My 2 Cents: When Dinosaurs Roamed The Television Landscape
Do
you remember when advertising executives were the stars in the entertainment
firmament? When I first went to work at Television/RadioAge in
the late '70s, our most in-demand interviewees were execs from: ad
agencies, local TV stations, syndicators and hardware companies, in
that order.
Today, our stars -- those who command $50 million a year salaries, those who
are featured in consumer and business magazine articles -- are network programming
executives. Then, ad executives were used even in TV trade and consumer advertising.
Funny how times have changed. In the '80s, ad executives were the ones who owned
the glamorous waterfront villas on the East Hampton, N.Y. beaches. The gossip
columns featured the likes of Jerry Della Famina, Al Masini and Larry Lamattina.
Before them, there were superstars such as Leo Burnett, Ted Bates, and Russell
T. Gray, just to mention a few.
At the height of this celebrity status, BBDO's, Bruce Barton was quoted as saying
that "Jesus was the world's greatest ad man." In the '80s, ad executives,
like Ted Bates' Robert E. Jacoby, were making the $100 million salaries, which,
adjusted for inflation, would even make Bill Gates blush nowadays.
That was the time when ad execs were featured in movies (e.g. How to Get Ahead
in Advertising and Crazy People), in TV series (e.g. Bosom Buddies)
and novels (e.g. The Virgin Queene).
At that time, all TV trade publications ran feature sections about "Commercials" and "Buyer's
Opinions," where a "buyer" was an advertiser. Today, the buyer
means exclusively a program buyer, without any need to explain.
Phil Dougherty's daily "Advertising" feature in The New York Times,
was one of the hottest columns in the universe: One could almost forget about
world news events, the column was the first thing that everyone in the media
read.
Ad agencies with the greatest clout (such as DellaFemina, Travisano and Partners)
were the "Dream Teams." The ad agency was the message, the medium was
a mere transport mechanism, and the content just a conduit to the audience. Everyone
bowed to the kings and queens of advertising.
Cut to the new century: Now try to search the Internet, or leaf through media
encyclopedias published in the '90s for any advertising name from the '80s and
'90s, and most likely nothing will even appear. Trade magazines don't even acknowledge
the existence of ad executives and TV trade shows organizers barely invite them
to speak at all anymore.
This is the greatest mystery of all, perhaps after the extinction of dinosaurs.
What happened? How could these superstars -- the "Masters of the Universe," the crème
de la crème of the industrialized world -- so easily fade out and
become replaced by their customers -- most of them bean counters, MBAs, speculators
and corporate bureaucracies?
Of course, the TV business has changed over the years: it has become comparable
to the direct-marketing business: very targeted, with plenty of ways to eliminate
the commercial messages.
Also, content became king and with the kings came the courtier of princes and
princesses, who -- while the ad executives were busy basking in their glory,
money and power -- slowly took over the business, by leveraging their ability
to create value by shifting money.
That's when money became the business of television: vertical integration and
consolidation replaced the old world order, causing the fat, idly advertising
dinosaur to fade out into black.
Dom Serafini
