Talk:Ad Council/Archives/2013

Funding

This is contradictory: "privately funded non-profit organization that distributes public service announcements on behalf of various sponsors, including non-profit organizations and agencies of the United States government"

This is not contradictory. The private funding comes from the sponsors who fund campaigns. Specific government agencies fund specific campiagns. The Ad Council does not just get a lump sum of money from the government. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Adcouncil (talk • contribs) 17:38, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

"We Can Do It!" poster

Recent edits were made to the Famous campaigns section of this article so that it is arranged in chronological order and so that it reflects campaign that began before 1988. Dates were also added where missing. 142.255.106.101 (talk) 20:18, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Additional edits were made to the Famous campaigns section to remove irrelevant citations and provide additional background on the section about the "We Can Do It" poster. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.255.106.101 (talk) 01:36, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Both times I reverted your changes to the "We Can Do It!" poster because of incorrect "facts" that you introduced. First off, you wrote: "Although widely thought to be an Ad Council campaign, the 'We Can Do It!' Rosie the Riveter poster was actually created by the Westinghouse Company’s corporate War Production Coordinating Committee."[1] Actually, no, there was no such thing as "widely thought"... at any rate you have not provided proof that it was "widely thought". To me it appears far more likely that it was just a case of Ad Council internal confusion. You linked to a CYA post made by Peggy Conlon after the mistake, one called "Rosie’s Legacy—the Red Bandana and Fighting Spirit Live On" which Conlon posted in January 2013. Conlon says that in 1952, Vice Chairman Harold B. Thomas of the Ad Council wrote about a connection between the Ad Council, the phrase "Rosie the Riveter", and the Womanpower campaign. Apparently some folks at the Ad Council in 2011–2012 thought that Thomas's reference to "Rosie the Riveter" included the "We Can Do It!" poster which is frequently but mistakenly called Rosie the Riveter. It was not a widely held belief, just an Ad Council mistake, that the "We Can Do It!" poster came from the Ad Council's Womanpower campaign. In fact, Maureen Honey wrote about the Womanpower campaign in 1981 without ever mentioning the "We Can Do It!" poster. The paper was named "The 'Womanpower' Campaign: Advertising and Recruitment Propaganda during World War II" and it appeared in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Honey writes about posters for recruiting women for war work and she writes about the Rosie the Riveter concept based on the famous Norman Rockwell painting widely seen on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, but she never discusses the "We Can Do It!" poster because she is not confused about it. If Conlon would like Wikipedia to say that the poster was "widely thought" to have come from the Ad Council then someone will have to find a third party reference establishing that very fact. Binksternet (talk) 04:20, 1 April 2013 (UTC)