【Engsub Archives】

Television commercials didn't always dominate the airwaves.

For the first years of the medium's existence,Engsub Archives TV advertising was actually banned by the federal government (not that it stopped a few bold broadcasters from experimenting illegally).

The American public wasn't introduced to the first legal TV ad until June 1, 1941 -- exactly 75 years ago -- when the Bulova Watch Co. interrupted a game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. The commercial was a simple video of a ticking watch backed by a voiceover telling the few thousand local viewers watching what time it was.

Here's a later ad from that same campaign:

The spot was made possible by a Federal Communications Commission ruling earlier that year that gave 10 local stations the right to show ads for the first time. New York's WNBT was the first to put the permission to use.

It cost Bulova a mere $9 to air the commercial, according to AdAge -- which would be about $150 today if you adjust for inflation. By comparison, 30-second national ad slots now cost an average of nearly $350,000 and go for as high as $5 million during the Super Bowl broadcast. 

"[The commercial] wasn't filmed at all, as far as I know," a Bulova spokesperson told Mashablein an interview a few years ago. "It was just the graphic and the live voice-over."

"As to why we did it, I suppose that's because we took pride in being a pioneer in marketing," the spokesperson added.

That wasn't an empty boast -- the watch company also made history years earlier by running the first-ever national radio ad in 1926. "At the tone, it's eight o'clock, B‑U‑L‑O‑V‑A Watch Time," the audio ad chirped. 

Bulova's primitive spot of course paved the way for the multibillion-dollar industry that television advertising has become today. 

The explosion of spending that eventually followed resulted in advertising's creative revolution of the 1960s -- famously documented semi-fictitiously in AMC's Mad Men-- in which the industry began thinking of advertising as something akin to an art form for the first time.

Thus, as a few thousand baseball fans watched a 10-second video of a clock face, television history was made.

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