Given its status as Canada’s dominant advertising medium, it’s easy to view the Sept. 6, 1952 debut of Canadian television as the Big Bang that created today’s vast advertising universe. For more than five decades, TV has been the sun around which all other ad forms orbit.
Canadian advertising was already flourishing by the 1950s, but TV quickly became the most powerful tool in advertisers’ arsenal, offering mass reach, efficiency, and a beguiling combination of audio and video. By 1961, just nine years after its debut, it accounted for 9.6% of all Canadian ad spending.
There was little doubt this new medium would find favour with advertisers. As noted media theorist Marshall McLuhan said during a 1955 speech to the Advertising Guild’s Toronto chapter, “advertising is totally uninhibited in taking advantage of new forms of communication… It has begun to exert a tremendous power over the inner lives of man.”
TV had actually been part of Canadians’ outer lives since its U.S. debut the previous decade. About 30,000 TV sets were purchased in Canada in 1950, and another 40,000 the next year. In his 1990 book Culture, Communication & National Identity: The Case of Canadian Television, author Richard Collins noted that there were already 146,000 sets receiving U.S. stations by the time of CBC TV’s 1952 inception. (Astonishingly, sets cost in excess of $400-this at a time when the average yearly income was about $3,500.)
On July 14, 1951, some 14 months before the formal introduction of TV in Canada, Marketing predicted that the “inherent conservatism” of Canadians would likely see its impact on established media be less pronounced than in the U.S., where TV had already eaten into the amount of time spent with books, newspapers and magazines by up to 50%, and forced radio networks to slash rates on afternoon and evening air time by anywhere from 10% to 15%.
The article quoted an anonymous business manager from the Chicago Tavern Owners Association, who colourfully lamented that TV “has done us dirt,” since patrons now opted to buy their beer at the liquor store and take it home to drink in front of the TV. Thus was forged a bond between TV and beer that exists to this day.
It soon became apparent that TV’s impact on North American culture was significant, perhaps no more so than when Swanson introduced the TV dinner in 1953. Here was food created with the specific intent of being consumed in front of a TV (a role filled admirably today by potato chips), and, arguably, forever altered the family dynamic. That first TV dinner consisted of turkey, cornbread dressing and gravy, buttered peas and sweet potatoes and was enclosed in a package resembling a TV set. It sold for 98 cents. Swanson ordered 5,000 packages in that first year; it would ultimately sell 10 million.
Then, in 1954, just when it seemed the TV experience couldn’t be improved further, Zenith invented the wireless remote control. While there is no scientific evidence to support such a claim, many believe this is the precise moment when contemporary man evolved.
So rapidly and thoroughly did TV become ingrained in the Canadian culture, that in 1956, an unidentifed adman was quoted in Marketing describing non-TV watchers as part of “the lunatic fringe.” A 1957 study by International Surveys Ltd. reported that Canadians were already watching an average of 4.3 hours of television per day.
Naturally, advertisers were part of the mix right from the start. The first-ever commercial sponsor on Canadian TV was Genereux Motors Ltd., a Ford and Monarch dealership in Montreal. The dealer sponsored a 15-minute telecast on CBC’s Montreal station, with the Montreal office of Vickers & Benson preparing the commercials.
And while many bemoan the amount of advertiser involvement in today’s shows, the Sept. 6, 1952 issue of Marketing provides an overview of just how intertwined advertising and programming were during TV’s early days. A front page article notes that Toronto-based Addisons Limited had signed on as a sponsor of a televised version of the late Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.
The show would open with a one-minute demonstration of Addison products by “nationally known women’s commentator” June Dennis and close with another one-minute “panorama” of Addison products. In addition, the middle of the show featured a personality known as “Dr. Marcus Long,” who discussed the story behind the production of Addison-Norge products in a live segment filmed at CBC’s Toronto studios.
In his comprehensive 1990 book When Television Was Young: Primetime Canada 1952-1967, Paul Rutherford noted that Toronto’s CBC station, CBLT, counted Canadian Westinghouse, Ford Motor Company of Canada, Campbell’s Soup, British American Oil, Bulova Watch, Consumers Gas, Consumers Tobacco and Salada Tea among its advertisers within a month of its debut. MacLaren Advertising alone had a slew of sponsored TV shows for clients including Imperial Oil (Hockey Night in Canada), Canadian General Electric (Showtime), Buick (Milton Berle), General Motors (General Motors Theatre) and Chevrolet (Dinah Shore).
“Most clients in highly competitive fields wish to learn more of this medium and many are willing to invest for the purpose,” said Young & Rubicam vice-president A.R. McGill in a Jan. 14, 1955 Marketing article asking executives from the country’s top agencies for their predictions for the year.
According to The Canada Year Book (an annual publication by Statistics Canada), print’s share of the Canadian ad spend declined steadily from about 57% in 1954 to just over 40% by 1972, while TV’s increased from just under 10% to about 43%. Interestingly, after a slight drop between 1954 and 1956, radio revenues never fluctuated more than a few percentage points in the same 18-year period.
By the late ’50s, the private sector was keen to reap the benefits of the burgeoning TV space. After enjoying a monopoly for nearly a decade, the CBC was joined by a second network, Canadian Television Network (CTN), in October of 1961. The name would be changed to CTV in 1962.
In an Aug. 23, 1961 interview with the Toronto Telegram, CTN’s program direcor Michael Hind-Smith claimed (somewhat ironically, given the opposite direction ultimately pursued by the two broadcasters) that his network would emphasize “commercial Canadian content,” since CBC programmers were “hotshots at grabbing American shows.”
Meanwhile, TV-much like the Internet would do 40 years later-was attracting its share of detractors, particularly from the newspaper and magazine sectors. “One reading habit TV hasn’t changed” read one ad for The Gazette in Marketing; “The evening newspaper is still the favourite family shopping medium” read another for the Montreal Star.
Speaking at the Commonwealth Press Union Conference in Canberra, Australia in 1955, Ken Thomson, then executive VP of the Thomson Company, noted that advertisers had tried TV and subsequently dropped it because it was very expensive, not flexible and didn’t permit selection of markets. He also noted that national TV advertising didn’t permit identification of dealers. At the same conference, his father, Roy H. Thomson, correctly described TV as a “most serious competitor” for ad dollars.
But the similarities between the early days and contemporary TV don’t end there. In 1963, Marketing was already featuring articles devoted to the growing problem of ad clutter-or “overloading the burro” in the vernacular of writer Jeff Holmes-during prime time. And Rutherford notes that advertisers were “forever grumbling about costs.”
And, much like today, Canadians tended to favour U.S. and British programs over original Canadian productions. “We’ve found that when we put an American show up against a CBC-produced show, we get the audience; when they put an American show against one of our Canadian shows, they get the audience,” bemoaned CTV founder Spencer Caldwell in 1963. “When we put Canadian shows up against each other, viewers who can turn to American stations.”
In fact, according to a Teleratings report for the week of March 3-9, 1963, seven of the top 10 most-watched shows on the CBC were of American origin, including the Beverly Hillbillies, Bonanza and Perry Mason. Even on CTV, which upon its debut claimed it would be a bastion for “commercial Canadian content,” five of the top 10 programs were American, including the country’s top hit, The Lucy Show. And according to BBM ratings from 1965, a typical Sunday night in Toronto might include Walt Disney at 7 p.m., followed by My Favorite Martian at 7:30 p.m., Ed Sullivan at 8 p.m. and Bonanza at 9 p.m.
The exception, of course, was Quebec, where language and cultural differences led to the development of a unique programming model and the subsequent creation of a star system that thrives to this day. As Rutherford notes, networks like Radio-Canada “expressed the soul of French Canada, with only limited resources.”
One of the earliest Francophone TV hits was La Famille Plouffe. In Culture, Communication & National Identity, Richard Collins notes that the show was so powerful-with 81% of all sets owned by French-language viewers tuned to the program-that hockey schedules in Quebec towns like St. Jerome, Joliette and Quebec City were often shifted to avoid games being played when it aired on Wednesday nights. Meanwhile, Rutherford said the amount of people using buses and trams in Montreal and Quebec City “noticeably slackened” during La Famille Plouffe’s time-slot.
And, again, advertising played a vital role in the development of Quebec television. In 1965, Labatt Breweries became one of the first national advertisers to adopt the “twin bed” marketing approach pioneered by Quebec adman and BCP founder Jacques Bouchard-which posited that while strategy can be the same, the creative in Quebec must be different-with its famous “Lui y connait a” commercial for Labatt 50. “For the first time, Quebecers saw themselves reflected in advertising” noted a 2003 Marketing article. The result? “Quebec’s love affair with 50 has remained more torrid over the years” with 50’s market share twice as big in La Belle Province as it is Ontario.
Since TV’s beginnings however, there has been one Canadian property that has consistently drawn audiences: hockey. The 1972 Summit Series between Canada and Russia marked a milestone in the development of Canadian TV and how advertisers approached the medium. According to Marketing, the Summit Series was the most expensive time ever sold on Canadian television up until that time, with rates ranging from $110,000 for a four-minute package to $600,000 for 32 minutes. Among the advertisers committed to major sponsorship deals: the Ford Motor Company of Canada, Toronto Dominion Bank, Zenith Radio and “bicycle maker” (!) CCM.
In Here’s Looking at Us: Celebrating 50 years of CBC-TV, author Stephen Cole notes that the Russians, who used the Canadian feed for the games taking place in this country, positioned a representative in the studio for all Canadian games, convinced that the Canadians would try to sneak commercials-“capitalist propaganda” one CBC personality jokingly labelled them-into Russia.
That same year, in a speech before the Broadcast Executives Society that would prove a flashpoint for a debate that still continues, CTV president Murray Chercover said that with the impending arrival of Global Television (it debuted Jan. 6, 1974), the CBC should begin a three-phase withdrawal from commercial television. However, the Montreal chapter of the Canadian Media Directors’ Council argued that, among other positive factors, the CBC is the “best restraint” for minimizing escalating time costs and the most efficient network outlet for small or seasonal advertisers.
In many ways, the 1970s marked the end of TV’s first act. It reached maturity with the arrival of pay TV and the first wave of specialty channels in the 1980s, while the 1990s saw the TV universe expand to levels that would have been unimaginable 40 years earlier. The 21st Century, meanwhile, has brought about broadband video and alternate distribution methods.
And the CBC still sells advertising.
