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Conveniently Deaf. TV pushes this vision to an overwhelming degree. Empires have been built on commerce, trade has opened up frontiers, but nothing like the TV sales pitch has ever existed before. Despite the genuine entertainment that so many of the good commercials afford, television still succeeds in crushing its viewers with ads that are too annoying, too loud, too often and just too much. Roughly 20% of TV air time is given over to commercials (see chart, next page). This year 2,000 advertisers will pour $3.1 billion into television advertising twice the budget of the poverty program reaching 95% of the nation's homes. What's more, the TV spieler has a unique license. He doesn't have to stick his foot in the door. He's already in the living room, chattering away from The Farm Hour right through Sermonette. Conveniently deaf, he just smiles and hammers home his quota of 600 "brief messages" a day.
Worse yet, he seems to catch his second breath always at the wrong time. He cuts into the movies just when things are getting interesting, or links three, four or five commercials in a row during the station breaks. Even the war news suddenly comes to an abrupt halt for the sake of sell. The bloody events in Viet Nam, incongruously flanked with sales messages glorifying the good life at home, leave the viewer with the inexplicable sensation that the commercials and the war are one and the same: Which is the more real?
And what are the limits? On the day Robert Kennedy died, Walter Cronkite no sooner wrapped up the latest bulletins on the killing than the screen cut cold to a mouthwash ad. Later, during the funeral, commercials were dropped. The television industry, which devoutly believes in commercials, pays its highest tribute by forgoing them. That is the first grand gesture (the second gesture is a reminder detailing how much money the network relinquished in the public service).
Interplay. The money alone that goes into commercial production is stupefying. Film Director Stanley Kubrick, himself something of a big spender (2001: A Space Odyssey cost $11 million), observed recently that "a feature film made with the same kind of care as a commercial would have to cost $50 million." As it is, the cost of a one-minute commercial rehearsals, filming, reshooting, dubbing, scoring, animation, printing runs to an average of $22,000 or about five times more than a minute of TV entertainment.
For that kind of money, the mini-moviemakers command top talent. Frank Sinatra sells Budweiser beer. Sid Caesar does a comedy routine for Sperry Rand, while Jose Ferrer supplies the voice-over continuity. Edward G. Robinson poured for Maxwell House coffee. Jack Benny promotes Texaco gasoline. George Burns puffs El Producto cigars. Sometimes the process is reversible. Actress Barbara Feldon was a sexy slink of a salesgirl for Top Brass hairdressing ("Sic 'em, tiger") before she went big on legit TV as co-star of Get Smart! Pam Austin, the original Dodge girl, is now a member of the cast of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.