The reason I feel the way I do about political advertising is that I’ve been making my living in advertising for about 30 years, and I know the damage it can do. There’s an old, very old, adage that says, “nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.” You get convinced to stop for a Bonzoburger, you don’t like it, so hey, you don’t eat there again. Ah, capitalism! But if you elect a candidate that doesn’t work, you’re stuck with him, pal. And before you get to not vote for him again, he gets to vote on dissolving your Social Security, sending troops to Kosovo and impeaching the president (another guy whose ads you liked).

All this assumes that the only reason you vote for someone is their advertising. And there are those people who would say that they’re not influenced by the ads. These, I suspect, are the same people who pay an extra $8,000 for an SUV because it has a first-aid kit. They say that while they may see the ads, they vote because of the issues and the platforms put forth by the candidates. This may well be true for a lot of folks. Or to put it another way, Oh, God, I hope so.

But the fact of the matter is that you get bombarded by a lot of advertising for one simple, proven-in-the-political-arena reason: It works. As Steven Kates wrote in the December 1998 Journal of Business Ethics (hey, just because I’m in advertising …), “Political advertising is believed to work under certain conditions for certain types of voters and for certain types of purposes such as image development, agenda setting, or attacking opponents.”

Even if you’re not a “certain type of voter,” ask yourself: Isn’t this just a peachy way to elect people? It’s image we want, so let’s get ourselves a handsome guy — he’s much more qualified than Abe would ever be. And of course, we want the agenda set on TV, not by the needs of the voters, so let’s make sure the election is about Willie Horton, not about where the money is coming from for our schools.

But let’s get to the real sirloin of this discussion, what we all know is poking us in the eye and giving us a national migraine: attack ads.

There is nothing wrong with attacking what an incumbent has or has not done. That’s what debates are for. But in a debate, there is something called a rebuttal. It’s the time when the attacked gets to respond to what’s been said. At the same time and place, in front of the same audience. In other words, the attacker has to stand for what he’s said. The same is true in a trial. An accusation is made, a defense is given.

But in a 30-second ad, anything can be alleged. By the time the respondent responds, days or even weeks have gone by. And of course, the natural reaction is to mount counter-attacks that are also immune to scrutiny. The net result for the viewer is an endless assault of shrill, demeaning finger-pointing. Congress on “Jerry Springer.”

Don’t kid yourself. Even as we take great delight in getting rid of suits in the office, there is a feeling that the institutions that make up the steel girders of our society are cracking. We can live with the fact that our politicians are, after all, just human beings. But can we survive if we force them to mud-wrestle to keep their jobs?

In commenting about a barrage of Democratic commercials, Kenneth T. Walsh wrote this in U.S. News: “The commercials have succeeded in painting the Republicans as extremists. But the negative barrage also has intensified cynicism about all politics, leaving many voters not so much angry toward Washington as feeling it is irrelevant.”

He went on to say: “Studies indicate that attack advertising breeds such disgust among moderate voters that many do not vote at all. If the current scorched-earth campaign continues, the November election could be dominated by die-hards and ideologues while centrists stay home.”

This is the real danger. Not that we might elect a bonehead or two; heck, good government needs boneheads. Say what you might about Joe McCarthy, you’re probably not going to see blacklists in Hollywood again. (At least not about being communist. About being involved in making the “Blair Witch Project,” perhaps, but not about being a communist.) No, the real danger is that by maintaining a methodology that rewards video veneer and violence of voice, we encourage a huge amount of self-interest money to finance a hissy fit. The result is disdain for everyone in the arena. Raise your hand for election and sure, you might start out as a hero: Mr. Hobbs goes to Washington. But I guarantee you that two weeks into the contest, you’ve become a self-sniffing, pocket-stuffing progress-stopper bent on screwing the voter out of rights, wallet, safety and any chance of keeping a job. And just wait till you’re the incumbent, you slug.

No wonder the next generation of voters is changing the channel. In “A Politics For Generation X,” in the August 1999 Atlantic Monthly, Ted Halstead cites Gary Ruskin, “an Xer who directs the Congressional Accountability Project, a public-policy group in Washington, D.C.,” who says “Republicans and Democrats have become one and the same — they are both corrupt at the core and behave like children who are more interested in fighting with each other than in getting anything accomplished.”

Halstead doesn’t refer specifically to political advertising, but he does cite some dire statistics that to me indicate some of the damage we’re doing to ourselves: “Voting rates are arrestingly low among post-Boomers. In the 1994 midterm elections, for instance, fewer than one in five eligible Xers showed up at the polls. As recently as 1972 half those aged eighteen to twenty-four voted; in 1996, a presidential-election year, only 32 percent did. Such anemic participation can be seen in all forms of traditional political activity; Xers are considerably less likely than previous generations of young Americans to call or write elected officials, attend candidates’ rallies, or work on political campaigns.”

As an ad guy, the first thing I’d say to the Founding Fathers if they called me in for a brand revitalization is that the current brand managers have screwed it up royally. Instead of sending out messages about values, performance and quality, they’ve blown the brand’s goodwill bank account on sense-off coupons to get themselves elected. It’s time we made them behave.

Again from the Atlantic Monthly (and again from the mouths of babes): “America’s greatest need these days is to clear out the underbrush of name-calling and ideology so that simple things can work again.”

“But what are we to do?” I hear you moan as your head hits the screen. “The First Amendment sez we must let them do this to us.”

Two hundred-plus years ago some great men gathered together, kicked the British out and created a new nation. We are eternally grateful for both these things, although I sometimes feel we ought to go to London, tell them we’ve maxed out the credit cards and give the whole thing back. These men wrote a document to tell us how to govern ourselves. Why? Because they were sick of having some aging syphilitic decide the rules on the basis of whether or not his mascara ran. This document survives and guides us today.

But hopefully we have learned that documents need to grow just like people. Progress changes how we act and how we think. Inventions beget behaviors. Discoveries provide opportunities. And most important right now, technology changes the rules. No law should ever be passed abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, or to petition the government for redress of grievances.

But like speed limits and bans on assault weapons and discouraging people from yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, we just have to find a better way to allow our candidates to have their say and speak it too. There wasn’t any VH1 when those words were written. There weren’t any Web sites, transit ads or caller I.D. As a society that is leading the charge into the next century, we simply have to come to grips with better ways to provide information while protecting what we got. We’re dealing with it for commerce. We’re dealing with it for pornography. Sometimes effectively, sometimes not, but we’re trying. Why can’t we turn some of this effort toward maintaining the dignity and effectiveness of government, which those guys who wrote the Constitution were literally ready to die for?

And there are ways. We’ve already got televised debates. What about cable access forums in which candidates can respond to viewer inquiries and their opponents can react? What about Internet sites at which issues can be articulated and examined? We’ve got hundreds of channels now. How about devoting one to something other than fishing? There have to be a dozen or more better ways to do this than to pour millions into paid political video manipulations that do nothing more than cause people to say the hell with it.

Helayne Spivak — who did the creative thing at places like Hal Riney, Young & Rubicam and Ammirati Puris Lintas and last held the nosebleed title of World Wide Creative Director, Chief Creative Director, North America, for J. Walter Thompson — was on former president George Bush’s ad team during his campaign against Gov. Michael Dukakis. Archive magazine asked her the difference between political campaigns and propaganda. Here is part of what she said:

I don’t think anymore that there is any difference. [In the Bush campaign, the] candidate was a product. Well, I guess we get what we deserve, because if you can affect a presidential campaign on a 30-second commercial, if people will not listen to debates, if they’re not interested in hearing what the candidates have to say, yet one negative political ad is able to move people, I guess it’s our own fault. It’s all propaganda.

Don’t blame Spivak. She’s telling you what is.

I just think we have to give some thought to what is going to be. Stopping paid political advertisements won’t make for a new dawn in America, certainly not by itself. But as a guy who makes ads, I’d like to see ads go back to what they were made for: selling soap.

Examples of vintage Burma-Shave road signs, including a blue South Dakota version. (Ray Crockett photo)

These red ads (one state, South Dakota, insisted that they be dark blue to keep them from conflicting with the red reserved for warning notices) usually consisted of five signs. For example: “DON’T PASS CARS/ON CURVE OR HILL/IF THE COPS DON’T GET YOU/ MORTICIANS WILL/BURMA-SHAVE.”

Some slogans touted Burma-Shave as a pre-aerosol “brushless” shaving cream—a cream you could scoop out of a jar and lather onto your face without relying on an old-fashioned brush and moistened soap in a mug.

("Thoroly"? I guess if the word doesn't fit the composition, change the spelling. . .)

In 1925, Clinton Odell, a Minneapolis lawyer, took the liniment his father created and transformed it into a brushless shaving cream. He named his company Burma-Vita—Burma, because most of the essential oils in the liniment were from the Burmese portion of the Malay Peninsula, and Vita from the Latin for “life”: “Life from Burma.”

Some of Burma-Shave’s primary “brushless shaving cream” competitors were Barbasol and Noxema.

The company was sold to Philip Morris in 1963, and all the signs were removed soon thereafter. As a testament to the campaign’s cultural significance, a set of signs was donated to the Smithsonian, where it still resides. But the brand eventually petered out. After being sold yet again (this time to the American Safety Razor Company) and then reintroduced in 1997, it never regained a hold in the market.

A history of the Burma-Vita Company, written by Frank Rowsome Jr. and illustrated by Carl Rose, was published by the Stephen Greene Press in 1963.

By the early 1960's, the rising costs of road-sign maintenance (as well as new and more effective ways of advertising) sounded the death knell for the Burma-Shave signs.

The following pages from Frank Rowsome Jr.’s book list all the road-sign Burma-Shave phrases produced from 1927 to 1963.

The soft drink that would be known as 7Up was created in 1929 by Charles Leiper Grigg in St.Louis as part of his “Howdy” line of sodas and was originally called “Bib-Label Lithiated (it contained the mood stabilizer lithium citrate until 1950) Lemon-Lime Soda.” It was almost immediately re-labeled “7 (7 natural flavors) Up Lithiated Lemon-Lime,” and then finally just “7Up”.

The first 7Up logo from 1929.

In terms of logos, an original winged trademark soon gave way to the red squared logo that lasted until the late 1960s that coincided with that period’s brilliant “Uncola” re-branding campaign. I always felt they had GOLD in that Uncola moniker. . .

A 1935 7Up label before the Howdy Company's name was changed to 7Up in 1936, followed by two Howdy beverage labels.

By the late 1940s 7Up was the third most popular soft drink in the United States. By the time the 1950s rolled around, the company had employed extensive branding techniques to keep the momentum going. The following three binders contain examples of what was offered to the bottlers and distributors to reinforce the product’s presence.

A catalog of 7Up sales/marketing items circa 1954.

This page includes tipped-in glossy paint chips.

These next three pages would NEVER fly with the HR Dept in 2012. . .

Before everyone had TV's in their home, it was common to go out to watch television.

7Up Sales & Promotion Merchandise Catalog circa 1954 - 59.

(would love to have those binders. . .)

Actual cloth swatches included.

More swatches.

1959 "Salesmakers" Catalogue

2 actual decals using the older logo with the woman reaching for bubbles- love the way the color is broken down into separate shapes and levels.

Actual booklet attached.

"Fresh Up Freddie" was the 7Up mascot created in 1957 by ad agency Leo Burnett and Walt Disney to help sponsor the Disney "Zorro" TV series.

Here’s a link to more info on “Freddie”: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/fresh-up-freddy.html

Remember, it's from 1959. . .

Ditto. . .

2 mid-1930's 7Up bottles.

Left: 1940's bottle with 8 bubbles on label. Right: 1950's bottle 7 bubbles.

"Like" was introduced in 1963 as a diet version of 7Up. It contained Calcium Cyclamate which was determined to be a carcinogen in 1969. "Like" was discontinued in that same year and Diet 7Up was introduced in 1970 sans the Cyclamates. This bottle is dated 1964.

Late 1960's/early 1970's can.

"The Uncola".

As a final footnote, I was lucky enough to work on spots for 7Up International using the Susan Rose/Joanna Ferrone character “Fido Dido”! Here’s one of my favorites done while I was at the Ink Tank Studio in N.Y.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JpHjeGXyw8

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

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Even dead, Jackson is a massive draw. He’s currently the subject of a global Cirque du Soleil tour with the horror movie title “Immortal.”  And Pepsi knows that overseas – especially in markets like Asia — his brand is as ubiquitous and American as well, cola.

Bringing back the dead is a peculiar – if increasingly common – gambit. Now that the earth has run out of living celebrities, they’ve had to revive Tupac to perform at Coachella  and Grace Kelly to make kissy face with Charlize Theron to sell perfume.  They even had to dig up Martin Luther King Jr., to pitch for Mercedes-Benz.

There comes a time when a celebrity passes into our iconography. Today, seeing the images of Elvis and Marilyn and James Dean in different pop culture contexts barely seems any stranger than fake Abraham Lincolns selling cars in February. And why wouldn’t Jackson’s people wring a few more opportunities out of his incredibly lucrative image? Somebody’s got to pay for all those $10 million mansions.

Senior PepsiCo marketing executive Frank Cooper told the WSJ that the new campaign will be both “respectful” and “forward looking.” It may be respectful. But there’s nothing “forward” about the dead. Jackson’s image survives as an easy symbol of pop music, but the man whose life ended from propofol intoxication three years ago, whose doctor is currently serving time for involuntary manslaughter, couldn’t seem less like the right spokesman for the notion of “living for now.”

Shockaroonie, some people found this offensive. The ad went the wrong kind of viral, with a social media explosion of negative feedback. It’s not that comedy with a racial element is always wrong wrong wrong. The Jewish Hank Azaria is currently in his third decade of playing the Indian Apu Nahasapeemapetilon on “The Simpsons,” and nobody seems to be outraged about this. Kutcher’s incredibly unnuanced performance isn’t that, though. On his blog, writer Anil Dash explains it perfectly –  “a fake-Indian outfit and voice” constitute “the entire punchline” of the clip. And, as he eloquently put it, “I can’t imagine I have to explain this to anyone in 2012, but if you find yourself putting brown makeup on a white person in 2012 so they can do a bad ‘funny’ accent in order to sell potato chips, you are on the wrong course. Make some different decisions.”

And so that’s what Popchips is trying to do. On Wednesday, in a “message from Keith” on the company’s website, its founder, CEO and foe of proper capitalization Keith Belling wrote, “we received a lot feedback about the dating campaign parody we launched today and appreciate everyone who took the time to share their point of view. our team worked hard to create a light-hearted parody featuring a variety of characters that was meant to provide a few laughs. we did not intend to offend anyone. i take full responsibility and apologize to anyone we offended.” That’s a constructive, self-aware response to a potential public relations disaster. (Kutcher, who in recent months has been tainted by his hasty Twitter support for Penn State coach Joe Paterno and a divorce that featured rumors of unprotected extramarital sex, has so far had no comment on the problematic ad campaign.)

It’s a positive thing that Popchips understood its mistake and made an immediate effort to rectify it by pulling the ad. That step forward is mitigated somewhat, though, by the a large number of “get over yourself” responses on Anil Dash’s blog. We’ve still got much work we need to do in this country around issues of stereotypes and sensitivity, folks.

You don’t have to look any further than the entire Popchips campaign to see what I mean. Its remaining “World Wide Lovers” include the stoner Brit “Nigel,” who’s “seeking higher planes of consciousness” (GET IT????), the effeminate German “Darl” — a swishy riff on openly gay designer Karl Lagerfeld — and the dumb redneck “Swordfish.” In the end, there’s also regular old, newly single Kutcher, who describes the other guys in the club as a “freak show.” Hey, geniuses at Popchips – you’re still perpetuating gross generalizations. Also: They’re not funny. It’s a great big snack-loving country. Being cool about brown people – and gay people, and people others would call “white trash” – shouldn’t be such a crunch.

The FCC rejected a push by the industry to water down the measure. But the rule as passed also has serious limits. For example, the data will not be searchable or uploaded in a common format.

The rule will first apply to affiliates of the four major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) in the top 50 TV markets. All other stations will have until July 2014 to come into compliance.

“[L]arge areas of some swing states, like Virginia, Missouri, Wisconsin and Michigan, could see an influx of advertising in markets outside of the top 50,” the Sunlight Foundation noted in an analysis today. It was also not immediately clear exactly when the rule will go into effect for the top 50 markets.

Then there’s the crucial question of the format in which the files will be available. FCC spokeswoman Janice Wise told ProPublica that the commission is not creating a searchable database of the political ad files.

“We’ll accept whatever [file] format they provide,” she said in an email.

That will make it much more difficult to analyze the information.

Wise said there are no specific plans to make the database searchable.

By opting to allow stations to submit political data in any format, the commission departed from a recommendation made last year by in an FCC working group report.  The report called for the political file to be put online and that “as much data as possible [be] in a standardized, machine-readable format” that “could also enhance the usefulness and accessibility of the data.”

Also not clear is how the broadcast industry, which vigorously lobbied against the rule, will react.

“[W]e will be seeking guidance from our Board of Directors regarding our options,” the National Association of Broadcasters said in a statement decrying the vote.

In March, the industry group submitted a filing with the commission raising “serious questions about the FCC’s authority” to require stations to put political ad data online.

“That was written as a legal memorandum, which is code for, ‘We’ve lawyered up and we’re ready to sue over this,’” says Andrew Schwartzman, a longtime FCC watcher at the Media Access Project.

The broadcasters’ group declined to comment beyond its statement.

On a Thursday earnings call for Belo Corp., one of the companies that has been fighting the disclosure measure, CEO Dunia Shive suggested that broadcasters would continue to fight the new disclosure rule.

“I don’t think the conversation is over with respect to being able to continue talking about if we will ultimately have to include ad rates online,” she said, Broadcasting & Cable reported.

Belo spokesman R. Paul Fry told ProPublica that the company merely “want[s] to continue the dialogue on this subject.”

The FCC also said today it would review the new rule after a year to see if any changes need to be made before all stations will be required to come into compliance in July 2014.