By the time commercial television came along in the late 1940s, it was just that ... commercial. The networks were in place, the mechanism for the sale and purchase of time was established, the ad agency-broadcaster relationship was well established, and a large number of programs and stars carried their sponsors with them when they moved from radio to television. Just as important, a new kind of audience existed, one bursting with money and leisure as a result of WWII's transformation of American society-working women, suburban lifestyles, and a work force that was primarily industrially, rather than agriculturally, based. No more working seven days a week from sunrise to sunset. No more labor that required you to pour all of your money back into the land. In contrast, factory and office workers lived a nine-to-five, five-days-a-week existence. They had time left over at the end of the work day (leisure time) and extra money to spend after the necessities were satisfied (expendable cash).

These workers needed to spend their money somewhere, so the plants and factories that had been humming under war-related manufacture now made the new consumer products for those folks to buy. But how would people learn about the cornucopia that awaited them? Commercial television. Whetmore (1992, p. 417) wrote, "Commercial television came along just after World War II and has since helped change our attitudes about everything from mouthwash to credit cards. Television-a heavily used, intimate, trusted, emotionally stimulating, and visually compelling medium-is perfectly suited to carry advertising.

In television's early years, sponsors, not networks, controlled the medium and selected programs to be produced and aired (Chapter 8). An advertiser would produce or buy a program from an independent producer and the networks served as national sales agents for their affiliated stations. The networks would clear time with the stations and collect money from the advertiser based on the operating costs of each station.

But by the mid-Fifties, the networks were actively maneuvering to remove the advertiser from any position of power. Realizing that even greater profits lay in the production and owning of programming and not (necessarily) solely in their distribution, the networks began producing a number of programs themselves. An early example was NBC's Today which premiered in January of 1952.

The 1959 Quiz Show scandal killed off the last of the-sponsor--produced programs on the networks. Now that they did not own their own programs, advertisers found it impossibly expensive to sole-sponsor a network production. They quickly learned that it was more efficient and profitable to spread their commercials across several programs and, thus, reach substantially more viewers. The networks were happy to cooperate, selling advertising time in 60-second segments in what they called magazine-style advertising. This produced not only great profits for the networks, but because there was now more competition for viewer attention and recall among advertisers whose messages populated a single program, the nature of the ads themselves changed. Creativity came to television advertising.

No longer in possession of the luxury of sole-sponsorship, advertisers discovered that they needed to develop selling strategies to make their occasional commercials stand out among the abundance of others. In addition, because several advertisers would now be after the same audience, many commercials would be selling the same or a similar product during a particular program. Because many products advertised were essentially the same in quality and cost (e.g., cosmetics, candy, cigarettes, and household cleaners), the goal of much of this early advertising was brand awareness. Brand identification through catchy slogans and jingles became the order of the day. The airwaves were filled with commercials comparing one brand with another through demonstrations and testimonials. Commercials during this time were highly product-oriented . This would change, however, as the quantity of commercials on television once again increased, this time due to government regulation.

In the late 1960s the efforts of a young attorney-consumer advocate, John Banzhaf, led to the removal cigarette commercials from the airwaves. The ban, effected in 1971, had an immediate impact. At the time, cigarette companies were television's biggest advertisers. American. Tobacco alone was spending over $46 million a year on the medium. With this important cash-cow absent, the networks soon discovered that there were not enough advertisers who could afford to buy 60-seconds spots on a popular prime-time program.

Lowering the price of advertising time was a logical solution, but production costs for their entertainment programming made this an impossibility for the networks. In l953, for example, a one hour episode of Studio One cost CBS $30,000 to produce. In 1975, Gunsmoke cost the same network $230,000 per hour. The Solution: split the 60-second spots into more affordable 30-second segments. Now even more advertisers had access to the potent medium and, not incidentally, the networks could make more money selling two 30 second spots at more than the price of one full 60 making each minute of advertising more profitable.  The networks avoided financial disaster but advertisers now found their commercials amidst twice as many competing messages. In 1965, every network television commercial was a full 60 seconds (although 23% were piggybacked, that is, a single sponsor presented two products in the same minute). In 1975, only 6% were a full minute long.

Not only did the number of commercial announcements grow, the number of commercial minutes allowed on television also increased. In 1967, for instance, there were an 100,000 commercial minutes on the networks; in 1974, network television presented 105,622 commercial minutes; That's 5,600 additional minutes on the three commercial networks alone. More recently, during the Reagan administration, the FCC granted broadcasters permission to increase the number of prime-time commercial minutes to eight per hour (that's 13% of your viewing time spent on watching commercials).

From the mid-Fifties to today, the amount of money  spent on television advertising has exploded. In 1956, a total of $1.25 billion in television advertising was sold. In 1976 $6.7 billion;1986, 22.$billion,and in 1991, $25.5 billion.

In the Eighties, these trends accelerated. The price of commercial time continued to rise, television's income from advertising continued to grow, production costs continued to escalate, the number of commercials on the air continued to increase, the television time allowed for advertising continued to expand and, as a result, the length of commercial spots continued to shrink. Fifteen and even ten second spots became a popular and affordable way to advertise, although there were more and more commercials filling the breaks between program segments, producing that bane of advertisers, clutter. Stark (1985, p. A24) commented on this situation:

2. Games and contests. Collins (1988) mentions pods wherein " the TV networks .... present trivia questions or puzzles before the first commercial in the pod is aired and then present the answers at the end of the pod" (p. 13). "You Make the Call" on major league baseball and NFL broadcasts are good examples. Other strategies touted by the National Association of Broadcasters are prize games such as sweepstakes based on Social Security numbers and a bingo-type game using advertised products instead of numbers called TV WINGO (Making the call 1986).

3. Recurring stories. Viewers watch a romance develop between a delightful man and pretty woman over several individual commercials and several cups of Maxwell House coffee. Viewers shriek (with joy? horror?) with each installment of the Energizer Bunny campaign.

4. Sensation television. Pioneered "by the 'three Ms' -- Madison Avenue, MTV and Miami Vice. Rock music, close-ups bright colors, random violence and diminished use of language and plot are all designed to snap viewers out of their trances and break through the cluter. The point is not to force the audience to think, but to cut through the clutter" (Stark, 1985, p. A24). Taco Bell, Sega, United Airlines, at any given time any viewer can add a dozen sponsors to the list of those who use their 30 or 15 seconds to wash our senses in sight and sound.

The diminution of word and plot in today's advertising is not without its critics. On a general level, it runs counter to the idea that advertising creates the informed, discriminating consumer necessary to an economic system driven by true competition. Draper (1986, p. 15) argues that, in fact, information-free advertising leads to monopoly:

Perfect competition requires highly standardized products, many buyers and sellers, and perfect information." Every buyer knows what every seller proposes to charge for every product and feature. Price competition, the inevitable result, forces sellers to use their resources efficiently. Consumers benefit doubly- first, because all their products are as cheap as possible, and second, because the sum of society's wealth is greater than it would be in an imperfect market ...

The theory of monopoly concedes that advertising deflects consumers from the rational aim of buying in the cheapest market and makes them, instead, want a certain brand irrespective of cost. Since the company that produces the brand is the only one than can do so, it has a "limited monopoly."

How else can Nike demand and get $180 for a pair of basketball shoes and Evian make a profit selling water at 2 dolllars a bottle?

A more specific criticism arises because many people believe that because commercials are ahead of the medium's other forms aesthetically and creatively, they set the tone for all the medium's other genres. Do we really want our news , to have commercial's flash, speed, and lack of depth? Some say that it already does. As Stark (1985, p. A24) warns, "In the media age, tonight's television audience is tomorrow's electorate." Increasingly, political campaigns (and the task of governance itself) look more and more like the "three Ms."

Not unrelated is the complaint that television ads, in their attempt to touch our emotions while avoiding our intellects-and do it in 15 seconds amide the clutter of competing commercials-inevitably cheapen and demean the important parts of human existence that they portray. What is the commercial representation of motherhood? The wisdom to buy $1,89 bottle of Downy. What is its distillation of family? Of success? Of attractiveness? Does the night really belong to Michelob? This is an excerpt from an editorial by Philip Harper (1989, p. 10B):

There are many other complaints that follow television advertising. For example, should advertising to children, people who presumably do not possess mature reasoning skills, be allowed? As one member of Action for Children's Television asked a Senate subcommittee, if we don't allow salespeople to enter our homes to sell our children products, why do we allow the most sophisticated salespeople of all to do it for 12 minutes every hour every Saturday morning?

American television allows beer and wine commercials despite growing scientific evidence that they lead to increased consumption on the part of under-age drinkers. Ads for fruit flavored and fruit-colored wine coolers have drawn particular attention. Yet American television shrinks away from advertising condoms, despite growing scientific evidence (and the great success of drinking and driving and anti-smoking public service campaigns) that demonstrates that these spots can promote safe sex.

Ultimately, we have to understand that the reason television advertising draws so much attention and criticism is that it is ubiquitous and seems to work.