Early radio advertising weaponized sincerity and basic instincts for sales

Evidence

As Irna Phillips, inventor of the first radio soap operas, explained: “sincerity, honesty, genuineness—true values. If the woman listener is made conscious of these standards in the story itself, how little effort it would take to make her conscious of these same standards with the product advertising.” In Fortune magazine, Phillips revealed her own recipe for engaging female listeners. “You appeal to,” she said, “(1) the instinct for self-preservation, (2) sex, (3) the family instinct, or (4) all three together if you can manage.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 329

Categorization

• QUESTION: Phillips’ blunt formula — survival, sex, family — reads like a proto-maslow / proto-behavioral-targeting manual. Worth tracing how explicit this manipulation rhetoric was in the 1930s.
• XREF: connects to: Early 1920s ad textbooks sold crude stereotypes about women’s suggestibility — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 210; Calculated authenticity as promotion emerged in early twentieth-century America — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love:…, 319