Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - S8E03 - A Matter of Time: The History of Commercial Lengths

Episode Date: January 18, 2019

This week, we look at the history of commercial lengths. From the very first 10-minute radio commercial in 1922, to five-second commercials today, the length of ads has changed dramatically over the decades. But it’s not the changing lengths of commercials that’s so fascinating. It’s the reasons why. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,

who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan. You just have to love storytelling. Subscribe now and don't miss a single beat. new year new me season is here and honestly we're already over it enter felix the health care company helping canadians take a different approach to weight loss this year weight loss is more than just diet and exercise it can be about tackling genetics hormones metabolism felix

gets it they connect you with licensed healthcare practitioners online who'll create a personalized treatment plan that pairs your healthy lifestyle with a little help and a little extra support. Start your visit today at felix.ca. That's F-E-L-I-X.ca. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are.

So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. From the Under the Influence digital box set, this episode is from Season 8, 2019. You're so king in it You're not you when you're hungry You're a good hand with all things. You're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly. Back in 1836, a man named John Henry Belleville owned a particularly precise pocket watch. It was a chronometer, accurate to one-tenth of a second.

That was impressive in the 1800s because the watch industry was just getting off the ground. So John Belleville decided to start a business. To sell time. He developed a list of clients and would send a messenger from shop to shop to share the time on his pocket watch so they could set their watches to it. And he charged them a fee. Belleville sold his time to clockmakers, ship chartering companies, railways, and anyone else who needed accurate time to run their businesses.

Why was John Belleville's time so valued? Well, he just happened to work at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London, England, the birthplace of Greenwich Mean Time, the baseline for universal time calculation. So he had the benefit of getting the time on his pocket watch certified each week. John Henry Belleville didn't just have the time, he had the time. He ran his successful company for 20 years until he passed away in 1856. Belleville's wife Maria then took over and personalized the business by visiting the shops herself, pocket watch in hand. After 36 years, the time eventually came to hand the company down to their daughter Ruth

in 1892. Ruth pursued the family business with zeal. She became known as the Greenwich Time Lady. She continued visiting her 200 clients on the streets of London. Neither rain nor sleet nor even Jack the Ripper could keep Ruth from delivering on time. Eventually, a competitor emerged called the Standard Time Company. It was a telegraph business that was able to transmit a beep at the top of the hour.

The president of the company called Ruth's method old-fashioned and even tried to undermine her by suggesting she was using her feminine wiles to gain business. Ruth was outraged, but she knew a good scandal when she heard one. The notoriety was free advertising and it only increased her sales. Even with the steady advance of technology, many customers preferred Ruth's face-to-face service. They just didn't trust their time to be delivered by a machine. Ruth continued making the 12-mile trip to the observatory every morning at 9 a.m. to set her trusty pocket watch, the very same pocket watch her father had used all those years ago.

Remarkably, Ruth Bellville sold time until 1940. Then, she finally ran out of time and died at the age of 89. In the world of advertising, selling time is still big business. Radio time, television time, and video time generates billions of dollars around the world. The history of commercial time is as interesting as the history of the Belleville family. From the very first 10-minute radio commercial in 1922 to five-second commercials today, the length of ads has changed dramatically over the decades. But it's not the changing lengths of commercials that is so fascinating.

It's the reasons why. You're under the influence. Question. What do all these things have in common? An apartment building, a baseball game, actress Sigourney Weaver's father, Richard Nixon, elephants, and Geico. I'll go have a coffee while you think about that. Give up? Well, the answer is they all played critical roles in how the length of commercials has changed dramatically over the years.

Commercials have gone from 10 minutes long to 1 hour to 60 seconds to 30 seconds to 15 seconds to 10 seconds to 6 seconds to 5 seconds to 1 second long. Yep, time flies in the ad business. Time, weather and... The very first commercial ever broadcast was on radio, which only makes sense because radio was the first broadcast medium. The year was 1922. The station was owned

by AT&T because the phone company owned a very special patent, the vacuum tube. When it was discovered the vacuum tube was an essential element of radio sets, AT&T set up its first radio station, WEAF New York. AT&T immediately understood the business model radio offered, because it mirrored the revenue model that underpinned their telephone business, which is to say, they sold time. When you made a long-distance phone call, you paid for minutes and seconds. And that's why WEAF Radio offered advertisers the same product, minutes and seconds, because WEAF was owned by a telephone company.

The very first advertiser to pay for radio time was a real estate company called the Queensborough Corporation. It advertised vacancies in the Hawthorne Court Apartments in Jackson Heights, Long Island. Friends, you owe it to yourself and your family to leave the congested city

and enjoy what nature intended you to enjoy. Visit our new apartment homes in Hawthorne Court, Jackson Heights, where you may enjoy community life in a friendly environment. Because radio commercials were new and had no precedent, that first radio commercial was ten minutes long. Aren't you glad that changed over time? When other radio stations began to spring up, they needed content and quickly realized entertainment was the perfect solution.

So singers, bands and vaudeville acts were given ample airtime. Advertising agencies, always in search of an audience, soon saw the potential of creating radio programming to attract listeners. Programming their clients could sponsor. As a result, those early radio programs had names like the Palmolive Hour, the A&P Gypsies, and the EverReady Battery Hour. They were created and owned by advertising agencies. With radio shows in the 1930s, ads evolved from 10-minute messages to essentially become hour-long commercials

because the entire program would be branded with the name of the sponsor. The makers of Chase and Sanborn Coffee, a blend of the world's choice coffees, which is now so very reasonable in price, present Dezu Pip, Dorothy Lamour, W.C. Fields, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Hoagie Carmichael, Robert Armbruster and Don Amici. This is the Chase and Sanborn Hour. There would be multiple brand mentions by the show's announcer. The host would talk about the product.

Characters were named after the sponsoring brand, as in Paul Oliver in the Palmolive Hour. Orchestras were named after the brands, and the sponsor's name would even be incorporated into the scripts. Radio stations got free content and could charge for the airtime. Advertising agencies discovered a new revenue stream, and advertisers could reach huge new audiences. If listeners loved the program, they loved the brand by association. It was a win-win-win. Meanwhile, another broadcasting medium was entering the picture. This is station W2XK, an experimental transmitter of the National Broadcasting Company. We are operating on a frequency of 52 megacycles by authority of the Federal Communications Commission. A test program follows.

It was called Television. Accent on the vision. The date was July 7, 1936. Believe it or not, there was actually a time when advertising was banned on television, until the Federal Communications Commission granted commercial licenses to ten stations that went into effect on July 1, 1941. NBC-owned station WNBT was the only station to air a commercial on that day. It was broadcast

before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. The advertiser was Boulevard Clocks. America runs on Boulevard Time. The commercial showed a watch face with the words

Boulevard Watch Time placed over a map of the U.S. and was broadcast to a total of 4,000 television sets in New York. Total time of the first ever TV commercial? 10 seconds. In the early days, television networks took a leaf from the radio playbook. Advertising agencies produced the programming and the advertising. Most programs had a single sponsor.

All the power was in the hands of the advertising agencies. Enter a man named Pat Weaver. Pat Weaver worked at an advertising agency called Young & Rubicam during the golden age of radio. He produced several top-rated radio shows and was in charge of all his agency's radio programming. In 1949, he was wooed to NBC as head of NBC TV.

Because sponsors owned the shows outright, the networks had little say over the content. Some sponsors even dictated when their program would appear on the network's schedule. Weaver wanted to shift

the power back to the networks, so he changed the way companies advertised on television. He encouraged NBC to develop its own shows and then sell 60-second blocks of time to multiple sponsors.

So instead of Texaco Star Theater, with Texaco being the sole sponsor, for example, NBC would produce a program called The Tonight Show, where multiple advertisers could buy advertising time in commercial breaks, but they would not control program content. Weaver called this the magazine concept, comparing his idea to print advertisers buying space in magazines but not controlling the editorial content. It was a powerful idea, because it also made TV advertising time more affordable to smaller advertisers, opening up a whole new revenue pool for the network.

Whereas a single advertiser might spend $1,000 for a two-minute ad block, now four advertisers could spend $350 each for 60-second commercials, and the network now made $1,400 from the same block of time. Not long after, the other networks followed Weaver's strategy, and television sponsorship went from owning entire programs to buying 60 seconds of commercial time inside those programs. With that, Pat Weaver changed the world of advertising forever and would eventually be inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.

And I believe you know his daughter Susan, otherwise known as Sigourney Weaver. From that point on, 60 seconds remained the standard measure of commercial time until Richard Nixon did something no one else had done before. And we'll be right back after this message. crusher. Health goals is here. Losing weight is about more than diet and exercise. It can also be about our genetics, hormones, metabolism. Felix connects you with online licensed healthcare practitioners who understand that everybody is different and can pair your healthy lifestyle with the right support to reach your goals. Start your visit today at felix.ca. That's F-E-L-I-X dot C-A. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals.

No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make

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If you're enjoying this episode, why not dip into our archives, available wherever you download your pods. Go to terryoreilly.ca for a master episode list. On April 1st of 1970, Richard Nixon signed legislation banning cigarette advertising on radio and TV in the U.S. The last cigarette commercial aired at

a few minutes to midnight on January 1, 1971, during Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. The tobacco industry was a huge advertising category, spending more than $150 million on television, or the equivalent of $1 billion in today's dollars. The loss of that revenue was crippling to the big three networks. They needed to find a new way to attract business. Enter the 30-second commercial. 30-second ads were less expensive to produce and buy than 60s. These cheaper commercials

attracted a whole new category and revenue pool of smaller sponsors to network television. From this point on, the 30-second commercial would become the standard of advertising time. It also introduced the world to one other lasting concept, advertising clutter. But one decade later, another wave was about to hit the advertising shores. This is it.

Welcome to MTV Music Television, the world's first 24-hour stereo video music channel. Now, starting right now, you'll never look at music the same way again. When MTV launched in 1981, videos changed more than the musical landscape. The quick-cut editing style of music videos greatly influenced the advertising business. As a result,

some 30-second commercials had more than 40 edits, meaning more than one per second. The impact was seismic because MTV taught young audiences to accept lots of information in a short period of time. That change opened the door to the arrival of the 15-second commercial in 1984.

They were cheaper to produce, advertisers could afford to buy lots of media time, and the quick aspect of the 15s meant they rarely got zapped by viewers. The lower cost also allowed advertisers to bookend, which meant placing a 15-second ad at the beginning and end of commercial breaks, the two most important positions to be in. The low cost also allowed ad agencies to produce many more commercials.

The speed of 15-second commercials also required a new form of storytelling, usually a quick gag and a payoff. Well, the color's off, the type is wrong, and I'm not even sure this is our logo. I like it. Yeah, I like it too. If business were that easy, you wouldn't need us. Update your office with Canon Business Solutions. 15-second commercials were usually mixed with 30s in campaigns.

And all was well. Until the 21st century introduced us to an 18-second video of elephants. The first video ever posted to a new thing called YouTube happened on April 23, 2005. It was titled, Me at the Zoo. All right, so here we are in front of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say. It showed YouTube co-founder Javed Karim at the San Diego Zoo looking at elephants.

He and his two partners posted it to the new site they had created to share videos. By summer of 2006, the site hosted over 65,000 videos and was delivering over 100 million views per day. By 2010, YouTube was the dominant provider of online video in North America. That attracted advertisers. Soon, brands were posting their network TV commercials on YouTube. But YouTube offered big audiences and longer time limits, so advertisers extended the length of their commercials, many stretching to two minutes. When Google purchased YouTube in

2006, it began offering pre-roll advertising. That meant commercials would roll before the start of the actual video people had come to watch. Five seconds into the ads, a skip box appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, giving viewers the option to skip the ad if they so desired. Then, in 2015, the advertising industry received a jarring piece of research. 94% of people were skipping the pre-roll ads. Getting viewers interested enough to pay attention to those first five seconds, let alone watch an ad in its entirety,

became a real challenge for advertisers. Until one brand decided to become unskippable. In 2015, Geico's ad firm, the Martin Agency, had an idea. What if they embraced that five-second window? Instead of just repurposing their network TV ads into a pre-roll, they created an entire campaign that focused on making the most of those initial five seconds. They called it Unskippable. The campaign featured a series of ads showing people in different cheesy situations, like handshaking over a business deal in an office elevator,

or a mom serving a young 50s-style family a spaghetti dinner. One person always emphatically uttered the key word that formed the basis of Geico's marketing. Savings. Then around the three-second mark, the actors freeze in place, and then the voiceover breaks the fourth wall and says, you can't skip this Geico ad because it's already over. Geico, 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance. The ad was unskippable because it was already over. Or was it? After those first five seconds, the camera lingers for an uncomfortably long 30 to 60 seconds on the actors, still

standing perfectly still, holding their breath while the environments around them hilariously continue to move. In the elevator handshake ad, a woman steps into the elevator and has to awkwardly maneuver around the two frozen businessmen in order to press her floor button. In the spaghetti dinner scene, the family dog hops up onto the table and starts eating the entire meal while the family remains still and smiling. And as a testimony to how powerful the unskippable idea really was, it amassed over 14 million views on YouTube, remarkable in a medium renowned for warp speed ad skipping. And more importantly, the campaign also sparked a record number of insurance quote requests.

GEICO's unskippable campaign disrupted the world of pre-roll advertising. It would go on to win over 30 awards, including the Grand Prix at the Cannes Advertising Festival, proving that sometimes all it takes to upend an entire medium is a little thinking outside the skip box. New year, new me. Season is here, and honestly, we're already over it. Enter Felix, the healthcare company helping Canadians take a different approach to weight loss this year. Weight loss is more than just diet and exercise. It can be about tackling genetics, hormones, metabolism. Felix gets it. They connect you with licensed healthcare

practitioners online who'll create a personalized treatment plan that pairs your healthy lifestyle with a little help and a little extra support. Start your visit today at felix.ca. That's F-E-L-I-X dot C-A. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era,

make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. With the success of five-second ads online, the advertising industry began migrating the idea over to television. Just when you thought 15 seconds was short, along came the dawn of the six-second ad.

The shift down to six seconds was due to evolving technology, shrinking attention spans, and, well, lower ad tolerance in a younger audience raised on YouTube. The Advertising Research Council found that six-second television ads

captured up to 11% more attention per second than longer ads. So in 2017, Fox made history by becoming the first network to accept six-second commercials on broadcast television. During that year's Teen Choice Awards, Fox debuted six-second ads for Old Spice, Snickers, and Duracell. There were not only fewer ad breaks in the show, but some entire commercial breaks

were under 30 seconds long, with five six-second commercials playing back-to-back. The network said it was launching YouTube-style ads to roll with the digital punches and chose the Teen Choice Awards because millennials were the digital generation. The following year,

Toyota ran a series of six-second ads in a very unexpected place, the Winter Olympics. The commercials were condensed versions of full-length ads telling short but sweet stories about perseverance with the tagline,

Start Your Impossible. Olympic advertising ad time is highly coveted and historically, brands used it for longer, more anthemic storytelling. But Toyota was granted the exclusive rights to use six-second ads by the Olympic Committee. It was unprecedented. We began today by telling you the first radio commercial in history was 10 minutes long. Well, not long ago, an advertiser aired a one-second radio commercial. We've played it once before.

All effective commercials do three things well. They tell you the name of the product, they demonstrate the unique benefit of the product, and they express it in a creative way. Well, this award-winning one-second commercial, produced in Norway, managed to do it all. Here it is. Because my Norwegian is so very excellent,

allow me to translate. It said, Guinness Book of World Records. In just one second, that ad told you the name of the product and demonstrated the unique benefit in a creative way. Because that very commercial itself created an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for world's Shortest Commercial. Recently, the Oxford Dictionary announced the most used noun in the English language. It wasn't man, it wasn't woman, and it wasn't love.

It was the word time. When we look back on the evolution of commercial time, it isn't the length of commercials that's so fascinating, it's what influenced those changes. That the first radio commercial was aired on a station owned by a telephone company because the phone company understood the concept of selling minutes and seconds. That the first ever TV commercial aired on the very day the ban on television advertising was lifted in 1941. That single sponsor programs ended when Pat Weaver wanted to shift control

from advertisers to networks. That 60 secondsecond commercials gave way to 30-second commercials when Nixon banned cigarette advertising. That 30-second ads gave way to 15-second ads when MTV taught young audiences to accept compressed information. That 5-second ads were born when an 18-second elephant video launched YouTube. That it was an insurance company that figured out how to beat the almighty skip button, and that a one-second radio commercial could actually win an award. Which brings us to one last lingering question. Are commercials as persuasive as they used to be

as they get shorter and shorter and shorter? Only time will tell when you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. This episode was recorded in the Terror Stream. Producer, Debbie O'Reilly. Sound engineer, Keith Ullman. Theme music by Ari Posner and Ian Lefevre. Research, Allison Pinches. Co-writer, Sydney O'Reilly.

Follow me on Twitter at Terry O'Influence for show updates and bonus material. See you next week. Under the Influence. The beginning of a beautiful sandwich. Hey, I like your style. I'd like your style even more if you were wearing an Under the Influence t-shirt. Just saying. You'll find them on our shop page at terryoreilly.ca slash shop.