The Advent of Radio Advertising

representation firms in radio, companies that sell time to advertisers on many radio stations

Until the 1920s, virtually all of the advertising agencies’ work appeared in print media. Beginning in the 1920s, however, many ad people began to turn to radio to place their ads. To help ad practitioners purchase local radio time most efficiently, representation firms—companies that sold time on many radio stations—came into existence. In connection with these sales, ad practitioners insisted that radio executives provide proof of their statements about the size of their audiences. A number of companies rushed in to conduct surveys of listeners in order to get this information, and the broadcast audience research (or rating) business was born.

Radio also required ad people to learn how to sell through sound rather than through text. Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, advertisers adapted tried-and- true print techniques—slogans, dramatizations, brand personalities—to the new medium. In addition, ad agencies that had large consumer goods firms as clients often coordinated the creation of weekly network radio programs. Agencies were responsible for coming up with an appropriate idea for the program, negotiating its time period and its cost with a network, and then producing the show from start to finish every week.

Advertising, the Post-War Era, and Television

As World War II ended and millions of soldiers came home, got jobs, and started families, production of consumer goods took off. Manufacturers and stores turned to advertising agencies to help them stir up demand for products, and by the mid-1950s the ad industry was healthier than ever.

The commercial introduction of television in the late 1940s brought a challenge to advertising practitioners that was similar to the one they had faced with radio. In fact, as we noted in Chapters 9 and 11, the large-scale movement of ad money into TV forced magazine and radio executives to make profound changes in the audiences they pursued and the content they chose. Increasingly, radio and magazines sold themselves as media that targeted particular groups that certain advertisers were chasing (young adults, for example), whereas television reached “everybody." The period clearly showed the power of the advertising industry as a whole to shape the direction of the media system.

In TV's early years, ad messages were live; as in radio, they often appeared as part of the program. Advertisers bought hour or half-hour blocks of time from the TV networks and sponsored entire shows; again, as in radio, ad agencies produced these shows for their clients. But this approach changed after a decade. By the early 1960s, advertiser interest in fully sponsoring a show diminished.

Part of the reason was that TV network executives had concluded that it was more profitable for them to shape their schedules, and sometimes own their shows, than for them to allow advertisers to do so. Advertisers had their reasons for agreeing with this approach. They wanted to reach as many people as possible with the quickly growing medium. Tying up a large amount of money in one time period every week was not the best way to achieve this goal.

As a result, advertisers scattered their time purchases across the TV schedule. With tens of millions of Americans viewing the same show at the same time, network charges for advertising on these shows skyrocketed. With the increase in charges, the length of television commercials decreased. In the 1960s, one-minute commercials were common. By the 1970s, the most common duration had dropped to thirty seconds. By the 1990s, fifteen-second TV commercials were common.