#100 How Advertisers Can Change History

#100 Blogpost – Wednesday, July 8, 2020

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2020/07/100-how-advertisers-can-change-history.html


Posted by Denny Hatch

The Power of Advertisers:

They Can Change History!

               

In the early morning of August 19, 1920, my tiny grandmother walked into the bedroom of her elder son (my father) age 22 who was sleeping off a hangover. Waving a tiny American flag and loudly humming John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, she kept circling the bed until my father sat up and asked what in the world she was doing.

Muzzy triumphantly placed on the bed a copy of The New York Times that proclaimed the 19th Amendment had been signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson.

She could vote in the November election!

The Second Paragraph of the

Declaration of Independence

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

All MEN are created equal? Did Thomas Jefferson really mean “Women were to be treated as outcasts and second-class citizens forever?”

Note to Thos. Jefferson: Without women, you wouldn’t be here, Schmendrick.

It took 244 years for women to claim one of their “Unalianeble Rights” and deemed worthy to vote. This story — plus slavery — were the two greatest tragedies in the founding of the United States.

Type “Women’s Suffrage” into Google

And You’ll Generate 18.9 Million Results

This was a 244-year struggle.

Google “Woman’s Suffrage” and then click on “Images” at the top of your screen. Up will come hundreds of photographs of parades, meetings, rallies and mass gatherings going back to the very beginnings of photography.

Google “Women’s Suffrage Posters” and click on “Images” at the top of your screen. You’ll have at your fingertips hundreds of examples going back the early 19th century proclaiming women’s right to vote (as well as a lot of anti-women's-right-to-vote tirades).

Every one of these pro-suffrage events was made possible by brilliant, motivational speakers and organizers—Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul and many more nationwide. 

Their message was enhanced by advertising and publicity to keep the movement alive in people's minds—word-of-mouth, letter writing campaigns, flyers, newspaper ads and posters tacked up on trees, poles and buildings to get out the word using the emotional copy drivers that make people act—anger, guilt and salvation.

Women Got the Vote in 1920, Yet It Took World War II to Enable Them to Come into Their Own.

Rosie the Riveter

—J. Howard Miller, 1942

Westinghouse Corporation

Even though women gained the right to vote in 1920, the U.S. was still a male dominated society. Men were the breadwinners while “the little woman” was the “homemaker” expected to do the shopping, do the laundry, do the cooking and raise the children.

World War II Changed the "Little Woman" Paradigm

• In the years 1940-1945 twelve million men went into the military; 73% served overseas for an average of 16 months. The male dominated workforce at home was decimated.

• 350,000 women served in the armed forces at home and overseas.

• “1,074 Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) ferried over 12,000 military planes, completed countless domestic missions, and flew more than one million miles in service of the war.” —Google

• 5 million women entered the workforce in World War II. Post-Pearl Harbor women worked in a variety of positions previously closed to them. —Google

• “310,000 women worked in the U.S. aircraft industry, representing 65 percent of the industry’s total workforce (compared to just 1 percent in the pre-war years).” —Google

• “The munitions industry also heavily recruited women workers, as represented by the U.S. government’s “Rosie the Riveter” propaganda campaign. Based in small part on a real-life munitions worker, but primarily a fictitious character, the strong, bandanna-clad Rosie became one of the most successful recruitment tools in American history, and the most iconic image of working women during World War II.” —Google

The Boys Came Home from the War to a Sea Change.

For six years women replaced men in the workplace. They accomplished all their typical “little woman” stuff—raising kids, doing shopping, cooking, dishes and laundry.

Plus… they had tasted job experience apart from the typical nursing/teaching/airline stew/secretarial stuff. They were engaged in interesting work, savoring the pleasures of self-sufficiency and the fascinating interaction and camaraderie of the workplace. Especially pleasurable was the satisfaction of bringing home a paycheck! They loved it!

Sometimes an ad campaign can take on a life of its own, gaining significance well beyond what it was originally intended for.
“That’s what happened to Westinghouse Electric’s “We Can Do It” ad featuring a now-iconic image of a strong, muscular woman taking her spot in the workplace.

“The poster was originally used only as an internal morale boost to female workers at Westinghouse factories producing helmet liners during World War II. In fact, the poster was not even supposed to be connected to Rosie the Riveter, a mostly fictitious factory worker character used to recruit women to join the war effort.

“It wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s that the image began to gain traction with feminists as a symbol of female empowerment. Since then, it has been used by everyone from Clorox to Beyoncé to communicate the idea that women are strong, independent people capable of rolling up their sleeves and getting the job done.”
—Drake Baer, The Shawnee News-Star, August 24, 2014, "Fourteen Ads That Changed the World"

Can the Power of a Mass 

Boycott Also Change History?

How Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook Worked with the Russians to Change History.
On July 27, 2016, Republican nominee Donald Trump illegally called on Russia to find presidential Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump proclaimed. He added, “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Vladimir Putin took Trump’s announcement as an open invitation to aid in his quest for the presidency.

Whereupon the shadowy Internet Research Agency at 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg promptly opened 470 bogus accounts on Facebook and spent $150,000 on 5,200 ads that ran between June 2015 and May 2017.

“Most of the ads did not refer to particular candidates, but instead focused on divisive social issues such as race, gay rights, gun control and immigration.”

“WASHINGTON — Russian agents intending to sow discord among American citizens disseminated inflammatory posts that reached 126 million users on Facebook, published more than 131,000 messages on Twitter and uploaded over 1,000 videos to Google’s YouTube service, according to copies of prepared remarks from the companies that were obtained by The New York Times.

Two World-renowned Experts — Unafraid to Speak Truth to Power — Declare Putin Elected Trump.

I.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/russia-turned-election-for-trump-clapper-believes

II. 

In addition to James Clapper, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, professor of communications at Penn and co-founder of FactCheck.org “offers a forensic analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump’s victory… As Steven Livingston, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it straight.” —Jane Mayer, The New Yorker

Quick Backgrounder: How Russian Trolls Used Nazi Propaganda Techniques of the 1930s.

“Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister had an array of secret transmitters masquerading as English radio stations but based in Germany. They were deployed to arouse alarm and fear among the British people. They were to take pains to disguise their German origins, even to the point of starting broadcasts with criticism of the Nazi Party and fill their reports with grisly details of air-raid deaths and injuries, so that when the first air raids against England took place, the populace would be primed for panic. As Goebbels described it: 'Mistrust must be sown of the plutocratic ruling caste, and fear must be instilled of what is about to befall. All this must be laid on as thick as possible'.” —Erik Larson, THE SPLENDID AND THE VILE: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance during the Blitz.

Donald Trump: Perp of Hate, Fear, Threats and Racism
When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, he set the tone for his campaign and message over the next five years (and possibly the next 9 years).

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best… They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.” —Donald Trump, June 16, 2015

Fast Forward to 2020: A Recent Sampling on Facebook

The Message to Facebook Advertisers from

We know what Facebook did.

They  allowed  incitement  to  violence  against  protesters  fighting  for racial justice in America in the wake of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and so many others.

They named Breitbart News a “trusted news source” and made The Daily Caller a “fact checker” despite both publications having records of working with known white nationalists.

They turned  a  blind  eye  to  blatant  voter  suppression  on  their  platform.

Could they protect and support Black users? Could they call out Holocaust denial as hate? Could they help get out the vote?

They absolutely could. But they are actively choosing not to do so.

99% of Facebook’s $70 billion is made through advertising.

Who will advertisers stand with?

Let’s send Facebook a powerful message: Your profits will never be worth promoting hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and violence.

Please join us.

Is the Boycott Working? Might It Change History?       

• More than 160 companies have pulled their spending so far, but is it enough to force Facebook's hand to make significant change?

• Facebook's market value dropped by more than 8 per cent, amounting to about $72 billion.

• So it's fair to say investors are sending Facebook a strong message. To give some context, last year Facebook generated nearly $102 billion in advertising sales. About a quarter of that comes from big companies such as Unilever, but the vast majority comes from small businesses. —ABC.net

In addition… 

• Mark Zuckerberg just became $7.2 billion poorer after a flurry of companies pulled advertising from Facebook Inc.’s network.

• Shares of the social media company fell 8.3% on Friday, the most in three months, after Unilever, one of the world’s largest advertisers, joined other brands in boycotting ads on the social network. Unilever said it would stop spending money with Facebook’s properties this year.

• Companies from Verizon Communications Inc. to Hershey Co. have also stopped social media ads after critics said that Facebook has failed to sufficiently police hate speech and disinformation on the platform. Coca-Cola Co. said it would pause all paid advertising on all social media platforms for at least 30 days.—Bloomberg News

Takeaways to Consider

• “If I were starting life over again, I am inclined to think that I would go into the advertising business in preference to almost any other. The general raising of the standards of modern civilization among all groups of people during the past half century would have been impossible without the spreading of the knowledge of higher standards by means of advertising.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt

• “Advertising nourishes the consuming power of men. It sets up before a man the goal of a better home, better clothing, better food for himself and his family. It spurs individual exertion and greater production.” —Winston Churchill

 

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Word Count: 1910