Canada’s TV spot awards fete the best and the brightest ­ Playback looks at the talent behind this year’s crop

In this report

– Palmer Jarvis’ evocative ad for Playland is a prime example of Vancouver’s guerrilla-style admaking at its best p. 22

– The winners montage: pix of the picks p. 26

– Preserving our TV advertising heritage p. 28

– A profile of Bessie-winning cinematographer Peter Hartmann p. 31

– Flashcut’s Bob Kennedy scoops the Bob Mann Award p. 32

– And the winner of the prestigious Spiess Award is BBDO’s Michael McLaughlin p. 33

– Allstars roundup p. 34

– Playback introduces ZapProof, a new feature on TV spots that stand out from the clutter p. 40

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We fully expect that television advertising has a future. We all love to speculate and debate how that future is going to emerge. But d’es television advertising have a past?

Television commercials are invariably ubiquitous and even the favorites become downright tedious when seen too often. I am not a great consumer of television, but when I do get intrigued by a particular series such as e.n.g. or Black Harbour, or a sporting event such as the Olympics or ncaa basketball, I am quickly put off by the repetition of television commercials. I remember once counting seven repeats of the same ad in the course of a single World Series baseball game. Therefore, I have become as adroit as anyone in zapping to other channels to avoid commercials and am relieved when tv ads disappear altogether.

But what happens to the television commercials after they are pulled from broadcast? D’es anybody care? Should we care? Or can we breathe a sigh of relief when they are no longer around to plague us?

‘New icons’ of our age

The readers of Playback know well how much imagination, energy, ingenuity, and resources go into the making of television commercials.

Dollar for dollar, word for word, and second for second, no other film or television production is as expensive, as debated and as focused as are tv spots. Marshall McLuhan called advertising ‘the greatest art form of the 20th century’ and Paul Rutherford, historian at the University of Toronto, dubs television ads the ‘new icons’ of our age.

Yet d’es the industry that makes these commercials themselves value them? It seems that they are too busy making new spots to give much thought to yesterday’s efforts. I look forward to being contradicted on this score and hearing about a company which has carefully developed an archives of its past advertising but I am not counting on it.

There was talk at the Canadian Advertising Foundation and the Institute of Canadian Advertising some years back of establishing a comprehensive Canadian research center and archives for advertising, but I could find no evidence of these schemes these days.

TVB Bessie library

Fortunately, the Television Bureau of Canada indeed d’es care and has retained all commercials submitted to it for the annual Bessie Awards since 1963. These days they are receiving some 900 television ads a year and they now hold over 25,000 in their video library. Originally these ads were submitted on film but the bulk of their collection is on the 3/4′ videotape format, only very recently moving into digital beta.

Their database logs each ad by title, by product being advertised, by year of production, and for recent years, by advertising agency, production house, product category and production elements.

The tvb exists to promote the medium of television and copies these television ads for its members and for general educational purposes.

Therefore, they make up compilation reels as requested for nominal dubbing fees but cannot authorize any exhibition or further broadcast use of these commercials. Their annual reel of Bessie winners is circulated within the industry and to those schools of broadcasting that order it.

The earliest commercials on film held by the tvb were transferred to the National Archives of Canada, which also holds a complete set of all Bessie Award winners. However, all the commercials on the 3/4′ videotape format at the tvb are these days certainly at risk. Three-quarter-inch is now virtually an obsolete format with fewer and fewer machines still widely available and operating; and even fewer technicians interested in running them at their optimum capacity.

Moreover, these tapes have accumulated dust and stray oxide, creases and wrinkles, not to mention begun to shed oxide. Therefore they require a careful and expert cleaning before attempted playback. Professional archival cleaning equipment exists for 3/4′ tape but few bother with it; even though most times playback heads become clogged repeatedly even on a single pass of a tape.

All of these problems are only going to get worse as the tapes age and the equipment becomes more obsolete. Someone is going to have to have the resources to clean these tapes and dub them to contemporary formats or we will lose this collection in its entirety.

Television commercials have also survived, albeit accidentally and randomly, and largely hidden, within television programming held by television stations and networks and by public archives across the country.

For example, the cbc kinescopes (a 16mm film print of a television program as it was being broadcast), used to distribute television programming across the country from 1952 to the mid-’60s, sometimes included television commercials, but finding them is like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Also, when the film elements from film production companies found their way into public archives, such as was the case with Bellevue-Pathe and Crawley Films, then the television commercials they may have made also survived.

No Canadian ad archives

But we do not have any archives in Canada which have made it their focus and objective to preserve the records of advertising. In the u.s., the Smithsonian Institute has a center with this express purpose and the University of Oklahoma has targeted political advertising as its collecting mandate. The Museums of Broadcasting in Chicago and New York City have sought out television advertisements and have great success with presenting them to their publics.

Advertising agencies have deposited their collections with various archives; most notably and recently the J. Walter Thompson collection at Duke University. And company archives such as those at Kraft Foods and Coca-Cola have found that their television advertising is their most popular and most requested material.

Television ads are increasingly being used to recreate the ambiance of the ’50s through to the ’70s. Be it in museum exhibitions, plays, films and television programming; anywhere you want to recreate these periods, television ads do it easier and more effectively than any other device imagined. They so quickly evoke another time and place for both the person who might remember them as well as the younger person who never saw the ads in their initial run.

Stock footage is becoming big business and is being searched out almost everywhere. Thus it is not surprising that television ads are also being mined and the video archive at the tvb reports that they are regularly putting together compilation reels for all manner of requests. Recently they found footage of Celine Dion singing for a Chrysler commercial that was subsequently cleared and used by an American television talk show when they interviewed the singer.

Vintage ads repurposed

The true proof of the appeal of past television advertising is its use by contemporary television advertising. Some years ago Esso dusted off Murray Westgate, both in his original and contemporary versions to again sell gasoline and a Black Label television ad was resurrected to help resurrect the beer.

Black Star Beer even went so far as to organize a television advertising campaign around a series of invented vintage television commercials so as to give themselves an instant history.

Scholars and students of communications are beginning to get serious about television ads, and so they should. Paul Rutherford’s book, The New Icons? The Art of Television Advertising, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1994, examined and dismembered commercials with both delight and academic rigor. Students and professors in sociology, communications, film studies, marketing, broadcasting and even literature are examining television commercials from a host of different perspectives.

The television advertising industry in Canada is larger, more successful and more imaginative than is known outside the industry itself. The industry celebrates these accomplishments with great fun and energy as the popularity of annual Bessies Awards demonstrates ­ the one-day event has been a sell-out for a good many years.

More needed

Perhaps then it is time for this industry to have a past that is comprehensively preserved, widely accessible and energetically promoted. Only by doing all of these will its true creative contribution to our society be recognized.

For such purposes, I am not sure that the admirable collection at the tvb is truly sufficient in retaining all of television advertising that we need. The tvb collection is somewhat Toronto-based and biased towards the more creative and imaginative ads rather than the longest-running or most successful ads ­ (sometimes even the Bessie winners may, in fact, get very little airtime for a variety of reasons).

And to truly document television advertising we need more than simply the ads themselves. The graphic work created for the television ad, not to mention for accompanying campaigns in other media, can be stunning and warrants preservation by someone.

The evolution of how television commercials are constructed has changed tremendously over 45 years and much of that knowledge will only be in the noggins of the precious few that persisted in the industry for a good long time. The decision-making between client, ad agency, and the maker of the television ad itself has to be fascinating and revealing, but how and where is this ever going to be documented?

So, we should indeed care what happens to past television commercials.

At the same time as I admit to becoming quickly irritated at television commercials, I must also admit to taking delight in them. They stimulate, enchant, entertain and sometimes even inform. They enter our subconscious more directly than we ever admit and shape us in ways we only vaguely fathom. For these same reasons, the past ads speak more eloquently about our earlier selves than we fully understand.

Indeed, we need to care a good deal more about the past of television advertising.

ernest j. dick is a consulting archivist based in Granville Ferry, n.s. He can be reached at ejdick@atcon.com. This article was prepared with the help of and special thanks to Mark Morton, video supervisor at the Television Bureau of Canada, and Rosemary Bergeron, moving image archivist at the National Archives of Canada.