ABSTRACT
Michele Hilmes is professor of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In addition to Radio Voices, from which this excerpt comes, she is the author of Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable. One of the largest and most "radio active" advertising agencies in the United States during this period [the 1920s] was the J. Walter Thompson Company. Though, according to Roland Marchand, advertising agencies were slow to see the possibilities in radio for product promotion, this attitude varied greatly from agency to agency. There did indeed exist opposition to radio in agencies in the early 1920s—hardly surprising, considering the tight connection between ad agencies and the print media, who did indeed have something to fear from competition with radio. Though sale of as much time as possible to sponsors remained from the beginning the primary goal of both networks, the control exercised by the increasingly powerful agencies began to undermine the networks' control over their own business.
