Children, andThe Simpsons. To accommodate each
network’s decreased viewership, advertisers were al-
lowed to purchase more minutes per hour during
prime time as a result of a relaxation in Federal Com-
munications Commission (FCC) rules. The FCC
had recommended that no more than twelve min-
utes of commercials be broadcast per hour during
weekdays and no more than ten on weekends.
Deregulation and Corporate Mergers Under the
Reagan administration, America experienced an in-
creased distrust of so-called big government, and
the country underwent a massive surge of deregula-
tion, especially in the banking and stock industries.
Along with deregulation, the country witnessed an
increase in corporate mergers. Corporations pur-
chased other corporations, broke them into smaller
companies, and sold them off for huge profits. This
practice created a feeling of great prosperity among
those fortunate enough to have a share in the prof-
its, as there seemed to be no end to the rising stock
market, foreign investments, and defense spending.
These mergers created new, high-paying jobs in
banking, corporate law, and stocks, even as they
eliminated jobs within the merged companies. The
new jobs attracted recent college graduates and
helped created a class of highly paid, ambitious
young people.
Advertising agencies were not immune to these
mergers, which proved beneficial to advertisers. As
smaller boutique agencies began to be bought up by
larger agencies with more resources, advertisers
found they could rely on one agency for a compre-
hensive advertising campaign, including broadcast
time, print media, and outdoor (billboard) space.
These mega-agencies provided a “one-stop” shop-
ping experience for the advertiser and created a
more uniform, professional advertising campaign.
Agencies exploited the distrust of pervasive gov-
ernment by creating ads that claimed to empower
the individual and that spoke to the yuppie demo-
graphic. The most famous ad of this genre was a
1984 Apple Computer commercial that ran only
once, during the Superbowl. The ad featured a
young woman running down a bleak, gray hallway
with a sledgehammer. At the end of the hallway was a
room filled with people working on PCs and mind-
lessly watching a big screen, as if hypnotized. The
woman hurled the sledgehammer at the screen and
freed the mindless worker drones and, in doing so,
freed Americans from their slavery to PCs and Big
Brother (a reference to the totalitarian government
portrayed in George Orwell’s 1949 novelNineteen
Eighty-Four). Other ads—such as Wendy’s “Where’s
the Beef ?” campaign, in which an elderly woman is
dissatisfied with her puny hamburger, and Wendy’s
Iron Curtain campaign, which featured a Soviet
fashion show in which every “model” was unattrac-
tive, grim, and identically dressed—portrayed Wen-
dy’s consumers as empowered by a fast-food chain
that provided them with the choices and quality they
deserved and introduced catchphrases that over-
took the country.FTC and FCC Policy Changes Under the Jimmy
Carter administration of the late 1970’s, the Federal
Trade Commission (FTC) created strict guidelines
that regulated what claims advertisers could make
and how they could present their products, espe-
cially to children. In the 1980’s, President Reagan
appointed James C. Miller III to head the commis-
sion, and under Miller the FTC’s staff was cut in half
and attention to advertising decreased.
The FCC, the commission in charge of regulating
mass media, also adopted a hands-off policy, allow-
ing free enterprise to reign and advertisers to police
themselves under the chairmanship of Mark Fowler.
In the 1970’s, the FCC also had encouraged self-
regulation, but it had threatened to impose regula-
tions of its own if broadcasters did not do a sufficient
job themselves. The National Association of Broad-
casters was set up to create rules and ensure that they
were followed. The 1980’s saw a reversal in those
rules, revoking the previous twelve-minute and ten-
minute caps on television commercials per hour.
The most drastic change arguably was Fowler’s cre-
ation of a “children’s-programming-length commer-
cial,” that is, his decision to allow networks to air
entire cartoon programs featuring characters who
were also available as toys and other products. These
characters included He-Man and the Masters of
the Universe, the members of GI Joe, and the
Thundercats. Suddenly, toy manufacturers had en-
tire thirty- and sixty-minute programs with which to
advertise to children every day, although they could
not place advertisements for a cartoon’s products in
commercial time during the program.
The FCC under Fowler also loosened the restric-
tions on underwriting for public television. This re-
laxation of underwriting rules offered corporationsThe Eighties in America Advertising 19