1953: The first TV commercial - Gibbs SR toothpaste

Pioneering days at the start of commercial television, this ‘tingling’ commercial from the SR toothpaste brand was the first to air on the small screen. Watching it today, the style grates against what we know and have grown familiar with, yet dig deeper and you can feel how that generation of creative directors and marketers were wrestling with how to use the format. This is exactly what the internet industry had to do since the web started to go mainstream in 1995. Along the way, many of the models of media were simply imported from other channels; not the digital natives of FaceBook and Google. The early generation of internet sites were analogous to the early generation of television shows: ‘radio with pictures’. Watch it and think about whether the digital communications you see are native to the medium, or models crudely imported from other channels: the imports may work okay, but the digital natives are where communication starts to fly.