Josh Clark

It wasn't actual TV commercial in between content.

The first ad, I guess, if you count that stuff was in 1930.

The year TV debuted, really, and it was a furrier.

Man, it seems like it would have been from like 1830, but it was a furrier in Boston called I.J.

Fox Furriers who sponsored the CBS Orchestra.

It was a program called the Fox Trapper.

So that, you know, that's kind of how ads went up until 41.

Yeah.

Yeah, and that was the radio format.

It was essentially they just took the format that had been pioneered on radio and now they were doing it on TV.

That's not really an ad.

If you call that an ad, you're just being contrarian, right?

Sure.

There were still even other ads, but they were illegal because it wasn't until 1941 that the FCC started issuing licenses to run commercials on broadcast networks.

But that means that the ads before them were illegal.

I could not find any mention of what these ads were for, but I got the impression that they were just experimentation networks kind of on the sly, figuring out how to do it as they went along.

So again, Bulova is the first actual TV commercial that was legal and that was also produced with the intent, the sole intent, to sell a particular product on air.

That was it.

That space of air was filled up by an ad.

That was the first time ever.