Word: soaps
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...millions of housewives tuned in The Guiding Light this week at the same time (1:45 p.m., E.S.T., weekdays), same station (CBS), most were sure-or almost sure-that things would come out all right, as they eventually do in the sweet-sad world of soap opera. There was also no doubt that things would come out all right for the program's sponsors: Procter & Gamble Co.'s Duz soap and Ivory Flakes. As any junior advertising executive can explain, soap operas "get more advertising messages across to the consumer"-and sell more soap-simply because the housewife...
...soapmaker is more aware of this theory than Procter & Gamble's President Neil Hosier McElroy, as handsome, ruddy-faced and well-scrubbed as one of his own radio heroes. P. & G. was in the advance guard of soap opera, helped start it on its interminable way more than 20 years ago with The Puddle Family. P. & G. writers were among the first to learn that the trick is to spin the story out to fantastic lengths, with a flood of tears to wash away every smile. This year, with 13 soap operas...
...Soapbox. The addition of soap operas to American culture has been under constant attack for years. To every complaint, the soapmakers have a crisply pragmatic answer: they are written as they are because that is what their audience wants. When asked what he thinks of his soap operas, P. & G.'s President McElroy, no steady listener himself, is apt to get up on one of his own soapboxes: "The problem of improving the literary tastes of the people is the problem of the schools. The people who listen to our programs aren't intellectuals - they're ordinary...
...soap, he also means synthetic detergents*-the fast-growing competitor of old-fashioned soaps. And the way the selling spiels of P. & G.'s soaps and detergents deride each other's qualities is often completely bewildering...
...Those new detergents may be all right for dishes," warns pure (9944/100%), mild Ivory Soap on The Road of Life, "but your hands aren't made of china." Voting Doctor Malone, on the other hand, plugs a liquid dishwashing detergent: "Joy's lotion-soft suds feel so good on your hands." Ma Perkins suggests "Brand new Oxydol [with a] new detergent formula," to get clothes "whiter than sun-white." But according to The Guiding Light, "Duz does a wash like no detergent can-it's the soap in Duz that does it!" On Life Can Be Beautiful...