by Norah Ababatain

The very first TV ad appeared in 1941 during a baseball game on a local New York channel. The 10-second ad cost a four dollars and completely revolutionized television! It was an ad for a luxury watch company called Bulova. Due to the great success of the Bulova advertisement, other companies began to realize that they needed to jump on board with their marketing and started creating TV ads as well. By 1948, many additional advertisers were using television spots to reach the large audience on television.

By then television was so popular that even the movie studios feared that television would dominate all other media! Of course, that was before a new player showed up. The Internet!! With the Internet, came online shopping and with that came online advertising. With an increasing percentage of the consumer demographics choosing to shop online, Internet advertising is now a multi-billion dollar industry. With the evolution of advertising came the SPAM ads, then the clickable banner ads, the pay per click advertising model, then came the era of social media advertising. With social networks promoting online TV such as YouTube came a new but old type of advertising.  We went back to TV ads, except this time they were digital, online on a smaller screen rather than on your TV.

In 2006, YouTube launched its participatory video ads and brand channels. The participatory video ad is a user initiated video content with features like rate, share, comment and embed options enabled. With brand channels, YouTube gave marketers an opportunity to put out video content consistent with their brand. The first brand channel was Warner Bros. Records.

Today before almost each YouTube video, comes an online video ad.  Such as this one:

Despite the long evolution of advertising, TV advertising remains somehow similar. The concept is the same, a short video to promote a brand or a product. The issue here is how effective are these online ads? People usually go to online television to escape ads and experience a more private atmosphere.  Platforms such as Netflix where you pay for content are meant to be ad free, so if marketers continue to add video advertisements to online television will that affect the user experience and this Internet domination? Will there be a new media to replace that?