The pandemic has accelerated the death of a once-crucial medium: the TV ad, which had the surreal job of heroizing a product in 60 seconds or less.

Whatever your opinion of it, Taco Bell’s first commercial starring Gidget, the real-life Chihuahua, became an honest phenomenon in the late ’90s. People walked around saying “Yo quiero [Fill in the blank.]” Gidget attended movie premieres and appeared on Access Hollywood. The talking dog rocked America, and all it took was 30 seconds.

Whatever your opinion of it, Taco Bell’s first commercial starring Gidget, the real-life Chihuahua, became an honest phenomenon in the late ’90s. People walked around saying “Yo quiero [Fill in the blank.]” Gidget attended movie premieres and appeared on Access Hollywood. The talking dog rocked America, and all it took was 30 seconds. Back when Americans digested the same media diet of a few dozen TV channels and the occasional blockbuster film, commercials could do that. Snippets from the highlight reel still jangle in our heads: “I’m a Mac”; “Wassup?”; “He likes it! Hey, Mikey!” For decades, broadcast TV commercials (also known as TVCs) often held the same pop-cultural legitimacy as the programming they ran against. “In the ’80s, there were a hundred things of note that happened in culture in a year,” Karl Lieberman, a co-creator of Dos Equis’s “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign and an executive creative director at the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, told me. “There was a chance that ‘Where’s the beef?’ could be one of them.” Now, he said, the media landscape is so saturated that “advertising oftentimes isn’t in the top 100 things that happened in a day.”

>"The pandemic has accelerated the death of a once-crucial medium: the TV ad, which had the surreal job of heroizing a product in 60 seconds or less."

Network and cable TV now vie for views with all sorts of channels, most of which didn’t exist 20 years ago. More streaming services such as Netflix are becoming subscription-based, not commercial-based. Clients have cottoned to the assurances of digital metrics, even as some of those metrics have been found to be inflated.

>"The pandemic has accelerated the death of a once-crucial medium: the TV ad, which had the surreal job of heroizing a product in 60 seconds or less."