Commercial History

Today in 1941, the world's first TV commercial aired.

The ad was broadcast before a game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies and cost the Woodside-based company less than ten dollars.

The same company also bought the first ever radio advertisement (1926) and was the first company to make a large sponsorship agreement with a TV show (1955). What company is this? Click here to find out and see a still from the TV commercial.

Comments

[Pessimistic Pat]

...and its been all downhill since!

[Phil]

joe, I'm pretty sure that, much like with radio, the manufacturers of the sets themselves footed the bill for programming, so as to have something to show and spur sales of the sets.

[joe]

Damn, Phil, we should have made Boeing and Grumman build our airports!

[Phil]

I'd be happy if we could just get Major League Baseball to build their own stadia!

[Kevin Carson]

So is it true what Carl Sagan said, that the first-ever TV broadcast was Hitler at the 1936 Olympics?

If he'd had a sponsor, it might have been an I.G. Farben ad with a voice-over by Joe Kennedy or Prescott Bush.

[sydhe]

I think the claim was that Hitler's broadcast was the first powerful enough to be detected from other solar systems. Maybe the previous experiments were line-of-sight or too weak to be detected against the Sun's radio noise.

(Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce at the time, made a speech over the first long-distance television broadcast on April 7th, 1927, from Washington to an audience in New York, but I'm pretty sure that was a cable broadcast.]

[Douglas Fletcher]

I thought the first TV broadcast was back in the 20s, by the guy who invented the first TV system. He had a receiver set up across town from where he broadcast.

[Paul Z]

And where are they now?

[jon]

Maybe the same place as the first company that advertised on a blog?

[Hanah Metchis]

Actually, they're still around, as a quick Google search turned up. http://www.bulova.com/

[joe]

Who paid for TV's content before ads and sponsorship?

[Tim Cavanaugh]

Correction: The first radio ad was a spot for a real estate developer in Queens. It predated the Bulova ad by four years:

35. New York's WEAF broadcasts the first radio ad: 1922

Though there's vague evidence of some program sponsorship before this, the first ad on a commercial radio station (then called toll broadcasting) is on WEAF in New York -- a 15-minute spot for a Queens real estate development. In the years to come, broadcast ads would evolve in sophistication and cleverness, culminating in the groundbreaking "Swedish Bikini Team" TV commercials for Old Milwaukee in 1991.

[Tim Cavanaugh]

The "guy who invented the first TV system" was Philo T. Farnsworth. It really pains me that the greatest inventor of the twentieth century is also the most famous for being obscure. Everybody knows the Wright Brothers, Robert Oppenheimer, Tim Berners-Lee... Hell, even Guglielmo Marconi got props in the deathless lyrics of Starship's "We built this city on Rock 'n' Roll." Inventing TV in 1927, I think, knocks all their inventions into a cocked hat, and it's only because we're so contemptuously familiar with television that we don't appreciate what a techological marvel it really is. At a time when people were still wearing wool underpants, it was a machine that could receive and display more data than the computer you're using to read this message. Even lifelong TV sourpuss Neil Postman had to bow to Farnsworth's greatness in his Time 100 appreciation. A great genius, a great San Franciscan, and without a doubt the greatest graduate of Brigham Young University. They don't make 'em like Philo T. anymore.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Maybe 'Philo T. Farnsworth' is just not one of those names that easiliy sticks in your mind. Sounds like a character out of a WC Fields movie.

Personally, I'm kind of bad with names anyway, Tom.

[joe]

At least he's got a statue in the Capitol, Tim.

[Michael Duff]

Holy crap, Hanah's writing for Reason! You go, girl!

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