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This chapter focuses primarily on advertising agencies and market research firms, the two principal outside suppliers of professional services to most marketing managers. The issues that govern the working relationship between the organization and these two agents are similar to those for other service providers. To implement many of the organization's marketing programmes requires working with outside suppliers of services, such as consultants, distributors, advertising agencies, and market research firms. Being outside the organization enables them to look at the marketing issues with more detachment than most insiders. Good working relationships with service suppliers provide leverage for the marketing team's internal capabilities. However, to gain the most benefit from these professional service firms requires the development of a commercial arrangement that is based on sound economic foundations.

This chapter explores how and why advertising agencies became program suppliers. Admen initially resisted radio because of their desire to maintain good relations with print publishers, who feared the competition posed by the new medium, in addition to concerns that the industry's professional respectability could be undermined by associating with showbusiness. Facing competition for clients from other program producers, advertising agencies soon moved into radio with varying levels of enthusiasm and commitment. Once in radio, agencies were responsible for overseeing programming and integrating it with advertising strategies. Radio's temporary nature, lack of visuals, and reliance on human voices limited admen's options. But analogizing the human voice as a “typeface,” admen began to explore alternative strategies for engaging audiences.

This chapter discusses the battles for control over programming and advertising standards between national networks and advertising agencies. During the 1930s, the networks provided advertisers access to mass audiences, and the agencies provided the programming to attract those audiences. Concerned that advertising excesses would endanger the essence of broadcast advertising, the agencies expected the networks to set and enforce standards, as publishers of magazines would. However, having been handed responsibility for programming, or editorial content, agencies resented network interference in their own programs and advertising. The two major networks—National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)—differed in their attitudes toward advertising. NBC adhered to a public utility ideal of broadcasting, providing a public service to all program producers without discrimination. On the other hand, CBS made advertisers and their needs the main part of its business.

This chapter focuses on two important advertising agencies—Batten Barton Durstine & Osborn (BBDO) and Benton & Bowles (B&B). BBDO approached radio as an ideal medium for building a corporate image, overseeing programs for large advertisers concerned not with product sales but with improving consumers' views of them as good corporate citizens. Their longest-running and best-known program for the Du Pont Company, Cavalcade of America—a docudrama tracing the history of American business and innovation—served the progressive goals of cultural uplift, public education, and good corporate citizenship. Meanwhile, B&B approached radio as an opportunity for innovating advertising by challenging the advertising industry conventions. B&B's most important program, Maxwell House Show Boat—which used integrated commercials—not only became a top prime time program but also increased Maxwell House coffee sales by 70 percent.

This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of the role of the advertising industry in the “golden age” of radio. The majority of nationally broadcast sponsored programs on network radio during the late 1920s until the late 1940s were created, produced, written and/or managed by advertising agencies. A few examples of these programs are J. Walter Thompson's Kraft Music Hall; Benton and Bowles' Maxwell House Show Boat; Young & Rubicam's Town Hall Tonight for Bristol-Myers; and Blackett-Sample-Hummert's soap operas for Procter & Gamble. The advertising industry became deeply involved in broadcast programming because advertising agencies addressed the needs of broadcasters and advertisers. This book challenges conventional views about the role of advertising in culture, the integration of media industries, and the role of commercialism in broadcast history.

This chapter examines radio advertising and how the radio became conceptualized as an advertising medium. It begins by examining the history of radio broadcasting. It then discusses the following: selling radio to advertisers and advertising agencies, strategies on how radio advertising should be funded, programs developed to generate goodwill, the debates over which music was suitable in broadcast advertising, and translating print advertising practices to sound. The chapter also examines two early programs, the Clicquot Club Eskimos and Aunt Jemima.

This chapter explores the strategies employed by advertisers and advertising agencies in investigating their audience and determining who was listening to their programs, and what kind of musical programs listeners preferred. It discusses the use of polls and surveys to assess listener preferences and to design programs that the audience might like.

Jack Benny drew from a successful vaudeville career to adapt his humor to radio form in 1932. Realizing the pressures of creating new program material on a weekly basis, he hires Harry Conn. Benny and Conn develop continuing, quirky characters and “comedy situations” in imaginative spaces away from the microphone, that create a new kind of American humor. Sponsored first by Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Benny and Conn develop their program through experimentation, addition of new character Mary, and turn Jack into the “Fall Guy” who was butt of his cast members’ jokes. Friction with Harry Conn nearly derails the program, but Benny finds new writers and the program hits top radio popularity ratings by mid-decade.

To date, domain name disputes in the United Kingdom have tended to revolve around trade marks. Most larger companies who are sufficiently motivated and financially equipped to take such disputes through to a conclusion, own registered trade marks and/or strong trading goodwill.