The Kingdom of the Airwaves — Radio and Television Commercials

So far, we have watched advertising reach toward the science of the mind, refining persuasion as a technique. Yet however skillful the sales copy, it means nothing if it never meets the other person’s eye. In the middle of the twentieth century, a technology that fundamentally rewrote that power to ‘deliver’ entered the home. Radio and television — the airwaves flying through the sky. Where newspapers and magazines waited for their readers on paper, broadcasting, as voice and image, flowed directly into the very center of people’s lives. In this installment, we trace this era in which advertising moved from paper to the airwaves, through both its dazzling prosperity and the easily overlooked shadow.

The Stories Voices Carried — Radio and Sponsored Programs

The history of advertising by airwave began first with radio. From the 1920s into the 1930s, radio was placed at the center of the home in the blink of an eye, and people came to listen to the same program at the same hour. Here, an unrivaled stage was born for advertising.

What was distinctive was the depth of the bond between program and sponsor. At first, it was not rare for a company to provide an entire program and crown the work with its own name. Before long, agencies bought broadcast slots from the stations and made the programs themselves for the sponsors — that form, too, is said to have spread. Advertising was no longer something wedged into the gaps of a program; it became the very backer that made the program possible.

The symbol of this was the fifteen-minute serial drama that aired on weekday afternoons. The main listeners were women in the breaks between housework, and the sponsors, it is said, were often companies selling soap and detergent. From this, such programs came to be called ‘soap operas.’ Drawn into a story that continued day by day, listeners would await tomorrow’s developments and return before the radio again at the same hour. The habit thus built up was itself an asset for the sponsoring company. The attachment people felt toward a story naturally flowed into a fondness for its product. Advertising learned the art of winning people’s goodwill — not through the words of the sales pitch itself, but first by offering a pleasant span of time. It was not an imposition, but a supple method that slipped quietly into the midst of daily life.

The Desire Reflected in the Living Room — The Arrival of the TV Commercial

To radio, which had been voice alone, image was added. Television had arrived. In the United States in 1941, what is said to be one of the world’s earliest television commercials was broadcast. It was an advertisement for the watchmaker Bulova — said to have been very short, a plain piece that announced the brand name along with a clock on the screen. It bore no comparison to the dazzling commercials of later years in its plainness, yet this became the entrance to the long history of selling products through image.

Television came into its own in the postwar 1950s. Sets spread rapidly into homes, and the sight of a whole family gathered before the same screen became ordinary. For advertising, this was decisive. A product moves, a person shows it in use, a smile appears on screen — the ‘joy of using’ that letters and voice alone could not fully convey, image could deliver whole. New home appliances, foods, and cars were painted as objects of longing through the living-room screen, stirring people’s desire to buy.

In this era, advertising spread to every corner of society as a cog of mass production and mass consumption. With households across the nation watching the same program, desire for the same product spread all at once. Mass media and mass marketing joined hands and mass-produced the felt sense of affluence. It was indeed one of the driving forces that supported postwar economic growth and the improvement of daily life. At the same time, that the boundary between what was truly needed and what advertising made one ‘want’ grew gradually harder to see — that, too, we should remember as the underside of this affluence.

Ratings as Currency — Attention That Can Be Counted

Airwave advertising had a difficulty that paper did not. With newspapers and magazines, you can grasp to some degree ‘how much was delivered’ in the form of circulation. But broadcasting flows through the sky and vanishes. Just how many people, when, were watching or listening to which program — without knowing that, neither the value nor the price of advertising can be settled.

What grew in weight here was the idea of ratings. Select some households as a sample, and from the pattern of their viewing, infer the whole. As a company that conducted such surveys, the name Nielsen is well known. Ratings became, in a sense, the currency of the world of the airwaves, turning broadcasting’s invisible attention into a ‘quantity that can be counted.’ Advertising deals moved with this number as their yardstick, and it came to sway even the fate of programs.

The kingdom of the airwaves gave advertising an unprecedented reach. Voice and image touched the human heart directly, the currency of ratings turned the market, and they supported the golden age of mass consumption. Yet the sight of the same sales pitch flowing into every home would, before long, little by little bore people, and make them doubt as well. A weariness toward cookie-cutter advertising quietly built up inside the industry. Next time, we move on to the story of those who turned that discontent into energy and remade advertising itself — to the creative revolution of the 1960s that broke out on New York’s Madison Avenue.