Marketing+to+Women

As radio grew, the emerging national networks (the Columbia Broadcasting System and the National Broadcasting System) needed programs to fill their air-time and corporate sponsors to finance this air-time. Many of the programs broadcast during this period targeted specific segments of the population through both genre and sponsorship. Men listened to sports, comedy hours, and night-time serials. Children listened to stories of superheroes, villains and cowboys. Families gathered around the radio to hear President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, musical hours, and variety programs. Women listened to daytime talk shows and soap operas.

Between the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., radio programming was directed at women’s needs and interests. Early in the 1930s much of daytime programming on both CBS and NBC was considered a “hodge-podge” by executives who recommended “greater thought and structure for the daytime schedule” (Gomery 45). Although this goal would not be achieved until the 1936 -1937 season, the sale of sponsorship air time helped create soap operas’ prominent and anchoring role in daytime programming. Initially reluctant to sponsor women’s daytime programming, corporate advertisers like Colgate-Palmolive and Proctor & Gamble were lured into purchasing large amounts of air time by broadcasting executives who offered discounts to advertisers who purchased a one hour block of time instead of 15-minute segments (Cantor and Pingree 37).

Not only did advantageous pricing attract companies to sponsor programs, but radio research suggested “that if listeners associated a show with its sponsors, they were more likely to purchase the advertised product” (Gomery 39). National grocery chain and early radio advertiser, A&P, sponsored several morning programs targeted to the female audience in 1930 and found that even in the midst of the Depression their sales increased. In 1932 A&P decide to advertise specific products only on Monday’s shows and record the sale of these products on the following Tuesday. The collected data indicated “sales increased 29 percent the days following its being advertised on radio” (Allen 106). When A&P mentioned the price of the product, sales increased “an astounding 173 percent” (Allen 106). This data clearly indicated that corporate radio sponsorship of programs created increased revenue for the sponsors particularly when aimed at the female consumer. Additionally, women themselves acknowledged their own purchasing power in a 1932 study of 900 women from Pennsylvania. The study concluded “that ‘the program sponsor should realize that the housewife in a majority of cases is the member of the family who has the most influence upon family purchases and is the one who spends the most time in the home. She is, therefore, the member of the family most easily reached by radio broadcasts’” (Allen 106). Expenditures for daytime radio advertising more than doubled between 1935 and 1939 as sponsors realized that women were a perfect audience to reach through radio (Smulyan 91). Procter & Gamble, the largest user of network radio in 1935, sponsored 778 program hours that year, 664 hours of which were daytime programs, and by 1937 they were spending $4,456,525 on advertising, 90 percent of which going to daytime programming (Allen 117). The most common products advertised during daytime programming included breakfast cereal, toothpaste, drug products and home remedies, food, and beverages.

As the 1930s progressed the soap opera became the perfect radio program to attract a dedicated audience of listeners and consumers by offering a storyline that featured recurring characters using products in an affordable fifteen-minute format. **Soap Operas' Appeal**