The Early Days of TV Advertising

When television began in the late 1940s, advertising was already a vital part of the picture. TV’s first big hit, Milton Berle, appeared on The Texaco Star Theater; Frank Sinatra hosted Bulova Watch Time. Throughout the 1950s, advertisers were fully in charge, controlling the content of a large part of prime time, and selling their products through live demonstrations, celebrity testimonials, inventive animation, and ads that integrated directly into the program. With the shift away from full sponsorship to 30-second “participating” spots in the 1960s, a new era of creativity emerged, as advertisers embraced new techniques and approaches in order to reach new generations of consumers. This talk will look at how advertising changed during television’s first two decades and the important role it played in convincing viewers that the key to happiness lay in quite literally buying their way into the American dream.

Presented by:  Brian Rose is a professor emeritus at Fordham University, where he taught for 38 years in the
Department of Communication and Media Studies. He’s written several books on television history and
cultural programming, and conducted more than a hundred Q&A’s with leading directors, actors, and writers
for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Screen Actors Guild, the British Academy of Film and
Television Arts, and the Directors Guild of America.