For obvious reasons I’m having a lot of time at hand to watch Youtube clips these days, so I have seen a number of episodes of 1950s game shows, notably Grouhco Marx’ You Bet Your Life. It seems the business model of TV advertising was different in those days: Instead of interrupting the show with commercial breaks showing ads for different products, the show would in its entirety be sponsored by one particular company. The name of that company would be featured prominently throughout, and the show would occasionally be interrupted for a message from the sponsor, but only messages for that one sponsor would be shown.
Was this format really standard on all of television (I’m talking advertising-funded commercial television here, not the licence fee-funded European model) in the 1950s, or only applied to a select few high-profile shows? It seems rather unworkable to me, since the cost of the show (plus contributions towards the overhead of the TV station, plus the profit of the network) would have to be covered entirely by that one sponsor, which would have to make massive payments to the network. I suppose even a major corporation would easily eat up much of its advertising budget with just a few shows. When did the switch to the commercial break as we know it today occur?
It was pretty common in the 50s. It’s based on radio, where most of the shows had a single sponsor (indeed, many shows were officially named for the sponsor: e.g., “The Chase and Sanborn Show with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy”) and often the ads would be worked into the story.
The production cost of the show was indeed born by the sponsors. Often you had two sponsors. One got two ads and the other got one, with the two switching off who got two that week (what was meant by “alternate sponsor.”).
It phased out toward the end of the fifties to the current “magazine” format. The most common reason given for the change was that the sponsors demanded too much control over content. The classic example is a show about Nazi concentration camps was not allowed to mention “gas ovens” because the sponsor was a natural gas company.
The bigger reason, though, is the answer to most questions like this about TV: money. The networks realized they could make more money by selling ad time. This made shows even more ratings-driven, since low ratings made less money. Advertisers were often happy with a low-rated show because even that would reach a lot of people.
I don’t know the exact timeline, but it was definitely gone by the end of the 50s and probably a few years before.
Texaco star theater started on radio and moved to TV Started on radio in 1938 and TV show lasted until 1956. It was one of the first very successful TV shows.
It was the norm up until the middle 50s. Here’s a little history.
In the early days of radio, the networks were mostly just program carriers. Advertisers produced their own shows and paid the networks to run them. More elaborate shows might be paid for by two or three different advertisers.
The same principle carried over to network TV. What killed it was
a) mounting cost of production, which made it harder for one or two sponsors to afford production costs
b) the quiz show scandals of the era, which led the networks to exert more control over their sponsors’ programming
c) because of rising production costs, and network control over programming, the networks moved to “Magazine style” advertising where sponsors could choose to spread their advertising money throughout an entire broadcast day, rather than a single program and finally
d) greater importance of ratings, which discouraged the networks from carrying prestigious but low-rated programs, particularly those produced by outside sources.
Throughout the '60s, shows would be sponsored by companies, or at least particular products; usually, the product would appear in the lower left or lower right corner of the screen during the closing credits. If you watch a 1960s-era sitcom and notice an image in the corner (e.g. Dick van Dyke’s head on The Dick van Dyke Show, some trees on The Andy Griffith Show), or the corner is empty for some reason (the first season of F Troop), that’s where the logo was.
If you ever see an early episode of F Troop where they cut from the start of the opening credits immediately to the Warner Brothers logo at the end, it is because they couldn’t remove the Quaker Oats logo. There was one episode where it was left in, and there are what appear to be attempts to blot it out with a black marker of some sort.
Occasionally, it would appear in the opening credits. For example, when Chevrolet sponsored Bewitched, the opening would have Samantha “flying” the Chevrolet logo rather than a broom. The one I can think of that still exists is the season of The Flintstones sponsored by Styrofoam Building Blocks; you see Fred run into the house and grab Pebbles, next to a box of “Building Boulders.”
I have a fascinating DVD box set of '50s and early '60s commercials. Besides the sponsorship already mentioned, the stars would often do the ads.
I have another set of an Ernie Kovacs quiz show. sponsored by Dutch Masters cigars, where he did very funny ads for them in the show.
These shows were clearly very cheap to make.
This is one of the funding models of modern YouTube shows and podcasts: The show has some single sponsor, often Nord VPN, which the host hypes up in some segment, as opposed to an algorithm inserting ads created by some external entity, which is how modern TV and radio advertising works. The inserted ads are easier to block, but the inline host segment ads are less jarring and don’t come with as much tracking as the adtech company can muster.
Of course, the Nord VPN ads are fundamentally dishonest because they lie about what a VPN does, stating that a VPN keeps your credit card information private. No, that isn’t why you use a VPN. A normal HTTPS connection keeps your credit card information private, a VPN allows you to access a network you otherwise wouldn’t have access to and/or allows you to hide your real IP address, often to get around geographic restrictions. But getting around geographic restrictions is against company policy and therefore illegal, so we can’t advertise that that’s one of a VPN’s primary uses, can we? So we have to pretend a VPN protects you from identity theft because shut up. More bullshit than Carter has little liver pills.
We had a local jeweler (who we all swore had a Scrooge McDuck vault). He’d come to our TV station and instead of negotiating for running individual ads, would say “I’d like to buy a show”. Younger station managers would stare in confusion, but the oldsters knew the score. Ol’ Man Biederbeck had grown up with The Colgate Comedy Hour, and Kraft Television Theatre. So we’d ask him what his favorite show was, and if he said “Columbo” well, then, it was “Columbo, brought to you by… Biederbeck’s Fine Diamonds!”
He also recorded 15 second spots that ran day and night: “Hi, this is Bob Biederbeck, reminding you to watch Columbo this Thursday night, right here on this station!” Very old school.
The minute you walked in the joint,
I could see you were a man of distinction,
a real big spender!
Good-lookin’, so refined!
I figured that you’re the Muriel cigar smokin’ kind!
So let me get right to the point:
You’re right in style when you’re in Muriel’s company!
Hey, big spender!
(Hey, big spender!)
Spend a little dime with me! :o
Curious. I’ve seen Nord VPN being done by the presenter on a couple YouTube channels and none of them made any claims about credit card security. At least one of them specifically mentioned being able to watch [program] on Netflix by changing your ‘location’ from the US to somewhere in Europe because Netflix carries it there.
A lot of channels are getting organic sponsors because YouTube pretty well started screwing them over in regards to revenue-sharing. If you look up stuff about February last year you’ll find channel after channel complaining about it. There was a big push to get Patreon accounts at the time as well.
Not only was Kovacs a gambler, he didn’t like taxes and pretty much refused to pay them. Between the taxes and the gambling, he had run up substantial debts when he died. Edie Adams refused to declare bankruptcy and refused offers of help from Kovacs’ friends, insisting she’d pay off the debts herself. Along with advertising cigars, she put together a nightclub act, returned to acting, and started her own cosmetics company. Eventually, she not only paid off all the debts, but became wealthy on her own.
The “Beverly Hillbillies” intro ends with Jed pointing at something (see 2nd video below). For a time during the first season - an extra verse of the theme was played - referring to the Kellogg’s billboard which Jed was pointing at.
Different versions of the Kellogg’s verse were played on Canadian and US TV (the Canadian version didn’t refer to “Battle Creek”).
The extra verse:
They also did a Winston cigarette verse (after the main theme):
