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Manhattan's Rheingold beer people learned this when they went after the "ethnic market" with a $300,000 series of beautifully filmed ads, each showing a group of Greeks, Negroes, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Irish or Japanese partying it up with Rheingold. The mock-modest point was that the sponsor really didn't know why his beer was so widely loved, but "We must be doing something right." Wrong. Research later showed that no minority group wanted to drink a beer that could be so popular with other minority groups. As a result, Rheingold switched to a more forceful, if simpleminded, pitch proclaiming the "ten-minute head."
Delivery Service. Despite such evidence of consumer independence, some critics believe that TV commercials, along with all advertising, have a seductive effect upon the population, compelling it to overconsume its own overproduction. Even John Kenneth Galbraith, who has referred to advertising as "organized public bamboozlement," points out that the picture is not quite so simple and that advertising is an inevitable part of the U.S. economy. Harvard Sociologist Chad Gordon observes: "We are a materialistic culture, and material acquisitions came before the first commercial was ever made. Commercials did not create status envy or the desire for increased status" even though they can overstimulate those desires, and many others as well.
The more immediate question is not what commercials do to the economy, but what they do to TV. Obviously, they will not go away much as one would like them to at times. But must they dominate the channels quite as much as they do? Sometimes it appears that all TV fare is one super-commercial, with entertainment simply an extension of the sales pitch. The networks become, in effect, just audience-delivery services. It is not that they are influenced by advertisers they are psyched by them. In a classic episode, Chevrolet once changed the script of a western to read "crossing" instead of "fording" a river.
Such an incident is less likely now than it used to be (a recent Chevy commercial actually mentioned Ford by name). But it still remains indicative of a certain way of thinking by sponsors. With the exception of a few enlightened companies among them Xerox, Hallmark, Bell Telephone and Western Electric most advertisers still prefer to avoid controversial or specialinterest programs, and are happily led to the kind of show that provides the best frame for a sales pitch. Sometimes the frame and the picture merge completely, as when Clairol builds a beauty pageant around its commercials.