I stay on the email list of NewSuperstitionist because they occasionally feature an interesting development that I hadn’t heard about through other sources. Their emails in recent years reveal a change in their business model. NS runs frequent cruises to various parts of the world, with big-name “Experts On Board” to narrate and discuss what you’re seeing.
PING! Just like movies or music. The money is in the LIVE events, not the magazines and records and streaming. The magazines and records are self-liquidating premiums to bring in audiences for the live events.
Frank Edwards, in selling his short features to radio stations, mentioned that his books would serve as ‘self-liquidating premiums’. I hadn’t heard the phrase before, so started looking it up. The idea was developed by adman Duane Jones in the ’30s. His best premium was a Blarney-stone charm bracelet offered in exchange for 25 cents and a boxtop from Bab-O cleanser. Jones wrote a book on the subject in 1955, and I was enticed to read it because I wanted to see the charm bracelet. Why was it so enticing?
[Insert: The book didn’t picture the bracelet. I think this might be it. Several of them are on Ebay and Etsy, described as 1950s.]
The Jones book is mainly aimed at businesses who want to hire advertising agencies. In other words the book is a self-liquidating premium for Jones Advertising Agency.
Each chapter is packed with condensed wisdom, useful for business and life, and illuminating the permanent practices of business and advertisers.
Example: Radio began as infomercials, and the best shows in the ’30s and ’40s had the sponsor and product thoroughly integrated into the script. Modern bowdlerizers can’t edit out the product without losing the whole show. This was especially true with soap operas. Many of the best soap operas were written by the Hummert Ad Agency. When a premium like the Blarney Bracelet was about to be announced, the actors would display the bracelet and discuss it ‘incidentally’ for a few weeks before the announcement. The enchantment and glamour of the bracelet was built up before it was available.
Adventure serial/cereals followed the same integration method. An episode would focus on a device, then a cheap version of the device was offered as a premium. This Space Patrol episode features the control panel of a time machine, and ‘coincidentally’ you could get a cardboard simulation of the control panel by sending in a quarter and a Ralston cereal boxtop. [I had one of these cardboard panels when I was about 6, which corresponds to the date of the episode. It was good exercise for the imagination. I don’t remember watching Space Patrol, so I probably ordered it from the cereal box spontaneously.]
Modern equivalent: In 1990 soap operas morphed into Cable “News”. Same daytime audience, same plot patterns. Each major plot lasts for six months to a year, with a very slow micro-advance of plot from day to day.
News opera is no longer sponsored by soap, but the new sponsor takes the same care to integrate and build up enchantment. What’s the sponsor?
WAR.
= = = = = END REPRINT.
For NewSuperstitionist, the ultimate sponsor is Gaian genocide, another form of war.
Polistra's Mill 