Bulova – The first TV commercial

https://youtu.be/ho2OJfXkvpI, see commercial here.

The first TV commercial ever aired in the United States 75 years ago (the first day that commercial advertising was permitted on television) was on July 1, 1941, at 2:29 p.m. At the time, the Brooklyn Dodgers played a baseball game against the Philadelphia Phillies at Ebbets Field, New York. The commercial featured on the NBC-owned WNBT (now WNBC), and it appeared just before the first pitch. This was the first-ever commercial in the history of television.

It was a short, simple spot for Bulova Watch Co. It focused on a watch as the second hand ticked, and a voiceover told viewers what time it was, according to Ad Age.

The Bulova logo, with the phrase “Bulova Time”, was shown in the lower right-hand quadrant of the test pattern while the second hand swept around the dial for one minute.[6][7]

Compared to today’s big-budget TV advertising campaigns, the brand’s approach was relatively simple, featuring a Bulova watch imposed over a map of the United States with a voiceover declaring: “America runs on Bulova time”. The ad was broadcast July 1, 1941 on the eve of the United States entry to the Second World War, before the nation became a global superpower and the leading force in the world economy.

Although TV ads existed from 1928 onwards, those weren’t legal until commercial licenses came into effect in 1941, when Bulova aired this first official TV ad. A few years ago, discussing the creation of the first on-screen commercial, a spokesperson for Bulova told Mashable that the commercial “wasn’t filmed at all… It was just the graphic and the live voice-over”. The company paid just $9 in total for it – $4 for airtime and $5 for “station charges” – the equivalent of about $150 today. Unfortunately for Bulova, the ad only reached a few thousand people because, at that point, only 4,000 TV sets had been installed in New York.

The Bulova watches television ad heralded the age of TV advertising and the power of the brand, giving companies a new way to reach consumers. Afterward, TV advertising saw relentless growth and became the main source of revenue for private broadcasters (with TV ad revenues estimated at $73 billion in the US and £5.5 billion in the UK in 2016). The ad men of New York and London have never looked back

Bulova also produced the nation’s first radio commercial in 1927. It said, “At the tone, it’s 8 P.M., B-U-L-O-V-A, Bulova watch time.”