This textbook describes the process of composing, arranging, orchestrating, and producing music for jingles and commercials, and provides a comprehensive overview of the commercial music business. Rewritten and reformatted to increase readability and use in the classroom, this second edition includes new chapters on theatrical trailers, video games, Internet commercials, Web site music, and made-for-the-Internet video.

During the “golden age” of radio, from roughly the late 1920s until the late 1940s, advertising agencies were arguably the most important sources of radio entertainment. Most nationally broadcast programs on network radio were created, produced, written, and/or managed by advertising agencies: for example, J. Walter Thompson produced “Kraft Music Hall” for Kraft; Benton & Bowles oversaw “Show Boat” for Maxwell House Coffee; and Young & Rubicam managed “Town Hall Tonight” with comedian Fred Allen for Bristol-Myers. Yet this fact has disappeared from popular memory and receives little attention from media scholars and historians. By repositioning the advertising industry as a central agent in the development of broadcasting, author Cynthia B. Meyers challenges conventional views about the role of advertising in culture, the integration of media industries, and the role of commercialism in broadcasting history. Based largely on archival materials, A Word from Our Sponsor mines agency records from the J. Walter Thompson papers at Duke University, which include staff meeting transcriptions, memos, and account histories; agency records of BBDO, Benton & Bowles, Young & Rubicam, and N. W. Ayer; contemporaneous trade publications; and the voluminous correspondence between NBC and agency executives in the NBC Records at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Mediating between audiences’ desire for entertainment and advertisers’ desire for sales, admen combined “showmanship” with “salesmanship” to produce a uniquely American form of commercial culture. In recounting the history of this form, Meyers enriches and corrects our understanding not only of broadcasting history but also of advertising history, business history, and American cultural history from the 1920s to the 1940s.

“A lively history” of how TV advertising became a defining force in American culture between 1946 and 1964(Technology and Culture). The two decades following World War II brought television into homes and, of course, television commercials. Those commercials, in turn, created an image of the postwar American Dream that lingers to this day. This book recounts how advertising became a part of everyday lives and national culture during this midcentury period, not only reflecting consumers’ desires but shaping them, and broadcasting a vivid portrait of comfort, abundance, ease, and happy family life and, of course, keeping up with the Joneses. As the author asserts, it’s nearly impossible to understand our culture without contemplating these visual celebrations of conformity and consumption, and this insightful, entertaining volume of social history helps us do just that.

Here, Timothy D. Taylor tracks the use of music in American advertising for nearly a century, from variety shows like 'The Clicquot Club Eskimons' to the rise of the jingle, from the postwar growth of consumerism, to the more complete fusion of popular music and consumption in the 1980s and after.

Chapter 1: Research -- Chapter 2: Creative Strategy -- Chapter 3: Headlines and Slogans -- Chapter 4: Body Copy -- Chapter 5: An Introduction to Design -- Chapter 6: Newspaper Advertising -- Chapter 7: Magazine Advertising -- Chapter 8: Radio Advertising -- Chapter 9: Television Advertising -- Chapter 10: Direct Mail Advertising -- Chapter 11: Internet Advertising -- Chapter 12: Other Media Advertising -- Chapter 13: Public Relations and Corporate Advertising -- Chapter 14: Advertising Copy Research -- Chapter 15: Advice on How to Get a Job in Advertising -- A Final Note -- References -- Appendix: Graduate Programs.