Sixty years after NBC began the first regular TV service with coverage of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s opening speech at the New York World's Fair, the 1999 Super Bowl once again proved the indisputable power of television. The annual gridiron event attracts an audience of 800 million viewers worldwide and advertisers are willing to pay around $2 million for 30 seconds in front of all those eyeballs.
HotJobs.com, a small Internet company with big ambitions, spent almost half of its 1998 revenues for one spot during the game – which led to a crushing load of traffic that crippled the company's Web site. Was it worth it? They're spending twice as much on ads for Super Bowl XXXIV.
Inventors started tinkering with the idea of television in the 19th century and succeeded in broadcasting images over the air in the 1920s. Television sets in the home grew in popularity through the late '40s and by the 1950s the Big Three networks had secured their places at the top of the TV food chain.
The new medium developed the ability to influence the public's perceptions, preferences, and opinions in an undeniably compelling format. Before too long, TV started telling us what we could and couldn't see, and what to think about. As Washington Post critic Tom Shales put it, "We were one nation, indivisible, under television."
Over the years, TV has proven a brute economic and cultural force for the industries it has nurtured – entertainment, advertising, even politics. More than 98% of US homes have at least one TV set, and many more can be found in classrooms, airports, bars, offices, airplanes, supermarket checkout lines, your pocket, and your minivan. And we’re watching them. Americans spend an average of four hours a day glued to the tube — during which they’ll be exposed to (or surf past) at least an hour of commercials, or even more, if they tune in to a 30-minute infomercial.
Televised entertainment broadcasts (or events, as they are now called) have come a long way from the grainy, black-and-white live shows of yesteryear to become glittery, high-dollar productions that define who we are as Americans and our place in the world. Commercials – once limited to voice-over sponsorship tags – often share the same production values of the programs they interrupt. And the lines between TV news and entertainment continue to blur as we lose our appetite for hard facts in place of high-speed chases and reality-based programming.
As the TV universe has expanded, it has pumped ever-growing piles of money into the global economy. Estimated television advertising expenditures in 1999 will be around $40 billion — just $8 billion less than the GNP of the US in 1939, when Roosevelt spoke at the World’s Fair.
The result of all that money pouring into the economy? Monolithic global brands. The Coca-Cola Company spent $1.6 billion on advertising (in all media) in 1998. A generation after the company’s "Teach the World to Sing" commercials, legions of thirsty consumers around the globe reach for a Coke – in perfect harmony — and cement Coke’s ranking as the most valuable brand in the world.
The next market advertisers seek to conquer is the under-18 set. "Young viewers" translates to "young consumers"; Americans under the age of 20 spend (or convince their parents to spend) more than $140 billion each year. It makes good marketing sense to spend billions to build brand loyalty among this group as early as possible.
While the bombardment of TV advertising has created new economies, the political influence of television has created new ideals — some would say superficial ones. The Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960 — the first ever to be televised — taught us that sweaty candidates don't win elections and that debonair ones do. While voters who listened to the radio broadcast of the debate believed Nixon the rhetorical victor, the TV audience cast their lot with Kennedy. The nation was later transfixed in horror by televised images of Kennedy's assassination in 1963 and in pride when Kennedy's dream of an American walking on the moon was fulfilled in 1969.
TV’s seminal moments are etched indelibly in our culture, even among those too young to be there the first time around, thanks to huge archives of film reels and the development and eventual ubiquity of videotape. Rodney King probably wouldn't be a household name if his beating by Los Angeles police officers hadn't been captured on tape and aired thousands of times on television.
On the lighter side, a video camera in every home has made hugely successful shows such as America's Funniest Home Videos possible, providing fodder for the life vs. art argument. Reality shows, which often capitalize on the handiwork of amateurs armed with home video cameras, attract large audiences and the commensurate advertising dollars.
In the decades since television established its dominance, we've elected a TV and movie star to run the country and a professional wrestler to run Minnesota. Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski moonlights as an actor, former Senator Bob Dole touts the benefits of both Viagra and Visa, entertainer Sonny Bono's widow takes over his seat in Congress, and talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell is an outspoken gun-control advocate. News, politics, and entertainment are no longer separate — if they ever were — and they're becoming more indistinguishable.
After decades of dominance, the Big Three networks started to lose their hold on viewers in the 1980s. In 1980 Ted Turner defied the odds and built CNN (now owned by Time Warner) on the premise that people would want news all the time. CNBC (a partnership of NBC and Dow Jones) took the concept a step further with a day full of business news starting in 1989. On the entertainment side, Fox stepped into the fray in 1987 and started to draw viewers from ABC, NBC, and CBS, while cable TV has steadily whittled away at network audiences and advertising dollars — to the tune of about $10 billion in 1999.
The Super Bowl remains a perpetual network TV success, as well as a focal point for a more and more splintered society. We may not agree on taxes, gays in the military, or the political merit of any given president, but the Super Bowl allows us to get together in front a big screen TV and celebrate one thing uniquely American, and patently unoffensive, for the most part. After all, the winner gets a phone call from the president.
Britton Jackson is executive editor for Hoover's Online.
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