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Uh, there's a lot of great materials in the J Walter Thompson archive that Adam Matthew is digitizing. And, and one of them that, uh was found was, uh a list of rules uh for Oscar Meyer products to be advertised on television from the early eighties. And

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it, it listed some things that we might expect an advertiser once in their programming. You know, they, they don't. Oscar Meyer did not want to advertise on any television show that had poor taste. That makes sense. Uh But some of the rules they had were particularly

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food oriented. They wanted to know if a television program they were advertising on, had an animal that was eating, you know, they wanted to be alerted about that. They wanted to know if a program they were advertising on would somehow disparage food or maybe even show

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things like food fights. So they didn't want food to be portrayed in a bad way. They Oscar Mayer wanted to know if a program they were advertising on, featured a vegetarian character. Oscar Mayer, of course, advertised boloney and hot dogs. So they didn't like vegetarians, I

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guess, uh, you know, some other things that Oscar Meyer were concerned about uh were a little bit more serious. Uh They didn't want any kind, they didn't want to be advertised on any kind of program that disparaged dominant institutions that maybe uh criticized religion or criticized

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authority um that brought up controversial topics. Uh So it was an interesting list in this uh J Walter Thompson archive of the kind of things that made Oscar Meyer nervous. Other advertisers probably have similar lists. And what that document gives us is a peek into advertising's

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anxiety about being connected to programs and maybe a little bit of a hint about how advertising could subtly influence programs because we knew program producers know about those lists and you know, do they kind of do preemptive strikes to remove ideas that would make advertisers nervous

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when lists like the Oscar Mayer list would circulate. You know, the J Walter Thompson archive has a lot of documents that deal with the history of advertising because they're his historically situated in particular moments where, you know, actual J Walter Thompson executives and advertising workers were

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writing about things going on at the time. Uh One of the interesting documents that uh is in the archive is a speculation about what the future of television was going to be and this was written in the late thirties. And so they, there was, there was

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a lot of optimism in this um piece about what television could do, you know, it could bring the best educators to create a kind of a visual classroom. Uh But it was also interesting about how this document talked about the role of advertising. And, you know,

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it probably would not be surprising that J Walter Thompson saw advertising be very, being very influential in the history of television and in some ways being the savior of television or, or the engine of television because they knew they were going to finance television. And so

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when they were talking about all the great things television was going to do, they also said, well, it's going to be advertisers that will allow television to do all those great things and looking back on it, a lot of that optimism was probably overstated. There was

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a lot of things that television did that maybe was not so noble, but at the in the late thirties, you know, looking through the J Walter Thompson archive, we can see a lot of discussions about what television might offer and, and a hope for the future.

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There's a lot of materials in the J Walter Thompson archive that speak to a future that they didn't know but that we now know has happened and there's information about speculation in the J Walter Thompson archive about what digital, the digital world might bring about, you

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know, how advertising might change as we become more of an internet society. These are documents that were written in the very early nineties. And so it's been fun to read materials in the J Walter Thompson that speculates about a future media world that, you know, we

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have seen exist and some things they were remarkably right on and, you know, some things they, they, they were a little bit off base, but it was interesting to see, to see what the advertising industry thought of the future at these various moments in time.