While most publishers and most content producers in today’s digital landscape would describe themselves as ad-supported, the truth is quite the opposite: in commercial media (of any sort) the ads aren’t there to support the content.  In commercial media the content is there to support the ads.  What seems to have been almost entirely forgotten over the past 15-20 years was something both advertisers and content producers understood full well from the 1930s through the 1950s, when the programs on the marquee were prefaced in large type by the brands that owned them.  In the golden years of radio and TV the programs themselves were integral components of the ads.

Of course, the familial nature of the relationship between advertisers and content producers all but ended the very moment the networks discovered the enhanced profit potential of selling multiple ad positions in the same commercial break.  Advertisers suddenly became media renters instead of content owners, and the commercial rotation suddenly resembled a crowded battle ground as brands were just as suddenly compelled to compete for the same eyeballs they once enjoyed all to themselves.  The age of the advertising-as-intermediary model had arrived.

In order to penetrate the ensuing commercial clutter, brand advertisers enlisted the services of Madison Avenue agencies with madman reputations for creative genius.  The same agencies were typically integrated, one-stop shops with the requisite research, media planning, media buying and traffic components to support their creative calling cards.  No one, however, could fully explain why some advertising campaigns worked better than others, and the working assumption was that the real magic of advertising was somehow ensconced in the intangible things that touched our hearts, the same inexplicable things that most resisted measurement.  The fifty percent of advertising that actually worked was the same fifty percent that no one could explain and the same fifty percent that defied measurement.  Ad icon Bill Bernbach summed it up.  ”Advertising,” he said, “is fundamentally persuasion, and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”