What happens to old commercials? There must be thousands upon thousands of them made, most of them running for about a month, unless they’re popular, and are never seen again. Are they destroyed or kept in a library? Why keep most commercials anyway?
Well, some of them end up on TV Land (the cable/satellite channel for “classic TV”) as “retromercials”.
One Dub may end up on a bookshelf (next to some other tapes) of the Account Executive. Another dub or two might end up on a bookshelf of the main characters in the spot (if they request it). The broadcasting stations will keep their copies around for awhile in case the agency wants to run it again, then they’ll be pitched.
Spots that an agency really took pride in may be preserved to appear in presentations of what the agency has done.
At least, that’s the old method.
In reality, old commercials are reused to sell outdated products that we ship to foreign countries.
In Cuba they are still running Studebaker commercials because of the large number of Studebaker cars still being driven there.
Hell, in Russia, they’re so far behind the times, they’re only up to “Preparation G”.
I work at BBDO. They have reels that contain old commercial upstairs, and employees who are specifically in charge of managing the tape libraries. (I would imagine that newer commercials are stored on Jaz cartridges in digital form but I don’t know for sure). I was installing a FileMaker application on a tape librarian’s machine as she was playing through a bunch of 1970s-vintage shampoo spots looking for those that featured an individual actress.
Besides TV Land, I’ve seen some 70’s and 80’s commercials on regular TV, then with a message that their product is still appealing after 20-30 years. E.g., Life’s “Mikey” commercial; or excepts from Toys-R-Us of child actors singing “I’m a Toys-R-Us Kid”, then a fade to the actor, now grown-up, singing the next line.
I sure miss the relative straight-forwardness of commercials before the 1990’s. Now, often, I’m at a loss as to what was being advertised. I once was anticipating a new movie, until I saw the ad again and saw the 1-second, garbled “PlayStation” splash. “Crap, it’s just a game!”
You laugh, but a certain amount of commercial recycling does happen. In the mid eighties, I worked for a small Atlanta agency that was ultimately swallowed up by BBDO South. One of our clients was a small South Carolina savings and loan that was fourth in name recognition in their market among their own customers. Their budget was miniscule, but their objective was to at least make sure their own customers knew who they were (and to bring in as much new business as possible). We developed a series of quick, punchy 10-second TV spots that could be run alone or in groups of 3. The spots featured various animals responding (non-verbally, of course) to questions about how they’re treated by their current bank (voiceover by Lorenzo Music, the voice of Garfield and of Carlton the doorman on Rhoda), ending with the tag line “If we were you, we’d bank with us”. The most successful of these, featuring an incredibly expressive orangutan, was expanded to a full thirty seconds. That spot won a Lion D’Or at Cannes, a Clio, and a slew of other awards. It was also syndicated by the original client to smaller financial institutions in other markets across the country – only the title at the end with the S&L name had to be changed. Eventually, several years later, I saw the same spots used a couple of times in other parts of the country for completely different types of businesses. The voiceover had been redone, in one case by Lorenzo Music and in another by someone else, but the video was the same.