On April 15, 1987 Mobil Vice President, Herbert Schmertz, gave a speech at Fairfield University in Connecticut titled, “Patronage that Pays.” The speech applauds Mobil’s “affinity-of-purpose” marketing strategy, a strategy to “align the company with some worthy endeavor that most of our target audience would happily endorse.” Schmertz describes Mobil’s patronage of PBS’s Masterpiece Theater as a use of this strategy, and says the company used Masterpiece Theater as a way to sell national opinion leaders the need for the values of the [oil] industry “in a world where energy was quite obviously becoming the lifeblood of nations.” In essence, Schmertz praises Mobil’s ability to sell their values through marketing strategies, promoted as patronage of the arts, to national opinion leaders.