Thriving on the Tube

When Italian mothers wish to punish their children these days, they often warn: "Tonight you won't watch Carosello." The nightly eleven-minute TV show has a huge audience of both children and adults, despite the fact that it is nothing more than a nonstop commercial, peppered with jingles, cartoons and celebrity testimonials that hawk everything from Stock brandy to "Tiger in your tank." Carosello is but one reason why TV advertising, little known outside the U.S. a decade ago, has become a $775 million-a-year business in a dozen countries, from Finland to Japan. This year that total will probably increase another 10%.

Never on Sunday. Advertising on TV has achieved this growth despite the opposition of people who feel that it gives too much direct influence to the advertiser and of those who, like many of the British, consider it an esthetic affront. It has also been harnessed by numerous restrictions. Belgium, Holland and the three Scandinavian countries still ban all TV commercials. Even in those countries that allow it, the typical TV ad is decidedly soft-sell, is aired only at certain times at night; in Switzerland, TV ads are never shown on Sunday.

Despite bans on "misleading and disparaging" ads and a policy of refusing to break up nationally originated programs, Ireland's Telefis Eireann doubled advertising revenues in two years to $5,300,000. Finland, which bars liquor and weight-reducing ads, doubled its ad revenues to more than $7,000,000 in the same time. Although it limits ads to ten minutes a night, France managed to sell $5,000,000 in commercials last year. Switzerland, which allowed its first commercial only six months ago, has been forced to ration time among more than 170 clamoring firms, expects to reap $5,000,000 in television advertising this year.

And Now the BBC? While these amounts are small compared with U.S. television revenues, the annual totals are rising into more substantial figures in some countries. Last year Italy sold $21 million worth of TV advertising. In West Germany, where eight regional networks run almost nothing but "slice-of-life" commercials portraying housewives at work, ad revenues rose from $33 million in 1960 to $94 million last year. Britain's ten-year-old ITV now airs more than $300 million in TV time for advertisers as varied as chocolate-maker Cadbury's and Procter & Gamble.

In Japan, where the tube is derisively known as Ichi Oku So Hakuchi (for 100 million idiots), TV time is now so highly prized that spots are usually limited to 15 seconds each or to "crawl along" slogans that slither along the bottom of the tube even as the program goes on. Though Japanese pain-killer commercials are forbidden by Japan's strict food and drug laws to show pain and happiness in the same sequence, these same ads have helped television ad revenues to double to $300 million in three years.

Even countries that resisted TV ad vertising--notably Holland, Denmark and Norway--now find themselves debating whether to relax their bans against it. And Britain's venerable government-operated British Broadcasting Corp., where a few years back the very mention of advertising was enough to evoke "cries of horror and alarm," as the Economist once put it, has now begun to reconsider its stand against commercials.

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