1922. The first paid radio commercial

The moment

Monday, 28 August 1922, a quarter past five in the afternoon. In the studio of AT&T’s new station WEAF, on West Street in lower Manhattan, the announcer reads a short introduction. The radio audience “is to be addressed by Mr. Blackwell of the Queensboro Corporation”, who “will say a few words concerning Nathaniel Hawthorne” [1]. Blackwell takes the slot. He talks about the novelist’s ideals, about the “light shaft” that passes for daylight in a city apartment, about children “starved for a run over a patch of grass”, and only near the end about the tenant-owned apartments his company has just named Hawthorne Court, in Jackson Heights, twenty minutes from Manhattan by subway. Queensboro has paid fifty dollars for the time. The script survives, which is more than any earlier paid broadcast can say.

What came before

Radio in 1922 was a craze without a business model. Of the roughly 500 stations on the air that year, a quarter belonged to manufacturers and retailers and 40 per cent to schools, clubs, churches and government [9]. Performers worked for nothing. The question of who would pay hung over every studio.

Herbert Hoover, the commerce secretary who regulated the airwaves, rejected Britain’s licence fee on the set and rejected advertising too. At the First National Radio Conference in February 1922 he said it was “inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes, to be drowned in advertising chatter” [7]. The conference recommended that direct advertising be prohibited outright.

AT&T had a different idea and the patents to try it. In February 1922 it announced what it called toll broadcasting: a station with no programmes of its own, a telephone booth to the air, where anyone could pay to speak. Printers’ Ink, the print trade’s paper, said the plan would prove “positively offensive to great numbers of people” [3]. The station opened as WBAY on 25 July, lost its signal among the skyscrapers, became WEAF in mid August, and waited twelve days for a customer.

WEAF was late to its own first. Frank Bremer is reported to have rented his amateur station in Jersey City to the Jersey Journal for a New Year’s broadcast on the last night of 1921, for fifty dollars. WGI in Medford Hillside, Massachusetts, sold a programme to the Packard Motor Company of Boston on 4 April 1922, nearly five months before Hawthorne Court, and was stopped almost at once [2]. The record does not settle which came first. What WEAF has that the others lack is a script that survived, a company that kept its files, and a successor: AT&T sold the station in 1926 and it became the flagship of NBC.

What it changed

The talk sold apartments. Fox records that Queensboro “quickly sold two apartments”, and that by March 1923 the station had twenty-five sponsors, among them Macy’s, Colgate and Metropolitan Life [4, p. 152]. Small money, and beside the point. For the first time a marketer could buy the attention of a household at a fixed hour, inside the home, with a human voice, and count what came back.

The audience came first.

Eight years after the Hawthorne Court talk, one American household in three had a set; the Depression did not slow the curve.

Source: US Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Series R 104, 1975. Redrawn by Brave New Media.

Unit: millions of households

Show the data

Year	Households with radio sets (millions)
1922	0.06
1923	0.4
1924	1.25
1925	2.75
1926	4.5
1927	6.75
1928	8.0
1929	10.25
1930	13.75
1931	16.7
1932	18.45
1933	19.25
1934	20.4
1935	21.46
1936	22.87
1937	24.5
1938	26.67
1939	27.5
1940	28.5
1941	29.3
1942	30.6
1943	30.8
1944	32.5
1945	33.1
1946	34.0
1947	35.9
1948	37.62
1949	39.3
1950	40.7

The advertisers followed, and the money kept growing through the Depression. Hoover set the terms. At the Third Radio Conference in October 1924 he said that “the quickest way to kill broadcasting would be to use it for direct advertising”, and the conference passed a resolution deprecating “the use of radio broadcasting for direct sales effort” [7][16]. So the early sponsors bought a name on a show rather than a sales pitch: the Eveready Hour, the A&P Gypsies, the Cliquot Club Eskimos [4, p. 153].

The networks made it national. NBC was formed by RCA on 25 September 1926 around the station it had bought from AT&T, and a rival that became CBS followed the next year [9]. Then Lord & Thomas put Amos ‘n’ Andy on NBC for Pepsodent and the serial became, in Fox’s phrase, “the medium’s first runaway success” [4, p. 156]. Wu’s reading is that a sponsor had learned to “own” a part of the day, seven o’clock, every evening, across the country [5, p. 93].

1927$6

1928$15

1929$35

1930$43

1931$52

1932$63

1933$76

1934$93

1935$113

1936$122

1937$165

1938$167

1939$184

1940$216

1941$247

1942$260

1943$314

1944$394

1945$424

1946$454

1947$506

1948$562

1949$571

1950$605

Total US advertising fell by more than half between 1929 and 1933; radio's take more than doubled in the same years.

Source: Galbi, CS Ad Expenditure Dataset v1.14 (Coen series), 2009, for 1927 to 1934; US Census Bureau, Historical Statistics, Series T 459, 1975, for 1935 to 1950. Redrawn by Brave New Media.

Unit: $ million

Show the data

Year	Radio advertising ($ million)
1927	6
1928	15
1929	35
1930	43
1931	52
1932	63
1933	76
1934	93
1935	113
1936	122
1937	165
1938	167
1939	184
1940	216
1941	247
1942	260
1943	314
1944	394
1945	424
1946	454
1947	506
1948	562
1949	571
1950	605

Radio took its money from print. Newspapers carried 45 per cent of American advertising in 1935 and 32 per cent in 1945; radio went from 7 per cent to 15 [11].

Radio (%)Newspapers (%)Magazines (%)

Radio's share peaked in the war years; it was already slipping when television took its first 3 per cent in 1950.

Source: US Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Series T 444-471, 1975. Redrawn by Brave New Media.

Unit: per cent of total US advertising

Show the data

Year	Newspapers (%)	Magazines (%)	Radio (%)
1935	45.1	8.0	6.7
1936	44.4	8.5	6.4
1937	42.1	9.3	8.0
1938	41.1	8.9	8.8
1939	40.1	9.1	9.3
1940	39.0	9.5	10.3
1941	37.7	9.6	11.0
1942	37.0	9.2	12.1
1943	36.1	11.0	12.6
1944	32.6	11.9	14.5
1945	32.0	12.7	14.7
1946	34.4	12.7	13.5
1947	34.6	11.6	11.9
1948	36.0	10.5	11.6
1949	36.8	9.5	11.0
1950	36.4	9.0	10.6

The third change was a format. Procter & Gamble put a fifteen-minute serial called Ma Perkins on WLW in Cincinnati on 14 August 1933 and on NBC that December, to sell Oxydol [17]. Blackett-Sample-Hummert made the show, and it ran until 1960 [8, p. 358]. By 1937 Frank Hummert was the best-paid man in advertising, with a base salary of $132,000 [4, p. 160]. The soap opera was advertising with a programme wrapped round it, made by the agency and carried by the network.

The Mad Men thread

In the series the agency writes thirty-second spots and a media man buys the time. The road there runs through radio. Through the 1930s and 1940s most sponsored network programmes were produced by advertising agencies: Kraft Music Hall by J. Walter Thompson, Cavalcade of America by BBDO for Du Pont, Show Boat by Benton & Bowles for Maxwell House, The Jack Benny Show by Young & Rubicam for General Foods [8, p. 355]. Blackett and Hummert had both trained at Lord & Thomas under Hopkins and Lasker, and they carried reason-why selling into the new medium. The agency was the studio. It held the time, hired the stars, wrote the scripts and folded the sponsor into the act, as Benny did every week in his opening greeting.

Television inherited the model and then broke it. Pat Weaver, who had produced Fred Allen’s show at Young & Rubicam, joined NBC in 1949 with what he called the magazine plan: the network would own the programme and rent minutes inside it to several advertisers, as a magazine sells pages between articles. His memo that year reads, “There is not enough money to put on full programs for a single product” [8, p. 365].

Costs did the rest. The $64,000 Question, developed by Norman, Craig & Kummel and sold to Revlon, drew a 52.3 rating in the summer of 1955 and was, in Fox’s words, “the last stronghold of independent production and single sponsorship” [4, p. 215]. The quiz scandals finished the form.

Television advertising went from $454 million in 1952, when most programmes had a single sponsor, to $1.6 billion in 1960, when most did not, and the agencies moved to making the commercials and buying the time, which Meyers notes paid them better than producing programmes [8, p. 366]. The agency in the series is what came out the other side: a creative department and a media department.

What the series leaves out is the lineage. Ogilvy, asked in 1958 to name his copy mentors, listed Hopkins, Hummert and Reeves [4, p. 238]. The man who ran the soap opera factory taught the man who wrote the Rolls-Royce ad.

NetworkNational spotLocal

The network dollar bought a whole programme; the spot dollar bought a minute. Radio advertising as a whole kept growing while the programme money left for television.

Source: US Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Series R 107 to R 109, 1975. Redrawn by Brave New Media.

Unit: $ million

Show the data

Year	Network	National spot	Local
1935	63	15	35
1936	76	23	24
1937	89	28	48
1938	89	34	44
1939	99	35	50
1940	113	42	60
1941	125	52	70
1942	129	59	73
1943	157	71	86
1944	192	87	114
1945	198	92	134
1946	200	98	157
1947	201	106	199
1948	211	121	230
1949	203	123	245
1950	196	136	273
1951	180	138	289
1952	162	142	321
1953	141	146	324
1954	114	135	309
1955	84	134	326
1956	61	161	346
1957	64	187	368
1958	58	190	372
1959	44	206	406
1960	43	222	428

Applied: if you are a B2C brand

Say you sell a direct-to-consumer coffee subscription and a podcast with the right listeners offers you two deals. The 1930s deal is a year’s outright sponsorship, your name in the title, the host reading for you in every episode. The 1960s deal is host-read spots bought by the episode, across that show and a dozen others.

The record says the sponsorship buys something the spot cannot. Oxydol stayed with Ma Perkins for twenty-three years and the show was called “Oxydol’s Own” for most of them [17]. You get that only if you stay. Sponsors left anyway, for reasons that still apply. The programme cost more than the minutes. The brand was chained to one audience and one star. And once the arithmetic turned, one expensive minute in many shows beat thirty minutes in one.

Podcasting is walking the same road. In 2019 host-read ads were 66 per cent of United States podcast advertising revenue; in 2020 they were 56 per cent, as announcer-read and brand-supplied ads took share [14, p. 14]. Our view is that the first deal suits a brand with one product and a long horizon, and few others.

Sponsor if the show’s listeners are your buyers, if you can commit for at least a year, if the host will fold you into the programme rather than interrupt it, and if every episode carries an offer you can count. If any of the four fails, buy spots across many shows, give each show its own code, and treat the first quarter as a test of which shows work.

2015$105.7

2016$169.1

2017$313.9

2018$479.1

2019$708.1

2020$842.3

2021$1448.7

2022$1825.3

2023$1925.2

2024$2433.1

2025$2862.2

Radio went from $6 million to $247 million in its first fourteen years of advertising; podcasting's first ten years ran a shallower but recognisable curve.

Source: IAB and PwC, Internet Advertising Revenue Report, Full Year 2025, p. 24, April 2026, survey of US publishers and advertising networks. Redrawn by Brave New Media.

Unit: $ million

Show the data

Year	Podcast advertising revenue ($ million)
2015	105.7
2016	169.1
2017	313.9
2018	479.1
2019	708.1
2020	842.3
2021	1448.7
2022	1825.3
2023	1925.2
2024	2433.1
2025	2862.2

Applied: if you are a B2B brand

Say you run a logistics software company and a trade association offers you a sponsored webinar series: six sessions, their list, your logo. Before the price, ask who sets the agenda, who chooses the speakers, who keeps the registrant list, who holds the recording, and who has the slot next year. We put those five questions to clients before we look at a price.

If the association owns all of it, you are in AT&T’s phone booth. You pay the toll, you speak, you leave, and the audience’s loyalty stays with the station. It is a fair buy for reach, and it is what WEAF sold in 1922. If you set the agenda and book the speakers and the association supplies the room, you are the 1930s sponsor and its agency in one. It costs more and takes longer, and the identification is yours to keep.

Then apply the test the 1924 conference wrote down when it deprecated “direct sales effort” on the air [16]. If a session would be worth an hour of a freight manager’s time with your name removed, it will carry your name. If it is a demonstration in disguise, the second session has an empty room. Blackwell spent his minutes on Hawthorne and the light shaft, and named the apartments last.

What to do with it

1. Before any sponsorship, write down who owns the audience list, the recording, the editorial agenda and next year’s slot. If the publisher owns all four, price it as a spot buy.
2. Put your name inside the programme or not at all: a title, a recurring segment, a host who uses the product on air. A logo on a slide is a spot at sponsorship prices.
3. Give every sponsored episode or session its own offer, code or landing page, and report what came back per episode.
4. Compare the two deals on cost per listener-minute, including your own production time; that cost is what moved television from sponsors to spots.
5. Fix the term, the renewal right and the fate of the archive in the contract. Sponsorships end; decide now whether the episodes stay up with your name on them.