The Stats: Advertising in the Golden Age of Television

Over the past few days I've been skimming through the book, "The Age of Television," written by Leo Bogart in 1956. It shifts easily between the prophetic and the depressing.

"Commercials on television, as on radio, are accepted by the audience as part of the nature of things. The public's attitude toward them, from the available evidence, seems to lie somewhere between uncritical apathy, and positive interest."

Does this still hold true today? Or has this always been some form of lackluster defeatism, as if the advertisers conquered the consumer? While this would probably still ring statistically true today, I have serious doubts whether I want to put my name on something that will only be begrudingly accepted. You tell me, can you call it uncritical apathy, or is it just the tone of the defeated?

But, he moves on to these stats that suggest in those days advertising, it was more likely to skew towards the 'positive interest' side of Bogart's scale.

"In Lexington, Kentucky, McGeehan and Maranville found the public generally willing to approve television advertising. 74% said there was about the right amount of it. 81% called it, "clever," 74% "powerful," and 69% "helpful," in a series of multiple choice questions.

In Whan's 1952 Iowa survey, only 26% of those interviewed answered "yes" to the leading question, "Does any of the advertising on television annoy or irritate you?"

More recently a Trendex survey of 1000 television homes found that 90% of those interviewed said they "liked" the last commercial they heard."

Holy shit. How the hell did we go so wrong? I'm seriously shocked.  We had trust, we had interest, many liked us and wanted to hear from us. But too many took the easy way out, and we're left with the tattered leftovers. I guess you could call us the George W. Bush of the business world.