Traditionally one had defaced or scrawled on posters and billboards, or sometimes — mainly in rural areas — shot at them because the eyes or nipples of a model formed convenient targets.
Later, when a common gadget around the house was a set of transparent screens (like those later used for the electronic version of fencing) to place over the TV set for mock- tennis and similar games, strangely enough the viewers' ratings for commercials went up. Instead of changing channels when advertising began, people took to switching in search of more of the same.
To the content of which they were paying no attention. What they wanted was to memorize the next movement of the actors and actresses and deform their gestures in hilarious fashion with a magnetic pencil. One had to know the timing of the commercials pretty well to become good at the game; some of the images lasted only half a second.
With horror the advertisers and network officials discovered that in nine cases out of ten the most dedicated watchers could not recall what product was being promoted. For them, it wasn't "that Coke ad" or "that plug for Drano" — it was "the one where you can make her swipe him in the chops."
Saturation point, and the inception of diminishing returns, was generally dated to the early eighties, when the urban citizen of North America was for the first time hit with an average of over a thousand advertisements per diem.
They went right on advertising things, of course. It had become a habit.
