Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

George Parker at Adhurl hit it on the pointy little head of The New York Times (NYT) ad column which breathlessly reported the "new trend" of marketers sponsoring TV programs.  New?  NEW?!  Where and how does Timesman Stuart Elliot believe the term Soap Opera originated?  More specifc to TV, sponsors buying the entirety of a show goes back more than a half-century: Texaco (Milton Berle), the Colgate Comedy Hour, the original Lawrence Welk show sponsored by Dodge, Alcoa Theatre,  the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, etc., etc.  Bottom line: nothing new.  Radio invented it.  You remember radio.  It was the thing that television was supposed to replace. Elliot should know this, too.   You can read Parker's unedited, take-no-prisoners blog here.   When TV programs became prohibitively expensive to sponsor on a solo basis, the one-sponsor model melted away.  Powerful marketing, it was.  Talk about brand acclimation in the formative years!  Those of a certain age can remember jingles and characters better than most of the crap we were force-fed in duck-and-cover elementary school.  Brush your teeth with Colgate.  A little dab'll do ya. There's a whole kernel of wheat in every Wheaties flake.  He's feeling his Cheerios (GIS).  Can't even remember how many boxtops of how much dreck cereal I cut off and mailed in for how much junk.  My mom was right all along. But I've been eating Grape Nuts (KFT)ever since.  That's a lot of breakfasts. That's branding.