Television advertisement

• 1. Introduction

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  Television advertisements have shaped public culture, political campaigns, and commercial life since the 1st of July 1941, when a single paid spot aired on New York station WNBT before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies. The ad was for Bulova watches. It showed nothing more than a clock face adapted from a WNBT test pattern, with the Bulova logo and the phrase "Bulova Watch Time" in the lower right-hand quadrant, the second hand sweeping around for one minute. The company paid somewhere between $4.00 and $9.00 for that minute. Reports on the exact figure still vary.

  That modest beginning raises a set of questions worth following. How did a medium built around clocks and test patterns grow into a market estimated at $69.87 billion in United States ad spending alone by 2018? How did the music you hear in a commercial come to outlive the product it was selling? And why has the relationship between viewers and the ads they watch turned out to be far more complicated than the people selling those ads ever anticipated?

  In the United Kingdom, the first television advertisement aired on ITV on the 22nd of September 1955, promoting Gibbs SR toothpaste. In Asia, Nippon Television in Tokyo carried the first TV ad on the 28th of August 1953, for Seikosha, a company later known as Seiko. That ad, like the Bulova spot twelve years earlier, displayed a clock showing the current time. Something about time, it seems, was always at the center of television advertising.

• 2. Measuring the Audience

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  Nielsen Media Research in the United States and BARB in the United Kingdom both exist to answer a single question: who is watching? The answer to that question determines how much a broadcaster can charge an advertiser to appear in a given program, on a given network, or at a given time of day. That last category even has its own industry term: a "day-part."

  The numbers that come out of this measurement process carry real weight. By the 2010s, the total count of commercials broadcast had grown steadily, even as the length of individual spots shrank. The advertising market had expanded to the point that United States TV ad spending was estimated at $69.87 billion for 2018 alone. At New York's TV Week that same November, Turner Broadcasting System described the entire TV advertising model as broken.

  Across different countries, the rules governing what can be measured and sold vary sharply. In the United States, political campaign advertisements are a standard feature of television. In France, political advertising on television is heavily restricted. Norway bans it entirely. The market may be global, but the regulatory landscape is anything but uniform.

• 3. The Skip Problem

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  After the video cassette recorder became popular in the 1980s, television executives began taking seriously the possibility that viewers might simply fast-forward past the commercials. Advertising agencies responded by trying to make their spots more entertaining. The introduction of digital video recorders, such as TiVo and Sky+, intensified that concern, because these devices allowed viewers to fast-forward or automatically skip through stored programming.

  The data from the SkyView panel, which tracked more than 33,000 Sky+ households in the UK, told a more nuanced story. By the end of 2008-22% of UK households owned a digital television recorder. Among those households, 82% of all viewing was to normal, live broadcast television, with no ad-skipping involved. In the 18% of viewing that was time-shifted, viewers still watched 30% of the ads at normal speed. The net result was that DTR owners watched 17% more television overall, and the extra viewing meant they were actually exposed to 2% more ads at normal speed than before they owned the device. The London Business School and BARB both reinforced these findings with independent studies.

  Fox drew a different conclusion when it launched its "Remote-Free TV" experiment during the 2008-09 season. Episodes of Fringe and Dollhouse carried roughly ten minutes of advertising, four to six minutes fewer than comparable hour-long programs. Fox argued that shorter breaks kept viewers engaged and improved brand recall. The strategy did not deliver the results the network expected, and its future remained unclear.

• 4. Animation and Longevity

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  Kellogg's cereals have run animated campaigns featuring Snap, Crackle, and Pop and Tony the Tiger for multiple decades. These characters illustrate a structural advantage of animation that advertising agencies recognized early: an animated character does not age, does not fall out of fashion, and does not require renegotiation of a talent contract when cultural tastes shift.

  In the UK, polls on the most memorable television advertisements, including those run on ITV and Channel 4, consistently place animated spots at the top of the rankings. The Smash and Creature Comforts advertisements are named examples. Viewers tend to remember them long after the specific product details have faded.

  Not all longevity comes from wholesomeness. The Energizer Bunny campaign, which started in the late 1980s as a straightforward comparison ad showing battery-powered bunnies slowing to a stop while one kept going, evolved into something more elaborate. A revised version sent the bunny out of the commercial entirely, allowing it to intrude on what appeared to be an unrelated advertisement for another product. Viewers did not recognize the intrusion as a continuation of the Energizer campaign until the moment of the reveal. That campaign lasted nearly fifteen years, and the bunny's format was later imitated by Coors Light Beer, by motion pictures, and by GEICO Insurance.

• 5. Music as Memory

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  "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" ran for eighteen years, from the 1950s to the 1970s, and references to that phrase kept appearing in other media for as long as two decades after the campaign ended. "Where's the Beef?" grew prominent enough that Walter Mondale used it during the 1984 presidential election. "I've fallen and I can't get up" was still being referenced more than two decades after its first broadcast. Mary Wells Lawrence wrote three of advertising's most persistent slogans: "Raise your hand if you're Sure", "I black heart suit New York", and "Trust the Midas touch."

  Before the 1970s, music in television advertisements was mostly original jingles or adapted popular songs with rewritten lyrics. The 1917 George M. Cohan song "Over There" received this treatment in a Gocompare.com advertisement. Movement in the other direction was possible too: in 1971, a song composed for a Coca-Cola advertisement was re-recorded by the New Seekers as "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)" and became a chart hit. Songwriter Paul Williams wrote a piece for a Crocker Bank commercial which The Carpenters recorded as "We've Only Just Begun."

  Licensing original popular recordings for American advertisements became viable in earnest in 1985, when Burger King used Aretha Franklin's own recording of "Freeway of Love." In 1987, Nike used The Beatles' "Revolution" for an athletic shoe advertisement. The cost of licensing original recordings had been prohibitive in the United States until the late 1980s; before that, cover versions were standard. Research by PRS for Music in 2010 identified "Light & Day" by The Polyphonic Spree as the most performed song in UK television advertising that year.

  Some pairings generated controversy entirely separate from the advertisement's other content. Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life," a song about heroin addiction, was used to advertise Royal Caribbean International cruise lines. Sly and the Family Stone's anti-racism song "Everyday People" appeared in a car advertisement, which drew anger from listeners who objected to using that song's meaning in a commercial context.

• 6. Controversies and Withdrawals

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  In 2005, a commercial for Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, known as "Blood on the Carpet," was pulled after broadcast for depicting mutilation. A Snickers advertisement featuring Mr. T was withdrawn for being homophobic. A Cocoa Pebbles commercial featuring a character based on Hulk Hogan was removed after Hogan filed a lawsuit against Post, citing unauthorized use of his likeness. In 2012, a Burger King advertisement featuring Mary J. Blige drew criticism from African-American reviewers when it was previewed online; it was shelved before it reached television.

  Mascots have their own record of forced retirements. The Bud Light mascot Spuds MacKenzie, a bull terrier, was removed in 1989 after two years of use, following accusations that using a dog to advertise alcohol had a negative influence on younger viewers. The McDonald's mascot Mac Tonight was quietly retired after a lawsuit by Dodd Mitchell Darin, son of Bobby Darin, in 1989 over the use of "Mack the Knife." Ronald McDonald was retired from advertising in 2016 after 53 years of use. The retirement followed a wave of public clown-related anxiety and a letter signed by 550 physicians, sent five years earlier, arguing that a clown mascot targeting children for fast food was unethical.

  Product slogans have also been casualties. The Dr Pepper Ten tagline "It's not for women" was dropped after being deemed too sexist. Kotex retired its slogan "Kotex fits. Period." in 2005 after complaints that its double meaning was inappropriate when broadcast in front of children.

• 7. Children and Political Reach

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  Children under two years old cannot distinguish a television advertisement from the program surrounding it. Children between three and six can make that distinction. By ages 7 to 11, a child can understand that a sale is being attempted and can recognize individual sales tactics, but may still be susceptible to weak selling points. Teenagers between 12 and 13 can generally assess what is being sold and decide accordingly, but may not recognize paid celebrity endorsements as a commercial arrangement. Research on the subject notes that even viewers over 14 may lack the judgment to evaluate purchases critically or to understand how market forces operate.

  Concerns about children's exposure have led to specific advertising withdrawals. Commercials for children's underwear brands, including Underoos, that featured child models were criticized by parents on child exploitation grounds; children were subsequently removed from those advertisements. The question of what is appropriate to direct at younger viewers has shaped regulatory decisions across many markets.

  In the United States, political television advertising is a standard campaign tool. The contrast with France, where political advertising on television is heavily restricted, or Norway, where it is completely banned, points to how differently countries have resolved the tension between commercial speech and civic concern. That tension, present since the Bulova spot paid somewhere between $4.00 and $9.00 for one minute on WNBT in 1941, has never fully been resolved.