The first-ever television commercial ran on July 1, 1941 during a Brooklyn Dodgers-Philadelphia Phillies baseball game airing on the local New York TV station WNBT. The 10 second spot, for Bulova Watches, featured a graphic of a Bulova watch face over a map of the U.S. A voiceover declared that “America runs on Bulova time.”
As it happens, many giant American companies leveraged TV’s ubiquity, reach and impact to become the behemoths they are now. That includes Walmart, the retailer, which in 1980 (shortly after it began running TV ads) posted revenue of $1.2 billion (about $4.5 billion when adjusted for inflation). The company expanded dramatically, helped along by the reach provided by TV. Walmart’s revenue in 2023 was $611 billion.
Television didn’t invent advertising — it had been present in newspapers, magazines and radio for years — but the medium was responsible for turbocharging the industry, and during linear TV’s heyday of the…