered and readily embraced. Rather, the failure was owing to one often unremarked fact: over the 1960s and 1970s, most people simply did not stop watching television.
The public was, the activist-adman Jerry Mander wrote, “as they had been for years, sitting home in their living rooms, staring at blue light, their minds filled with TV images. One movement became the same as the next one; one media action merged with the fictional program that followed; one revolutionary line was erased by the next commercial, leading to a new level of withdrawal, unconcern, and stasis. In the end, the sixties were revealed as the flash of light before the bulb goes out.”
Consider that, over the 1960s, the countercultural Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors would all reach their largest audiences by appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show. Ultimately, the habit of prime time proved more powerful than the forces arrayed against it. With their access to the public mind mostly intact, the industries of attention had the opportunity not just to survive but to prosper.17
While there had always been those who viewed broadcast television as irredeemable, more moderate elements believed that the medium was essentially neutral; if it had become nothing but an attention harvester, it might yet be reimagined and reprogrammed to serve somewhat loftier goals. Essentially they believed in the potential ascribed to TV early on by those like Murrow, who had said, “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.”
Accordingly, by the early 1960s, noncommercial television stations were broadcasting in major cities: WNET in New York, KQED in San Francisco, WGBH in Boston, to name a few. It was Murrow himself who opened WNET in 1962, proclaiming the beginning of a “great adventure.” And it was with juvenile audiences that the noncommercial alternatives found their first successes, most notably Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street.
“I got into television,” Fred Rogers once told CNN, “because I hated it so.” A soft-spoken aspiring minister who favored cardigans, Rogers had the idea, radical in its time, that children’s television ought to be good for children. He had worked at NBC in the early 1950s, and then moved to Pittsburgh to work on a local public show named The Children’s Corner, which briefly ran on the network.
Children, of course, have less control over their attention than adults, but when they do pay attention, they open their minds more fully to the messages presented. By the early 1950s advertisers had come to understand the commercial potential of reaching children by television. The Howdy Doody Show, featuring a clown and a dancing puppet, for instance, was sponsored by Kellogg’s, and during every show Howdy Doody would dance around a cereal box. But those were the early days. By the late 1950s, programmers had learned to create shows that in a sense served as advertisements themselves, like The Mickey Mouse Club, which helped nurture enduring attachments to characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and other friends. That, in turn, helped drive sales of toys, tickets to Disney’s feature films, trips to Disneyland, and so on. And by the late 1950s, toy makers began creating toys specifically designed to be advertised on television: like Mattel’s first girl-directed toy, the Barbie doll, whose commercials, which ran during breaks in The Mickey Mouse Club, chronicled glamorous episodes in Barbie’s life.
Fred Rogers had fundamentally different ideas as to what the goals of children’s television should be. But he could find no lasting place for his ideas in 1950s American commercial television. Instead he got his break in Canada, where the State-run Canadian Broadcasting Company invited him to present Misterogers for northern children. On his new show, Rogers invited children into an imaginary world populated mainly by puppets, who spoke to children as friends. When in 1964 Rogers returned to the United States, he relaunched the show in Pittsburgh as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And so began his new routine: changing his shoes as he came in the door, symbolizing the passage into a different world. Rogers’s approach to his audience was highly innovative. He addressed ordinary, even mundane challenges, but ones likely to face his young viewers, like a fear of haircuts or monsters, or a quarrel between siblings.
Sesame Street, public television’s second great success, was a self-conscious effort to “master the addictive qualities of television and do something good with them.” The show’s creators appealed to children by mimicking commercial television’s tricks for gaining attention, with techniques like breaking news (narrated by Kermit the Frog), sponsors (“Today is sponsored by the letter E”), and “commercial breaks” featuring favorites like Ernie and Bert. Author Malcolm Gladwell summed it up this way: “Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them.”18
Public broadcasting was not quite radical, but its growing strength came at a time when America’s networks had indeed begun a close flirtation with losing relevance—meaning, young audiences. Most of NBC’s, ABC’s, and CBS’s leading shows were still keyed to the tastes of the 1950s. If we examine CBS, in particular, we see that top shows of the 1960s were “rural” shows like The Beverly Hillbillies (about a backwoods family living in Beverly Hills), Green Acres (urban socialites take up “farm living”), and Hee Haw (a country music variety show). Innocuous, comforting entertainment, to be sure, and still capable of bringing tens of millions to prime time, each and every night, but hardly in sync with countercultural viewers. As ratings began dropping, the whole enterprise began to sag. Commercial television was surviving the late 1960s on sheer inertia—the lasting power of attentional habits is never to be underestimated—and the fact that the backlash, such as it was, was mainly in the younger demographics, and had not reached the whole population.
Buoyed by their success with children, over the late 1960s public broadcasters began to reach directly for countercultural audiences with shows like the Public Broadcasting Laboratory, a magazine program produced by Fred Friendly. It debuted with a drama featuring blacks in “white-face,” and among PBL’s productions was Inside North Vietnam, a fairly sympathetic portrayal of the country under American air attack. Another ambitious effort was The Great American Dream Machine, an antiestablishment, anti-consumerist variety show, if such a thing could exist. “We’re trying to show what a great country this could be,” said the producers, “if we got rid of the false values sold to us by hucksters and con men who have contempt for the public.”19
Meanwhile, in an effort to consolidate and extend the success of college radio, National Public Radio was launched at just about the same time, its first program director a college radio veteran, Bill Siemering. “I was an ordinary-looking Midwestern kind of guy,” he said once. “No one ever remembered who I was. So I grew a beard.” The debut of NPR’s new flagship, All Things Considered, ran an hour and twenty-eight minutes, beginning with live coverage of Vietnam protests before turning to a lighter segment on small-town barber shops in “this age of unshorn locks, with shagginess transformed into a lifestyle.” Over time, NPR would gain audiences even larger than public television’s, proving the older broadcast platform yet had real life in it.20
Things might have turned out different for television as a whole, and CBS in particular, had the network not appointed a twenty-five-year-old named Fred Silverman as director of daytime programming in 1963. Silverman would later be acclaimed as “the man with the golden gut.” Though hardly a hippie, Silverman had a good ear for what would speak to his generation and countercultural critics. Perhaps, too, he was just young enough to teach himself the Pepsi trick for selling to them.
Silverman’s first successes were in children’s programming, and his first coup was the unexpected success of A Charlie Brown Christmas, in 1965. Commissioned independently, the special was nothing like the typically gauzy 1950s holiday programming, for it was written as a sharp rebuke of the commercialization of Christmas. Rejecting the flashy aluminum Christmas trees then in fashion, Charlie Brown buys a pathetic actual pine sapling that seems to die when the first ornament is attached. The perennial loser and “blockhead” has blown it again. But, then, the other children realize that the sad little spruce captures the true spirit of Christmas. They decorate it into a glorious tree, which their song brings to life. A Charlie Brown Christmas proved once again the counterintuitive truth that anti-commercialism could yield great commercial success; and so it did, earning high ratings for CBS and excellent exposure for its sponsor, Coca-Cola.21 Among other things, Silverman, who also launched Scooby-Doo, cited Sesame Street as an influence and proof that a show “can be entertaining and informative at the same time.” By the late 1960s, CBS had already canceled its last prime-time game shows and launched 60 Minutes, an obvious bid to resurrect See It Now. Now the show would prove that bracing investigative journalism could, in fact, garner top ratings.
By the late 1960s, some at CBS began to see that incremental adjustments aimed at children would not solve the problem facing television. If the business was to grow again, it had to do things aimed beyond the fan base of The Lawrence Welk Show. And so in 1970, Fred Silverman, just thirty-two, was made head of all programming, supported by Robert Wood, the new network president, who was forty-five. The new CBS would challenge many axioms of the attention merchant. Perhaps most importantly, it sought not just the largest audiences, but the “right” audiences. CBS was already the largest network, but the men took seriously what McLuhan called the “dinosaur effect”—the premise that they might be at their largest size right before extinction. The two immediately set about a thorough purge, redirecting the network toward the young, liberated, and socially conscious. Among others, chairman William Paley, now in his seventies, but still active in programming decisions, approved. As he said “You finally have…a vision of what is absolutely correct.”
Within just two years, commercial television—still by far the heavyweight champion of attention capture—had seen its own revolution of sorts. CBS canceled nearly every show about the rural/urban divide and characters that were “fish out of water.” As Life magazine wrote in 1971, “Slain were every single one of the hillbillies and their imitative relatives.” Also on the block: the once dominant Ed Sullivan Show. Now came a whole new kind of program, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (about an unmarried urban career woman), All in the Family (centered on the experiences of a working-class bigot living in Queens, New York), and M*A*S*H (an antiwar comedy about a field hospital during the Korean War, with regular appearances by blood and death). It was the era of “relevancy,” and a CBS press release touted its new shows as appealing to the “now generation.”
Silverman’s bet was astute and his touch as programmer every bit as fine as Paley’s—Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family, and M*A*S*H were all big hits, eventually to become icons of television history. By 1974, the network had retaken nine of the top-ten-rated programs, and television itself had successfully made itself “relevant,” saving it from a slow sapping of its energies, as its first and most faithful viewership began to age and die. At the same time, Silverman’s success also perhaps showed the challenge and limits of reforming the medium according to Murrow’s vision; for ultimately the business model remained the resale of human attention, and that reality was encoded in the very nature of all the programs. As Paley had first discovered, sometimes you could make the sale with panache; but if not, it still had to be done. Jerry Mander writes, the reformers believed “that television could communicate their message as well as any other….Intent on changing other people’s minds, they did not consider that television might change those who used it.”22
Even a show as beloved and hilariously subversive as M*A*S*H can be understood to exemplify what Marcuse described as the kind of opposition that actually perpetuates the status quo.* Alan Alda starred as Hawkeye Pierce, an irreverent but deeply humane surgeon sick of the military and uptight people in general. Here was a man of the 1950s that any partisan of the counterculture could love. It was an example of a show, as Jerry Madel put it, that let the writers feel “they were still reaching ‘the people’ with an occasional revolutionary message, fitted ingeniously into the dialogue.” At the same time, M*A*S*H kept tens of millions of Americans, would-be counterculturals among them, faithfully tuned to commercial television during prime time. If the contest really was, as Leary and others proposed, for the minds of the people, it was lost when America renewed its contract with the attention merchants. The broadcasters had adjusted the terms: now it was free, relevant entertainment in exchange for attention. But in the end, everyone would remain easily accessible to advertisers.23
As for the advertisers themselves, Pepsi had shown that they could make the adjustment to the new sensibility even more nimbly than the broadcasters. A gang of hip new “revolutionary” agencies with young staff surged to success with innovative ways of doing things that mimicked the new younger thinking. These agencies—“the creatives”—mounted a serious challenge to the approaches, and the billings, of advertising firms established over the 1910s through 1920s and still dominant through the 1950s.
The best and clearest exemplar was New York’s Wells, Rich, Greene, founded in 1966 by thirty-eight-year-old Mary Wells, its president and guiding force. Everything about the agency was timely, including Wells’s announcement at its founding that “we are terribly aware of the current sounds and fears and smells and attitudes. We are the agency of today.” Even the offices spoke rebellion: as one visitor wrote: “There is a psychedelic ‘LOVE’ poster in the foyer. The guest chairs are rattan or bamboo and they have baby blue pillows….The receptionist is from Haiti with just the right amount of accent and chocolate thigh. It follows that the girls beyond the white foyer wall are mini-minded, but a couple are wearing pants.”
For its slogan, Mary Wells chose one perhaps equally suited to a yoga studio: “love power.” The idea, apparently, was to reach consumers with friendliness, and make them love the product; it was a 180-degree turn from Claude Hopkins’s idea of scaring people into buying things. The approach eventually found its way into Wells’s famous “I
NY” campaign, with the iconic Milton Glaser design.24
The new breed of advertisers made it explicit that they were not like the advertisers of old. As a cosmetics ad written by Wells Rich reads, “We’re not going to sell you a lot of goo you don’t need.” Instead, the ad reassured its readers, they were with the buyers, and shared their desires:
We’re young too.
And we’re on your side.
We know it’s a tough race.
And we want you to win.
The firm infused the same rebellious themes into nearly all of its work. Wells herself instructed the staff to come up with ideas this way: “Consider what you can’t do, then do it.” Indeed, doing it the unconventional way became reflexive. When, for instance, Philip Morris gave them the account for Benson & Hedges—an old British brand whose main distinction was its length (100 mm)—Wells came up with a strange set of advertisements that focused on the disadvantages of a longer cigarette—being caught in doors, under car hoods, and so on, with the tagline “Benson & Hedges 100’s must taste pretty good; look what people put up with to smoke them.”
Much of this approach depended on hiring a new generation of creatives. By the late 1960s, agencies were a parade of long hair and miniskirts. Draper Daniels, who had worked on the Marlboro Man at Leo Burnett in 1950s, noted wryly, “Obviously, pink shirts are more creative than white shirts. Paisley shirts are more creative than pink shirts. A blue denim shirt, or no shirt at all, is the ultimate in creativity. Beads or a locket are a sure sign of something close to genius.”25
The new hires were asked to put their revolutionary ideology acquired in college or graduate school into causes like Pond’s cold cream. “The suffragettes who whip into the store for today’s Pond’s creams,” read the new copy, are “a whole new genre of unfettered, free-spirited, savvy women who know how to cut through the phony baloney of the beauty business and get right down to basics.” After a while, the trick became obvious enough for even the stodgiest of the 1950s advertisers and companies to get in on the act. Anyone, apparently, could be a hippie, or at least work with that desire for individuality and freedom to book billings.26
Perhaps no effort better typified the dexterity of advertising’s old guard than the campaign for Virginia Slims. Introduced in 1967 by Philip Morris as a Benson & Hedges spinoff for women, Slims were just as long but even thinner. Leo Burnett’s creative department dusted off the old 1920s saw of smoking as women’s liberation to produce a version styled for second-wave feminism. Now the “torches of freedom” were being carried by women in floral print minidresses. The jingle ironically casts this return to one of modern advertising’s lowest points as the ultimate step in the steady march of progress:
You’ve come a long way, baby
To get where you’ve got to today
You’ve got your own cigarette now, baby
You’ve come a long, long way
What was the secret to how the attention industries cheated death yet again, even when the whole zeitgeist of the late 1960s and ’70s was seemingly against them? The success may finally be put down to the saving logic of capitalism. For what makes capitalism so powerful is its resilience and adaptability. The game is never lost, only awaiting the next spin of the wheel. As a mode of production, capitalism is a perfect chameleon; it has no disabling convictions but profit and so can cater to any desire, even those inimical to it. In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank theorizes that “in the sixties…hip became central to the way American capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public.” And so even “disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”27
It would, however, be unfair to claim in a broad sense that the commercial attention industries “won” the 1960s from their noncommercial antagonists, whether public broadcasters, spiritual seekers, those espousing liberation à la Marcuse, or merely those yearning for a simpler life. For clearly those ideas would leave their lasting mark. Individualism became the dominant American ethos, even of capitalism itself. But in a narrower sense, commerce did win: the counterculture’s call for the revitalization of spirituality and social consciousness inspired very few to make a permanent break even from television, the great portal to all that was wrong with society. To the contrary, by the early 1970s, television viewing had increased to an average of six hours per day per household. Perhaps Jerry Mander was right to say that the well-meaning had simply fought the wrong fight, seeking to reform television instead of realizing that it was the problem. What kind of force could take a moment of such disenchantment with its existence and turn it into a moment so ripe with opportunity?28 Who could turn the world on with its guile?
Many were the hopes that would be chewed up and spit out again, Timothy Leary’s among them. By the early 1970s, his dream of a religious awakening under the influence of psychedelics lay in ruins when he was imprisoned on drug charges following the criminalization of LSD. And so by that point, the main public exponents of his ideas—albeit in modified form—were companies like Pepsi, Pond’s, and the makers of the grapefruit beverage Squirt, whose slogan was “Turn on to flavor, tune in to sparkle, and drop out of the cola rut.”
Ever ready to identify itself with anything unquestionably American, even Coca-Cola, the brand once synonymous with 1950s conformity, would eventually arrive at the same place as everyone else. In 1971, they got another pillar of the establishment, the New York agency McCann Erickson (slogan: “Truth well told”), to express Coke’s own version of liberation and love in what would be the brand’s most enduring campaign. McCann identified the sweetest and most generous aspirations of the era with the buying of Coca-Cola. The result: a canticle to consumption, to fellowship as commerce—and the best damn commercial of the 1970s:
I’d like to buy the world a home
And furnish it with love
Grow apple trees and honey bees
And snow white turtle doves
I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I’d like to buy the world a Coke
And keep it company
That’s the real thing29