I love almost everything Brandweek does, but several weeks ago, the magazine published its best article yet. Titled “It’s Good to Be Jerky,” the article reported that beef jerky had changed its image, and was now seen as “a healthful snack for on-the-go urban professionals.” Resounding confirmation of jerky’s surge came from no fewer than four meat-snack professionals. “People’s minds have already changed about beef jerky,” Alan Bridgeford, president of Bridgeford Foods, told Brandweek. James Sampson, marketing manager for Frito Lay’s Oh Boy! Oberto jerky, went a step further, vowing: “If you eat our jerky, you’ll get past your problems.” Yet a third meat-snack executive confirmed the writer’s suspicion that jerky “has arrived.”

Was the New Jerky a legitimate cultural phenomenon or mere wishful thinking by jerky-mongering corporate executives? To find out, I called Sampson. What had Sampson meant, I wondered, when he told Brandweek, “If you eat our jerky, you’ll get past your problems”?

“I’m sure [the reporter] quoted me accurately, but I can’t remember saying that,” he tells me. “That is honestly not my belief. My belief is, if you’ve got problems, you should seek professional help.”

Sampson took pains to emphasize that, in his view, there’s “a hard road ahead” for jerky. “We want to convince people that this thing they never think about is actually a viable snacking alternative,” he says. At the same time, he says, he needs to get folks to stop thinking about Slim Jims. “Right now, if people think jerky, they think Slim Jim,” he says. “And we’re not that. We’re this other thing.”

There is, as Sampson explained to me, a kind of natural order of jerky. At the bottom of the barrel is the humble meat stick — high in fat, so-so in protein and made up of bits of the anatomy of animals that most people would prefer not to eat. “Think about a meat stick,” Sampson muses. “It is highly processed. It has a large amount of stuff in it. You can’t quite be sure what they put in there. They grind up beef. They grind up chicken … They put a number of different species in there.” Sampson points me toward the ingredients stated on a Slim Jim. “You’ll notice that the second ingredient listed is something called ‘mechanically separated chicken.’ Now, I’m not going to get into how the chicken is separated. Let’s just say that it’s a pretty interesting process. But, as terrible as it is, it gives the product its mouth feel.”

Next up the ladder of meat-snack evolution is “chopped-and-formed jerky,” a segment that Sampson finds difficult to explain. “Basically, it’s a re-formed stick of beef or a re-formed stick of turkey,” he says. “It’s finely ground meat, with a relatively high amount of fat, re-formed into something that looks like beef jerky.” But what is it, exactly? “All I can say is it’s been significantly changed,” Sampson says. “It was once something. But it’s not that anymore.”

Up a notch from chopped-and-formed is something called beefsteak jerky. “Imagine taking a piece of natural-style jerky and grinding it up,” Sampson says. “Then, imagine re-forming that into a stick or bar. It’s a quarter-inch thick. It’s naturally low in fat … That’s your beefsteak jerky.”

At the meat-snack summit is natural-style jerky, such as that made by Oh Boy! Oberto. Natural-style jerky is low in fat, high in protein and made from whole cuts of beef. “This is the premium segment of the category,” Sampson says. “You take whole-muscle meat. You marinate it. You slice it in a drying house.”

“Then you grind it up?” I guessed.

“No,” Sampson says. “You don’t grind it up. You package it, just the way it is. It’s natural-style jerky. It’s as close as you get to unadulterated meat.”

Alas, these distinctions are too often lost on the jaded East Coast palate. “We do better out West,” says Alison Melody, account director at Suissa Miller, Oberto’s advertising agency. “What we’ve found is that on the East Coast, jerky is still not perceived as a mainstream snack food.”

Several months ago, the intrepid Oh Boy! team headed to New York in hopes of changing that perception. “We were just reaching out and trying to understand the jerky market,” Sampson says. “Trying to get people talking about how jerky might fit into their lives.” Unfortunately, the discussion got off to a rocky start. Respondents said things like, “It’s roadkill, it’s got to be roadkill,” Sampson laments. “Or, ‘I’d never put that in my mouth.’”

Happily, Sampson believes this consumer antipathy is not insuperable. “It turns out more people eat jerky than we think,” he says. “There’s this constant search going on within the snacking category, which we call ‘The Search for Snacking Alternatives.’ And it’s interesting what happens when you put people in a group setting. If one confesses, they all confess.”

“There are definitely a lot of eaters out there,” Melody says. “It’s not just the kids eating it. It’s the husband eating it. It’s the wife eating it. We call them ‘closet consumers.’” (Later, I was to find out that one of these closet consumers is Salon’s very own book editor Laura Miller.)

Now that the closet consumers have been smoked out, the next step, Melody says, is “actually getting [them] to acknowledge publicly that jerky is a compelling snacking option.” Toward that end, Oh Boy! Oberto has invested in a $7 million advertising campaign, revolving around the antics of a jerky-obsessed septuagenarian, “Grandma Oberto.” In the campaign, Grandma races a mountain bike, jumps out of an airplane and rappels down the face of a cliff, all for the glories of Oberto jerky. “Grandma Oberto is doing active things,” Sampson says. “What we’re trying to communicate is that the product is highly portable.”

But teenagers are unlikely to be weaned off their Slim Jims by the charms of Grandma Oberto alone. To accomplish that task, the Frito Lay contingent is turning to opposition research. “We’ve done focus groups with Slim Jim users,” Sampson says. “We’ve asked them, ‘Do you know what you’re actually eating?’ ‘Nope, I never read the ingredients statement.’ ‘Well,’ we say, ‘why don’t you take a look at that?’”

To the consternation of Sampson and his team, the Slim Jim loyalists turn out to be a pretty stoical crew. “They didn’t seem too bothered by it,” Sampson says. “Maybe one or two would ask, ‘What’s mechanically separated chicken?’ ‘What do you think it is,’ the moderator was instructed to reply. People tended to draw pictures of a chicken carcass flying at a jet engine,” Sampson says wearily.

Informed of the true provenance of mechanically separated chicken, respondents “would get very quiet,” Sampson says. “You could kind of see them working it through their heads.”

“Does that bother you?” the moderator asked. Inevitably, Sampson says, the answer was no. “They don’t care,” he says. “They keep saying, ‘I don’t care what’s in it. I recognize it as a Slim Jim.’”

My next call was to Jeff Slater, vice president of marketing for Goodmark Foods, which manufactures and distributes Slim Jims. I was curious to hear Slater’s response to Sampson’s description of his product as a repellent substance, counter to the dictates of common sense, good health and kindness to animals. I was surprised by his reaction. Far from getting angry, Slater seemed to positively revel in his product’s noxiousness. “I mean, think of it,” he says. “It’s this gross stick. When you bite into it, it snaps. It’s nasty. But that’s OK.”

“Teen boys love the product,” explains Jo McKinney, account director at North Castle Partners, Slim Jim’s ad agency. “They really relate to it. They think it’s nasty. And it is. It’s just a nasty, nasty brand. With nasty, nasty advertising to go along with it.”

The ads are indeed nasty, treating viewers to a peek down the digestive tract and into the stomach, where Slim Jim Guy inevitably creates havoc. In the most recent execution, a teenage boy eats a Slim Jim and then jumps into a pool. “You’re supposed to wait 30 minutes,” yells Slim Jim Guy. “How about a beefy, spicy cramp?” Slim Jim Guy jumps up and down, pulling on the interior walls of the stomach, ultimately giving the boy a terrible cramp. The spot closes with Slim Jim Guy ripping through the logo and bellowing, “Eat me!”

Slim Jim Guy, McKinney says, is nothing more than “a tall, nasty piece of meat,” whose antics will appeal to defiant teens. “We are targeting teenage boys, 12 to 17,” she says. “At that age, you feel invincible. You want to do things that people don’t approve of … You’re risking life and limb everywhere. So our product just fits in.”

But canny Goodmark Foods is already looking forward. Caught up in the frenzy of this jerky moment, Goodmark is shoveling cash at all its jerky brands, including a $10 million campaign that will position its Pemmican Beef Jerky as the natural-style jerky that allows meat-snack lovers to “Survive the Day.” As the teenage eater’s taste buds mature, Goodmark is plotting various ways to make the transition from Slim Jim to Pemmican. There are bold new flavors, a meaty new Web site, even a redesigned, fresh-faced Indian-head logo.

Now Goodmark wants to do even more. “All of us really bring a lot of baggage to the jerky market,” Slater explains. “These days, we’re trying to clean-slate ourselves, and be a little more open-minded.”

Uh-oh. “Jerky has never been marketed as relevant to women,” McKinney says. “It’s had much more of a masculine, tear-into-it image.”

Now the Slim Jim team is hoping to level the playing field. “We’re currently doing a lot of qualitative research with women,” Slater says. “The results have been quite eye-opening. … It turns out when women try the product, they like the product. It meets a real salt craving that they have.”

The project, Slater stresses, is still in its nascent phase; and so there are limitations on what he can tell me. What he can say is that he is working with a Kansas company, New Product Insights; and that together, they are developing a new, hybrid, women-oriented meat snack that is both jerky and, somehow, not-jerky. “We’ve been using some nontraditional brainstorming methods, utilizing a technique called “‘category transfer,’” he says. “How do you take something that’s worked in one category — and make it work in a totally different platform?”

It could be, for instance, that jerky marketers have a lot to learn from companies like Cover Girl and Maybelline. “Think about the way women buy makeup,” Slater says. “Makeup is very compact. It’s very small … It’s easy to fit in your purse. Now, the challenge is — how do we take that attribute and relate it to women who don’t currently use our product?”

“What does any of this have to do with jerky?” I ask, confused. “Let me put it this way,” Slater says. “Think of Altoids. Now think of jerky.” He pauses. “The product may be different,” he says. “The packaging may be different. But the idea is the same. We’re both selling portability.” The curiously strong mint — now available in kippered beef.

Whatever one thinks of Slater’s presumption that the biggest obstacle to jerky consumption among females is … the bulky packaging, his heart is certainly in the right place. And so, inspired by Slater’s quest for gender equity in meat snacks, I decide to try some of the product myself. Spurning the gastrointestinal delights of Slim Jim, I opt instead for the Pemmican, two packs of which Slater has sent via FedEx. Let’s see. There is Sweet Mesquite, and Spicy Teriyaki. I decide to try them both.

Guess what? They’re delicious! The Sweet Mesquite is a fiery concoction, a generous medley of herbs and spices. The Spicy Teriyaki, reputed to combine a “pepper punch” with “the authentic taste of the Orient,” is even better, somehow summing up in one mouthful all the mysterious pleasures of that remote continent.

My plan had been to try a little bit of jerky, then throw the rest away. But it was so good, I had to eat it all — fast. Within two minutes, my fingers were scrabbling along the bottom of both empty bags. “I can’t believe I ate all that jerky,” I say to the redesigned, fresh-faced Indian head on the package. And the sage old Indian seemed to twinkle back at me, as if he’d known it all along.

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.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

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.