Television Commercials

Classic Television Commercials

To many of television's critics, advertising is the symbol of all that is wrong with the medium. The commercials, they say, are intrusive, repetitious, and dishonest, and appeal to viewers' base, material instincts. They turn a communications medium of unparalleled power into a vast wasteland, a Turkish bazaar, a patent-medicine show. Their exaggerations, their sometimes crude cajoling by fantasy and hyperbole have made commercials the targets of outrage and satire from the early days of Milton Berle to the contemporary assaults of Saturday Night Live.

The facts suggest a different reading. Advertisers use television the way they have used every mass medium from the first days of widespread newspaper circulation. They have discovered that television lends itself to certain techniques of selling which are especially powerful because the medium is powerful. The unique contribution of television to advertising is its prodigious ability to communicate not simply information about a product, but also fantasies about consumers and how they choose to live. Commercials are more carefully prepared, more elaborately produced, and more frequently seen than any one program on televison.

Every advertising medium uses familiar personalities to help the customer form the proper image of the product. Comet cleanser wanted to achieve a sense of unfancy, just-plain-folks competence. Its symbol: former movie star Jane Withers as "Josephine the Plumber."

Jesse White portrayed a Maytag appliance repairman who finds his work lonely because so few customers need to have their machines repaired. The campaign is a humerous way of making a claim that might be greeted skeptically at face value.

Increasingly, advertising wraps its products around a life-style. They will place the product in exactly the right environment, with exactly the right looking people, to get the effect they want. For example, in the American Express Travelers Cheques campaign, Karl Malden is always wearing his hat, even indoors. Why? Because American Express wants the image of a tough, protective, law enforcement figure standing behind its checks. Malden is the embodiment of the law enforcement officer, the symbol of security an uncertain traveler wants in a traveler's check.

Hertz rents automobiles to time-conscious executives; using football star O.J. Simpson to demonstrate speed and excellence was an effective match of personality and product.

In television's early days, when sponsors packaged and paid for programming by themselves, advertisers found many ways to increase the frequency of their messages. Here Ted Mack and the Original Ameteur Hour offers viewers a permanent reminder of the advertiser. Sponsors were clearly identified with specific programs. It was in effect, a holdover from the earliest days of radio, when sponsors hoped in part to earn the gratitude of listeners in return for paying for programming. The advertisers in the early days of television were, like the early programs, fascinated with the sheer magic of being able to show something to the viewer.

Animation, never before possible in mass advertising, came into its own with television. Ajax cleanser employed animated elfs to sing "Use Ajax, the foaming cleanser/Cleans the dirt right down the drain."

Advertising catch-phrases became part of our American culture. Charlie the Tuna (voice supplied by actor Herschel Bernardi) for years tried to join the Star-Kist company as food, only to be told that "Star-Kist doesn't want tuna with good taste, it wants tuna that tastes good."

Colonel Sanders, representing Kentucky Fried Chicken, touted "It's finger lickin' good."

By approaching social values and life-styles in the service of salesmanship, advertising has become not just a tool to sell things, but a tool to sell visions of America itself.

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