The Revolution of Advertising on Media

The Evolution of Digital Mass Media Commercial Advertisement

The digital and virtual advertising industry revolution began in the 1920s rather than by the current social media and search engine industry as we know today. The idea of adwords and “pay per impression” was already implemented 100 years ago.

In the 1920s there was a revolution in consumption and culture, which was reflected in the influx of 50 million citizens a week to cinemas. The Alexander brothers took advantage of the new tendencies. The mass viewing in Cinemas revolution is similar to what is occurring in the 21st century with digital and social media advertising revolution.

Their entrepreneurship was more impressive then the one we know today considering they had to work with less resources and with limited technologies. They managed to nail the emerging market before anyone else by combining airplane technologies with film making technologies faster then anyone else and thus maintaining strategic advantage. In ingenuous efficient way they adapted and developed technologies accordingly to the industrial and consumption evolution.

They managed to sell local businesses advertising space in movie theaters until the 1950s, they became the leading company in the field of virtual advertising (paperless) because of better competitiveness and horizontal production enabling adaption to emerging technologies and paperless visual technologies.

The product of newsreel and advertising reel that was projected in theaters before the main movie started is similar to today’s tweets, ad banners and so on. The economy of selling ads on websites and social-media have the same principles, pricing, targeting and procedures.

The evolution of motion picture advertising and TV went through stages:

Static advertising with an image using transparencies
Advertising with transparencies
Advertising with motion
Advertising with color
Advertising with voice
Departmentalization for Creative, Copywriting, Art, Production, Tragring

Their agents and films had to be moved from place to place as quickly as possible and therefore they trained the salesmen to be pilots. “Aircraft manufacturers could not meet their business needs so they created
“Alexander Aviation” which made it to the second largest plane manufacturer in the world producing eight aircrafts per day. Basically they were the model-T of the aviation industry.

In this respect, there is a similarity to Google, which invests in computer, communications, aerospace and aerospace technologies in order to improve communication, mapping and information transmission channels.

The Alexander aircraft company revolutionized the world of airplane marketing with a merchandising guide that they created. The planes were cheap and innovative so that the engine could be replaced in a modular way and therefore sold to the post office, farmers and everyone else. it had a huge potential for airplane-carriers and military use becauseo of maintenance and modularity, costing $2500 a piece.

The sale to the military was not so successful because they were not linked to the Establishment, politicians and generals like the competitors (who suffered from falling prices on the civilian market).During the 1929 market collapse which resulted the lack of customers and due payments from their customers the airline went bankrupt because it had no connections with politicians and generals such as Rockefeller, Hughes, Ford, etc.

If the United States had entered World War II with a companies like Alexander Aircraft industries, that had mass production of airplanes, it probably would have been able to increase the industrial advantage, ironically, the collapse of the 1929 markets destroyed competitive industries that were not close to the government. The 1929 market collpase had to do with the outcome of world war I, and the agents of world war II.

By the 1950’s, the Company was producing about 3,000 films annually to meet the demands of its advertisers and to maintain a library of films covering 8,200 different subjects. The company employed about 600 people while producing films for 75 of the nation’s leading manufacturers including General Motors, U. S. Rubber, Ford, Philco, Hotpoint and Seven-Up. The esablished regional offices in Dallas, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. With the emerge of television and the closing of theaters, Alexander Film Company turned to producing advertising films for the TV market. The firm was a non-union organization and therefore was blacklisted losing market share to Hollywood and others. The Alexander brothers managed to bring Ford’s revolution from the world of automobile to the world of aviation and the advertising revolution from the 21st century to the 20th century.

The Evolution of Digital Mass Media Commercial Advertisement

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