The Brought To You By phenomenon, or BTYB, began to take shape in the United States in the 1920s. Originally, it was an advertising format specific to radio broadcasting, taking the form of an explicit acknowledgement of the sponsor as the condition for the content’s very existence. Of course, there was nothing especially dazzlingly creative about it: radio stations simply needed money to operate, while companies needed an audience they could easily reach. These two needs were brought together by radio content, which was already regarded as a valuable business commodity.
The first documented sponsor of a radio programme was the American Atwater Kent Manufacturing Company, which became the official sponsor of a weekly music show in 1922. In effect, this was the equivalent of today’s full sponsorships, where one company paid for the entire programme, and the presenter repeatedly and explicitly reminded listeners of this during the broadcast. From the very beginning, this was a very different strategy from the one pursued by European broadcasters. The BBC, for example, was conceived from the outset as an institution funded by licence fees. Paid advertising was therefore unthinkable within this system.
Video: The History of Procter & Gamble's Soap Opera Involvement: Part One
Other sponsors quickly followed. In 1923, corporate giant Procter & Gamble (P&G) entered radio with the programme Crisco Cooking Talks, offering recipes and cooking advice in the format of an educational show. It was here, however, that it became fully apparent that sponsorship did not have to function only as openly declared advertising but also as a cleverly embedded form of it. P&G understood that if a listener heard advice on how to use Crisco in cooking or baking and then bought the product herself, the advertising message became less conspicuous, but all the more effective. It was within this logic that the entire system of broadcast sponsorship began to take shape.
Video: DYK P&G Pioneered the Soap Opera?
Advertising that pays for your story
A direct consequence of the boom in broadcast sponsorship was the emergence of soap operas. This still-popular format of endless serial dramas originally came into being largely because the production of the series was funded by manufacturers of soap and cleaning products — typically Procter & Gamble. The founder of the genre is considered to be Irna Phillips, who created the radio soap opera Painted Dreams for WGN Chicago in 1930. The real breakthrough, however, came with P&G’s Oxydol’s Own Ma Perkins, which carried the name of a washing powder in its very title.
Video: Ma Perkins Oxydol Commercial
“Most of the shows were sponsored by just one brand. There were no other advertisers. The shows were created for the company to advertise the company’s products, and they were very successful. Procter & Gamble was the biggest programmer in the field. The shows grew out of the creative departments of the advertising agencies,” explains Robert E. Short, former executive producer at P&G. Before long, the company became a larger producer of content than the stations themselves.
As early as 1935, P&G was sponsoring a total of 778 hours of radio programming a year, and by 1937, the company had invested almost 4.5 million dollars in these formats. In just ten years, it financed the production of twenty soap operas, among the most famous of which were Guiding Light, As the World Turns and The Edge of Night. Audience loyalty to sponsors was directly measurable. When P&G offered female listeners a packet of seeds in exchange for ten cents and an Oxydol lid, the company received more than a million requests. Listeners even wrote threatening letters saying they would stop buying the company’s products if a storyline took a different direction.
Video: Ma Perkins, Old Time Radio — full episode with integrated sponsorship messages
In the golden age of radio, the term sponsor therefore more or less merged with the roles of producer, director and censor. Major advertising agencies, typically J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam and BBD&O, created programmes and then looked for companies to sponsor them. The unwritten rule was that one programme equalled one company. These sponsors then had absolute veto power over the content. If they disliked a storyline, it could be changed immediately. If they took against a presenter, he or she was replaced at once. Yet it was precisely this absolute power that, in the 1950s, was to become the main reason for the collapse of the entire BTYB system.
The revolution happened on screen
On 1 July 1941, WNBT in New York broadcast the first television advert in history, for Bulova watches. The first television soap opera, The First Hundred Years, premiered on CBS on 4 December 1950, and its production was, of course, once again entirely handled and financed by P&G. The golden age of radio was officially replaced by the golden age of television. Under these conditions, the BTYB model naturally flourished. A true symbol of its time was The Jack Benny Program. In effect, it was the same format as on the radio, simply transferred to television. What made Jack Benny distinctive, however, was the way advertising messages were integrated directly into the content.
Video: The World's First TV Commercial 1941 Bulova
Jack Benny thus became the perfect embodiment of the BTYB era. The programme had several main sponsors — Jell-O, Lucky Strike, Lux and State Farm Insurance — without which it could not have existed, and this fact was duly and frequently emphasised. Performers on the show regularly sang sponsors’ advertising jingles, guests openly promoted their products, and the entire dramaturgy was structured in such a way that advertising was practically impossible to distinguish from the other creative and production elements. “Made perfectly clear by the opening words, The Jack Benny Program was as pure a commercial vehicle as television could possibly get,” writes the ANA Educational Foundation, for example.
Video: Jack Benny Show Full Version Vincent Price & Lucky Strike Commercials
Another frequently cited example of the economic power that the single-sponsorship model held over television broadcasting at the time is the NBC quiz show Twenty-One. Its sponsor was Geritol, marketed as a tonic for tired blood, and the show reached the height of its popularity during the 1957/1958 television season. During this period, sales of Geritol increased by an average of 3 million dollars a year. Eventually, however, it emerged that the quiz had been rigged, and the programme was cancelled. Geritol sales then returned to their previous level, but the case remains a textbook example of the correlation between single sponsorship and a rapid rise in revenue.
The final nail in the coffin
The Twenty-One scandal became the proverbial final nail in the coffin of single sponsorship. Resistance to the model had, however, been growing since around 1949, when Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, later president of NBC, joined the network. It was he who became associated with popularising the new model that gradually displaced single sponsorship: the so-called magazine model. This was based on the idea that in magazines, no single advertiser ever pays for the entire issue; instead, an issue contains dozens of adverts from different companies. The main curator of what ultimately appears in print, however, always remains the editorial team. Weaver wanted television advertising to work in a similar way.
Video: Twenty-One: Full Stemple and Van Doren Episode
“I won’t come to NBC just to sell time to ad agencies. I’ll come only if we can create our own shows and own them, and if we can sell every kind of advertising to support the program service,” Pat Weaver argued in 1949. In the end, he did manage to establish the magazine model. Advertisers bought short broadcast slots on NBC within a programme that remained under the control of the broadcaster. Gradually, more advertising breaks for multiple advertisers were inserted. In the most famous programmes, such as Today, Tonight Starring Steve Allen and Home, no one had exclusivity anymore.
Video: Charles Van Doren — archivní záznamy, přiznání před Kongresem
The magazine model subsequently came to dominate the world of television advertising and, in various forms, still dominates it today. Single sponsorship nevertheless survived for several more years, until the quiz-show scandal of 1959. The key date was 2 November, when Columbia University professor Charles Van Doren admitted before Congress that he had actively participated in manipulating results, something producers had done to satisfy demanding sponsors. The consequences were immediate and lasting. Congress soon amended the Communications Act, and the manipulation of quiz shows became a criminal offence. Producers began creating programmes first and only then selling advertising time, while advertisers lost the ability to effectively veto content. The single-sponsorship model was definitively dead.
The golden spot-advertising eighties
From 1960 onwards, television screens were therefore dominated by the advertising model that remains familiar to us today. Linear broadcasts are regularly interrupted by short advertising blocks lasting several minutes, with the time within them sold to multiple advertisers at once. This, of course, does not mean that there have been no conflicts since then. One major shift, for example, was the complete removal of tobacco companies from television in the 1970s, even though these corporations had previously been among the biggest advertisers. The turning point came after 1964, when the US Surgeon General published a report on the direct link between smoking and cancer. By 1970, cigarette advertising on television and radio in the United States was effectively taboo.
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The 1980s, by contrast, are seen in the context of television advertising as the “golden eighties”. This was a period in which creative and highly distinctive author-led spots flourished, many of which are still regarded as valuable pop-cultural artefacts. Adverts such as Mean Joe Greene for Coca-Cola (1979), in which the football star gives his jersey to a young fan, or Evolution for Nike (1982), which helped establish the conventions of motivational sports advertising, genuinely belong to the golden fund of audiovisual culture. It was also during this period that the Super Bowl definitively transformed from a football final into a prestigious advertising showcase. Television advertising became full-fledged entertainment.
Everything old is new again
BTYB sponsorship enjoyed a renaissance in the streaming era, in the spirit of the saying “everything old is new again”. This is paradoxical to some extent, because streaming originally benefited above all from widespread fatigue with unskippable advertising — and yet it ultimately contributed to the return of one of the most old-fashioned advertising formats. The Single Title Sponsorships model, introduced by Netflix in 2022, is essentially BTYB in a slightly different guise. The platform itself describes it as a short announcement at the beginning of an episode that points viewers to the sponsor, which ultimately amounts to a rather nostalgic return to 1950.
Perhaps the most extreme example of a return to the logic of BTYB is the Netflix Original Emily in Paris, starring Lily Collins. The first episode of the third series was entirely devoted to a marketing campaign for French McDonald’s, meaning that the whole episode effectively functioned as the sponsor’s branded content. Emily in Paris also clearly demonstrates the paid integration of fashion brands. According to available data, more than 14,000 items of clothing appeared in the series, some of them as part of paid product placement. For example, after a Kangol bucket hat appeared in the series, searches for it on the Lyst platform increased by 342%.
Video: Emily in Paris Season 3 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Another interesting experiment in the spirit of BTYB came from Fox in 2018. The broadcaster aired an episode of the animated sitcom Family Guy without advertising interruptions, but under PlayStation sponsorship. The episode was clearly labelled at the beginning and end as “brought to you by PlayStation”. And in 2025, even P&G returned after fifteen years to the genre it had helped create. That year saw the CBS premiere of Beyond the Gates — the first major new soap opera in more than 25 years and also the first hour-long soap opera in history with a predominantly Black cast. Procter & Gamble commented on its launch on Instagram with a single sentence: “We invented the soap opera.” The circle had symbolically closed.
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An old-new answer to the advertising crisis
At first glance, BTYB is the most straightforward form of advertising in television history. The viewer knows exactly who is paying for the content, and yet this transparency does no harm — quite the opposite. The reason lies in what experts refer to as a parasocial relationship with content. When viewers watch their favourite series or programme, they form an emotional bond with it. The sponsor associated with that content then benefits from the transfer of this emotional relationship: it is literally the one bringing you something you like. This mechanism is so strong that viewers consistently state in surveys that they prefer product placement to interruptions by traditional advertising.
The theory of parasocial relationships also helps explain why BTYB was abandoned in the 1950s. Single sponsorship gave the advertiser enormous power, which also posed a risk. If the face of a sponsored programme was hit by a scandal — such as the one involving Charles Van Doren and the quiz show Twenty-One — this also damaged the sponsor’s reputation. Weaver’s magazine model spread this risk across several advertisers, so none of them had to be directly associated with the scandal. At the same time, it lowered the threshold for smaller companies to enter the higher league of marketing. In the digital age, the popularity of BTYB has returned for a different reason: audience fragmentation has made it impossible to achieve mass reach through cheap advertising. Today, BTYB is a tool for reaching highly engaged audiences.
From a historical perspective, the BTYB phenomenon is interesting above all because it has always reflected the current state of the cultural debate about the relationship between content and advertising. As early as the 1930s, critics argued that the sponsorship model sold editorial space and that commercial interests distorted the content itself. In essence, they were formulating the same arguments we hear today about native advertising or sponsored content. After all, as the Saturday Evening Post noted in 2020, “It’s possible that deals could be struck where streaming favorites are brought to you by a single sponsor, which would play into an old adage, and a favorite of ad people. Everything old is new again.”