Thursday, January 28, 2021
Quickly replaced
An unusual way of looking at sponsorship, written in 1925 when the concept of advertising on radio was brand-new.
The features come from the National Surety Company, the Bank of America, the Metropolitan Life, and a dozen other established corporations; and if you are the guiding spirit of a home, we must remind you of the cooking talks broadcast by Miss Olive Allen for Procter & Gamble, the makers of Crisco, Ivory Soap, etc. For the privilege of giving you these talks, the abovementioned firms engage the facilities of WEAF and its affiliated stations at stated intervals. They pay the expenses and they divide the resultant benefits with you fifty-fifty; they get the incidental advertising and what business that may bring and you get the full advantage of the talk.The studio and transmitter were seen as subcontractors, 'engaged' to perform a service for Met Life in the same way that Met Life might 'engage' a window-washer to keep its building clean. Economically, this is an old-fashioned view of labor value. Met Life pays the subcontractor to build a product; Met Life receives part of the value as increased insurance sales, and the customer receives part of the value as increased knowledge. This view was fleeting, quickly replaced by the newspaper model where the sponsors were merely paying to insert their advertising on the pages of the broadcast product. ¶ 6:49 AM
