TV Commercials

TV Commercials

- jim Young

“Advertising is what happens on TV when people go to the bathroom.” - Luke Sullivan

I’m a product of TV Commercials. Particularly the commercials from the 1950s and 1960s.

“Snap, Crackle, Pop”, “You’ll wonder where the yellow went”, “A little dab’ll do ya”, “Wouldn’t a Dow go good now?”, “I’d rather fight than switch”, “Cross your heart.” Yep - beer commercials, cigarette commercials, we were pretty much exposed to it all. 

And we didn’t mind them. Commercials were a time to go to the bathroom or to make a sandwich, get a snack or a drink without missing the show. Sometimes we would even do the supper dishes during commercials.

I relied on commercials so much that when VCRs first came out I would sit on the edge of the couch with my legs crossed waiting for a bathroom break. I kept forgetting I could pause it at any time.

One of our media college professors told us a story that during the 1960s, one of the workers at a city water department noticed a slight drop in the city’s water reservoir approximately every 10 minutes in the evenings. He brought in a television and confirmed his suspicion that the drop in water levels coincided with the TV commercials as people were flushing toilets and getting glasses of water in the kitchen.

Broadcasters who were aware of their viewers’ habit of leaving the room for a snack or bathroom break during commercials began to push their broadcast volume level so viewers would at least HEAR their commercials even if they weren’t WATCHING them. This practice was later outlawed by agencies like the CRTC.

In school I used to do my homework in front of the TV. We had a combined living room / dining room. The couch sat at one end of the long room and the TV sat at the far end beside the dining room table. So the dining room table became my desk when it was time to do my homework.

Yes, the television that sat beside the dining room table was black and white. Yes, we only got one channel and yes, the viewing quality was consistent with the position of the rabbit ears which often included a piece of speaker wire connecting it to a curtain rod for improved reception.

No, I did NOT have to walk to school through a blizzard with the television strapped to my back. Yes I DID in fact have to walk to school uphill BOTH ways. The school was on the opposite side of the valley from where we lived so I actually walked downhill AND uphill both ways.

It occurred to me one night that most of the time, I was actually doing my homework while the shows like “The Man From U.N.C.L.E” or “Get Smart” aired and then I would stop to watch the commercials and resume my home work when the tv show resumed. 

Commercial formats were pretty consistent in those days. Most commercials were 30 seconds or 60 seconds long. A one hour television show would allow for a total of 10 minutes of commercials. Commercial breaks occurred approximately every 10 minutes allowing for 10 to 20 commercials to be aired every hour.

Most commercials today only last 15 to 30 seconds but 12 to 18 minutes of every hour is now devoted to commercials. Those combined changes equate to anywhere from 30 to 45 commercials per hour.

Almost from the beginning, television shows were produced with commercials in mind. In fact, during the early days of television, commercials were written right into the scripts of many shows, a format that was carried over from the days of radio. 

But if you watch an old television show today without the commercials you will often see a short pause every 10 minutes or so that was written into the script to break for commercials without abruptly disrupting the story line.

Most movies on TV in those days were reruns of older Hollywood movies. Of course the movies didn’t plan for TV commercials during production. A friend of mine worked for CKVR in the early 1970s. One of Marilyn’s jobs was to take the reel of film that was to be aired on TV and run it through a manual film editor. She would roll the number of feet that represented 10 minutes of viewing time and then slow it down to preview that portion of the movie to select the most appropriate pause in the movie she could find to mark it for a commercial.

TV shows and movies today still keep commercials in mind when being produced to allow for smooth transitioning, but internet movies on places like YouTube are not as forgiving. Commercials can pop up very abruptly, even midsentence, sometimes startling the viewer. Unless it’s a very compelling clip… that’s where YouTube and Facebook often lose me as a viewer. I don’t watch the commercial and I don’t watch the rest of the clip.

Sometimes I will even search YouTube just to watch clips of old television commercials from days gone by. Some of them were brilliantly clever while many were accidentally humorous.

I wonder sometimes if the manufacturers of some of those products that still exist today ever considered recycling those old commercials to help sell their products today. There would be no new production costs involved except perhaps to digitize the original footage for improved quality. But they are almost guaranteed to attract viewer attention.

Except of course for the alcohol and cigarette commercials. They wouldn’t be permitted. And of course the commercials would have to adhere to “political correctness” standards. None of those were issues in the 1950s and 1960s.

Those Were The Days.

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