By Steve Penhollow

The first legal TV advertisement, for Bulova watches, aired on July 1, 1941, prior to a baseball game.

There were only 2,000 TV sets in existence at that point, according to the website for the Paley Center for Media. It is not known how many of those sets were tuned to the game. But since being uploaded to YouTube in October 2011, the Bulova advertisement has been viewed almost 130,000 times.

That means Bulova likely increased its viewing audience sixty-fivefold, 70 years after this experiment in advertising officially concluded.

The history of TV advertising couldn’t have better bookends.

There have been many changes on the TV advertising landscape in those seven decades, not the least of which is the fact that televisions are no longer the only devices on which TV advertisements are viewed.

In the ’50s, TV advertising looked very different from how it looks today. Instead of a wide range of different products showcased in segments throughout a program, television advertising took the form of whole-show sponsorships.

“For example,” the late TV legend Ed McMahon wrote in his book When Television Was Young, “General Foods bought an hour of airtime on CBS on Monday nights at 8 o’clock. General Foods decided what programs went on the air, not CBS. All the network did was provide the vehicle to broadcast the programming. So rather than having commercials for several different products during the same show, the show was brought to viewers by a single sponsor. That’s why so many programs were named after a single sponsor.”

Viewers in the future will be able to curate their programming in ways we can only dream of today.

The rapid success of television led to the death of radio as it was known up to that point. In her bookWhat’s His Name? John Fiedler: The Man The Face The Voice, Elizabeth Messina writes, “National sponsors left radio for television at record rates, leading Variety … to describe the mass [radio] exodus as ‘the greatest exhibition of mass hysteria in biz annals.’”

Success validated the way television advertising was set up initially, but it also doomed that setup as well. “In an effort to generate more profit, networks began raising the sponsorship costs based on the number of people they claimed the shows were reaching,” writes Daina Middleton in her bookMarketing in the Participation Age. “Costs associated with producing new content were also rising at this time, so networks created a new approach for developing advertising.” When Middleton writes “networks created,” she isn’t quite giving credit where credit is due.

The father of modern television advertising is unquestionably NBC executive Sylvester L. “Pat” Weaver. Weaver came up with a new advertising strategy inspired by, of all things, magazines.

“He argued for a ‘magazine concept,’” writes Erik Barnouw in his book The Sponsor. “[It’s] a system under which sponsors would buy only inserts in programs produced by the networks, or by independent producers for the networks, under network control.”

His ideas weren’t popular at first, but by 1960, “[the] multiple spot per show [concept] dominated television advertising,” Middleton writes.

“And it has ever since,” she adds.

In recent years, one of the big stories has been the increase in the amount of time per hour of programming that is devoted to commercials, as well as the number of commercials that air each hour. “From 1991 to 2003, the total time viewers spent not watching the show jumped to 17.5 minutes from about 13 minutes per prime-time hour,” wrote Mark Jacob and Stephan Benzkofer in the Chicago Tribune in 2011. “Many countries regulate the amount of advertising per hour, but a similar industry agreement in the U.S. was ruled illegal in the 1980s.”

In the 1960s, by contrast, commercials per hour ran roughly nine minutes, writes blogger Bruce Simmons.

Tidy resolutions aside, the future of commercials is likely to see a great deal of transformation, and it will take its cues from changes in the way programming is viewed.

And each commercial tends to be shorter that its earlier incarnations, according to an article in theLos Angeles Times. “The number of 30-second commercials has declined, while 15-second spots have increased. Not only is more time being devoted to ads, but more spots are being jammed into commercial breaks,” writes Los Angeles Times reporter Joe Flint. “In 2009, 30-second spots accounted for 62% of all ads on television; 15-second spots were just 35%. In 2013, the percentage of 30-second ads fell to 53%, and 15-second spots increased to 44%.”

The ways in which programming and advertising have merged — through product placement and through TV series created by advertisers (like Chipotle’s Hulu show Farmed and Dangerous) — are other wrinkles in the battle for viewers’ divided attention and stretched dollars.

Instead of being some radical new concept, this may actually be a form of things coming full circle, according to Berkshire Eagle columnist Charles Fanto. “Blurring the lines between entertainment and advertising has been a mainstay of TV since its earliest days,” he writes. “Even the first nightly NBC newscast, hosted by John Cameron Swayze from 1949–56, was titled ‘Camel News Caravan.’ Swayze did the ads, cigarette in hand, of course.”

“Other stars from TV’s first decade — Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Andy Griffith, Dick Van Dyke — also performed ‘messages from our sponsor,’” Fanto writes. “Perhaps the so-called golden age was more tarnished than we like to recall.”

One man’s tarnish is another man’s burnish.

Tidy resolutions aside, the future of commercials is likely to see a great deal of transformation, and it will take its cues from changes in the way programming is viewed.

In May 2014, the chief product officer for Netflix, Neil Hunt, predicted in an Advertising Age magazine article that there would be an end to commercials as we know them. Hunt said that “the grid” — his term for the time- and date-specific way that broadcast and cable networks have presented programming since the birth of commercial television — is going away.

Viewers in the future will be able to curate their programming in ways we can only dream of today, Hunt said. Commercials will have to be personalized as well.

“Mr. Hunt also pointed out that the same technology that lets Netflix personalize recommendations could also allow streaming services to select the right commercial for the right consumer,” the article said. “This would mean viewers see fewer but more-relevant ads, and marketers would be better able to target very specific consumers.”

Data gathered from people making many specific choices will be able to be used to choose advertising for each person.

“Right now, most of the ads you see on TV — everyone else sees the same ads,” Brian Andersen of Luma Partners tells Forbes magazine. “That will change. One person will see a Ford truck ad, and the house next door gets a cruise commercial. It’ll be based on the data for that household.”

Steve Penhollow
Writer/Editor
BMDG Agency

Photo: Shutterstock