Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (47 page)

Other studios soon sprang up in the major cities of Europe and the United States. By the late 1840s, nearly every city in the U.S. had a “daguerrean artist,” and smaller towns were served by itinerant photographers traveling by wagon. Photography was starting to realize its promise.

Click to
page 348
for the next part of the story.

Julius Caesar wore a laurel wreath crown to hide the fact that he was balding.

Do you have testophobia, the fear of taking tests? If you don’t, then test your skills at the meanings of these other fears. They’re 100% real.

1. coulrophobia 2. phalacrophobia 3. automatonophobia 4. liticaphobia 5. myxophobia 6. geniophobia 7. cacophobia 8. atychiphobia 9. selenophobia 10. coprastasophobia 11. phobophobia 12. Francophobia 13. didaskaleinophobia 14. caligynephobia 15. arachibutyrophobia 16. decidophobia 17. automysophobia

A. failure B. slime C. making decisions D. France E. the moon F. ventriloquist dummies G. beautiful women H. lawsuits I. clowns J. phobias K. being dirty L. becoming bald M. school N. ugliness O. constipation P. chins Q. peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth

Answers:

1-I; 2-L; 3-F; 4-H; 5-B; 6-P, 7-N; 8-A; 9-E; 10-O; 11-J; 12-D; 13-M; 14-G; 15-Q; 16-C; 17-K.

The enamel on a human tooth is only 1/1,000th of an inch thick.

Soaps
—
you either love ’em or hate ’em. Either way, you might be interested to learn where they come from.

In the early 1930s, Richard Deupree, the president of Procter & Gamble, had to make one of the most important and most difficult decisions in the history of the company: Should they continue to advertise their products, even though the country was suffering through the Great Depression?

Times were tough. Financially strapped customers were defecting to cheaper brands, forcing P&G to introduce less profitable “price brands.” But for all the good that did, P&G’s sales still dropped 28% in 1933, and the price of their stock fell more than 70%.

What was the point of advertising when customers (not to mention the company) were going through such hard times? Maybe it made more sense to conserve cash and wait for things to improve. A lot of the company’s shareholders argued that Procter & Gamble should do just that, but Deupree had other ideas.

Deupree noticed that despite the Depression, some companies were actually prospering. The Fuller Brush Company, famous for selling its line of household brushes door-to-door, was thriving; so were many other companies that sold basic household necessities. And as crazy as it sounded, people were still buying radios even though they were a luxury. What on Earth were people doing buying luxury items in the middle of a depression?

Deupree concluded that no matter how much people had to cut back on their household expenses, some items—like soap—were so essential that families would not go without them. And if they really
wanted
something—like a radio—they were willing to scrimp and save their pennies for as long as it took to get one.

If people were going to spend money on things they needed or
wanted, Deupree figured that Procter & Gamble had no choice but to advertise…or lose business to competitors that did.

Elephant tusks continue to grow as long as the animal lives.

And since the number of households with radios was increasing, Deupree believed P&G should continue experimenting with the new medium.

Radio broadcasting was barely a decade old—KDKA, the country’s first commercial radio station, had only been broadcasting since November 1920. During the day, audiences were smaller because husbands were at work and children were at school. Those few daytime shows that did exist, such as
Live Stock Reports, Our Daily Food,
and
Mouth Hygiene,
didn’t attract very large audiences. Most broadcasters focused on providing evening programming, when everyone could listen.

Procter & Gamble was one of the first companies to realize that housewives working at home during the day represented a huge and potentially lucrative listening audience for the products it sold.

Remember, this was the era when most household chores had to be done by hand—few homes had washing machines or automatic dishwashers, and nearly all cooking was done from scratch. After a housewife finished preparing breakfast for her family and doing the dishes, she might spend hours washing clothes by hand with bar soap and a washboard; when she finished, she spent what was left of the afternoon cleaning the house or doing other chores. Then she prepared dinner; after that she did the dishes. Each day was filled with hours and hours of backbreaking, tedious work, and there was little to ease the boredom. Until radio.

Deupree and other executives understood that if they created programming that women could listen to while they were doing their chores—many of which required the use of soap—they could advertise and sell a lot of Proctor & Gamble products in the process. But what kind of shows would work the best? It would take nearly a decade of experimentation for P&G to figure that out.

As far back as 1923, the company had created a recipe show called
Crisco Cooking Talks,
in which every single recipe, naturally, called for Crisco shortening. The show was successful, and P&G
followed up with shows teaching people how to use Camay soap, and Chipso laundry soap, as well as a second show (one apparently wasn’t enough) on how to use Crisco.

What’s special about Mount Irazú in Costa Rica?

Today these shows would probably be considered “infomercials”—their purpose was not to entertain the listener, but rather to teach them new ways to use the product being advertised. It worked, but Deupree and other executives knew the shows didn’t come close to realizing radio advertising’s full potential.

In 1930 Procter & Gamble created a show that featured a singer named George the Lava Soap Man. George didn’t teach listeners about Lava soap; all he did was sing. It didn’t matter—sales of Lava went up anyway, and the experience taught P&G execs that entertaining listeners made more sense than instructing them.

But George the Lava Soap Man was missing something—a hook. If a listener missed George’s show one day, what difference did it make? They could always tune in the next day without feeling like they’d missed anything, because one day’s singing was as good as any other.

There had to be a way to create a format that would compel listeners to tune in every single day, maximizing the number of P&G ads they heard and keeping them from straying to shows sponsored by the competition.

One technique that had proven effective in Proctor & Gamble’s newspaper advertising was the comic strip serial. Ivory soap’s ad campaigns featured “The Jollyco Family.” Each week the strip featured a member of the Jollyco family or a neighbor using Ivory soap. There was even a snooty villainess named Mrs. Percival Billington Folderol who used colored, scented soaps instead of good old-fashioned Ivory. The story line continued from one week to the next, so people had to read the strip every week to keep up with what was going on.

The campaign was effective: Readers responded to the ads as if they were just another comic strip. They also bought soap—lots of it. After “The Jollyco Family” strip premiered in a New York newspaper, sales of Ivory soap jumped 25% in only six months.

If a continuing newspaper serial could sell soap, what about a
radio serial? By 1932 Proctor & Gamble was ready to find out.

It’s the only point in the Americas where one can see both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

In 1932 they introduced a 15-minute radio serial called
The Puddle Family
on WLW in Cincinnati to advertise Oxydol laundry detergent. But that flopped. The following year they tried again with a show called Ma
Perkins,
the continuing saga of a widowed lumber mill owner who mothers her employees and helps them solve their problems. Once again Oxydol was the sponsor.

In every 15-minute show, Ma Perkins or the other characters managed to plug Oxydol 20 to 25 times, or nearly twice a minute. “We knew the repetition would be very irritating and we’d get complaints,” one P&G executive said, “but the business was bad enough that we decided to try it.”

Sure enough, P&G received 5,000 letters of complaint that first week alone. Within a few weeks, however, reports of another kind began arriving at company headquarters: all over the country, P&G salespeople were reporting that sales of Oxydol were picking up. Way up—in Ma Perkins’s first year on the air, sales of Oxydol more than doubled, and they kept on climbing.

In a very short time, Ma
Perkins
grew into a national phenomenon. To many listeners, she was more than just a radio character: she was a member of the family, a close confidant, a best friend. An astonishing number of people actually believed she was real, Alecia Swasy writes in
Soap Opera:

Ma Perkins became America’s beloved “mother of the air.” Fans wrote asking her advice on their personal lives. Some sent her pot holders. One older woman suggested in a letter that the two could be companions in their “fading days.” She asked Ma for directions to “Rushville Center,” so she could begin packing her bags.

Proctor & Gamble had finally found a radio formula that really hooked the listening audience. The “washboard weeper,” or “soap opera,” as it would soon become known, had arrived.

Ma Perkins
sold so much Oxydol that Procter & Gamble decided
to create shows for their other products. Camay soap sponsored one called
Forever Young;
Chipso soap flakes was advertised on
Home Sweet Home;
and P&G White Naphtha laundry detergent sponsored
The Guiding Light.

A dragonfly can use its feet for perching but not for walking.

By producing its own shows and advertising on them as well, Procter & Gamble cut out so many middlemen that it saved as much as 75% of its advertising costs. So they kept creating more shows, and so did competitors like Colgate and American Home Products. By the early 1940s, there were 33 different soap operas on the radio, creating a solid block that started each morning at 10:00 a.m. and ran straight through till 6:00 p.m. Listening to the soaps during chores became a pop-culture institution—more than 40 million people were tuning in every day.

Richard Deupree’s advertising gamble had paid off. Thanks to soap operas, Proctor & Gamble not only survived the Great Depression, it thrived: Between 1933 and 1939, sales of Ivory soap nearly doubled, and sales of Crisco nearly tripled. These and other brands like Camay and White Naphtha became household words. And on the strength of their sales, Proctor & Gamble was well on its way to becoming the largest soap manufacturer in the country.

Will Proctor & Gamble stay on top? Will Ma Perkins ever be on television? Will Uncle John ever leave the bathroom? Tune into
page 439
for part II of our saga.