The Majestic Serenity of Late 1990s Network TV Ads

You know, in the past, I never liked to let people know about my birthday, but this year, I’ve had a change of heart. Yesterday, I turned 26! Pretty sweet. Was a pretty damn good day, I streamed, got some money, Caby and Savannah drew me some really adorable drawings, I got a buzz going, kino. Despite my newfound eagerness in letting people know, that alone wouldn’t be Letters worthy, but I have something special to mark the occasion: retro commercials.

I’m subscribed to a channel on YouTube called OptimumPx. He’s one of those VHS digitization archive channels that uploads commercial breaks and stuff. I don’t catch every single video, but they’re comfy when I’m in the mood. I like his in particular because of the variety (80s up through the 2020s) and because he’s not egotistical enough to watermark his videos like he himself made the commercials or something. You know who you are.

About two months ago, he uploaded a commercial break that aired on CBS during a showing of JAG, which was a 90s legal procedural that I’d never heard of until right now. Turns out, it spawned NCIS, so if you know what that is (and if you’re American, you probably do), there you go. What makes this upload special though is that it aired two days before I was born, on June 1, 1999. That makes this block of ads also freshly 26 years old!

So come with me. Let’s check out what prime time network ads were like 26 years ago.

A bit of preamble

I can’t go over every ad you can fit in a fifteen minute YouTube video, so I’ve picked my ten favorites. I’d still recommend you go and watch it for yourself. I know it can be a little silly to intentionally watch commercials, and believe me, I am full AdBlock total advertiser death in my day-to-day, but retro advertisements are a window into a world that doesn’t exist anymore, and I think that’s fun to examine. I have some thoughts in text and screenshots for you if you’re not in the mood, though.

ShopRite: Always fresh, always for less

This one cuts in on the upload. I don’t know how far across the country ShopRite reaches, but ours is currently in the mall (and it’s the busiest thing in there anymore). I love how straightforward it is. You buy ShopRite brands for your family, you save money, and now you can get your kid a bike. Shit, I’m sold! Gotta love those bright exposure transitions and a spot of slowly exploding, fading text popping up too.

Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?

How far away are you from using the Internet to respond to a market change?

I mean, I get email notifications when some Neocities kid comments on a five year old blog post of mine. Does that count?

How far away are you from making e-commerce as real as your next shipment?

I bought some CD-Rs from Amazon earlier. Does that count?

Yeah, I just love this. I don’t even know what product they’re specifically advertising here (I saw a guy working on graphs in an Internet Explorer window, I think), but I am so ready to bring my milk bottling business into the 21st century with Microsoft. Don’tcha miss when companies tried to sell you technology that wasn’t just an email summarizer in fancy packaging?

2000 Buick LeSabre: Peace of mind

This is a big favorite of all these ads for me. It’s just so peaceful, just this family chilling out set to an adult alternative soft rock sorta backing track (“stand by me!”) until it starts raining, and then they run for the safety of their 2000 Buick LeSabre and enjoy a vibey rainy drive home. I dunno, that’s that good shit. I think my stepmom had a Buick when I was little.

Remington MicroScreen 3: Shaves incredibly close or your money back

I’m throwing this one in more because there were quite a few cosmetic ads in this batch, and I guess because I’m a dude, none of them seemed interesting enough to include on the list. The male equivalent, this electric shaver ad, is close enough to be representative of the lot. Dudes rubbing their faces, downright impressed at the closeness of that shave. I love the 90s CGI high-tech innard shots of the shaver. Nowadays, they make those really sci-fi, but this one just feels like a moving CAD drawing, and that’s neat.

KeySpan: Helping you make educated energy choices

This ad caught my attention for how stark and informative it was. You can tell the budget was a little lower for it; a lot of it felt like I was watching a locally-produced weekend late morning filler show on WNEP or something. There wasn’t even a music bed!

I think this was a local ad. KeySpan was freshly incorporated as a natural gas distributor in 1998, one of the largest in the country, and apparently a big maintainer of the energy grid here in the greater NYC metropolitan area (and this taping is from WCBS in New York). They got bought out by National Grid USA (the US branch of National Grid in the UK) in 2007, making this is the only ad on my list from a company that just doesn’t exist anymore. Neat!

Audi: The New TT

Another big favorite of the batch. This one has it all. The fog, the orange skies reflecting off the water with the birds overhead, the totally new age wordless male singer, and this fucking epic voiceover that I will quote in full:

It’s time I traveled lighter, and threw away my maps, and made up for the seriousness of my youth with a little madness.

Fuck yeah I wanna go drive to the shore now. They didn’t need to go that hard. It’s just an Audi commercial! But they did. And I adore it.

Pizza Hut and Taco Bell (and KFC and The Phantom Menace)

For those of us who have not yet made our yearly pilgrimage to the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, here’s Colonel Sanders, some girl in a Pizza Hut hat, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, and a shitton of robots from the Republic. Because Star Wars prequel mania! Defeat the Dark Side! You could win a Bondi Blue iMac through this commercial. Offer ends 6/27/99, better hurry.

60 Minutes (and other CBS promos)

I spend a lot of time in this post pondering how advertising has changed, but amusingly enough, 60 Minutes promos still look exactly like that, even with that handheld single camera “just watching someone do something” look to them. I don’t know if I know a single thing about Chicago Hope, but similarly, network TV drama procedurals still look exactly like that. Maybe that’s why I find Law and Order so familiar and comforting, regardless of what decade that particular episode was made in. It’s like the core the world revolves around.

Marijuana (or maybe a PSA about it)

Get this: 21% of parents think their child may have tried marijuana. 44% of teens say they already have! (I was 44% of teens, if you’re curious. It was aight.) Funny how, in 26 years, weed’s gone from being something they show PSAs about to the millennial version of tobacco. It’s hard to argue with the tax revenue! Everyone likes green. I mean money. (Immediately after is a bumper for something seen later in the break, an interstitial about Helen Keller being one of CBS’ People of the Century for her work advocating for the disabled. I could do with more educational snippets between shows. It’s good for you.)

Intel Pentium III: Intel inside

Through this door is the power to make the Internet come to life.

Let’s round things back around with some good old-fashioned retro tech autism. The Pentium III (I will resist the urge to call it the Pentium !!!) was upon us, the gigahertz barrier was finally about to be broken, and set to a not-quite Powerman 5000 song, this little robot is going to help you search for Adobe Photoshop 5.0 on Excite (yes, not Google yet!) so you can not just get onto the Internet, but get into it. I don’t know how any of that tracks, but that’s neat as hell. You’ve sold me. I’m gonna upgrade tomorrow.

Some thoughts before we return to our show

I really get gooey at that uniquely 90s new agey majestically serene exploring-your-world sorta tone that a lot of these ads carry. I love how they’re shot. I love the soft focuses, the scenery, the slow pace, and the gentle soft rock ballad musical beds. (90s PBS shows and idents melt my heart in a similar way.) I really do feel like there was a sense of optimism and wonder in the 90s I yearn for nowadays. Technology was rapidly evolving, the Internet was the most exciting thing around, and we’d be in the future soon, better informed, better traveled, and more connected to our world than ever before. Whether it was real or just something advertisers were selling me doesn’t matter, it makes me happy to think about.

Not every ad strikes that tone. There’s more playful ones, especially the Wendy’s and Burger King ones (which I didn’t talk about here), and then ones that drop the music entirely and set out solely to inform. I think that’s huge, and it’s kind of a surprising ask of your viewers, especially in the days before they could just pop open an app to pass a commercial break. I’m sure most people still used commercial breaks to piss or grab a drink, but you get what I mean–the fact that advertisers even had that high of a view of their audience impresses me.

What I think happened was that everything has gotten very distilled. Marketers and algorithms know way too well what works on us, so advertising, like everything else, has become mental fentanyl, built entirely of the stuff we’ll remember (non-sequitur humor, characters shouting quick slogans, or the bullshit merchantry of starry-eyed children asking Google’s generative AI to write personal letters to athletes for them), and it’s left solely informative ads, ads that don’t want to annoy you into remembering them, and ads that invoke different feelings in us behind. (I also doubt that in today’s emotional economy, being optimistic about the future plays too well with people.)

I guess it’s a survival of the fittest thing–what marketer wouldn’t want the ad that sticks with people the best?–but it is disappointing that I can watch dozens of minutes of sultry, gently-paced ads promising me that I’ll be able to explore my world, reach my fullest potential, or run my business more efficiently than ever with Microsoft’s new technology, but immediately mute my phone and pounce on the skip button if I find myself without uBlock Origin (again, on my old phone) and subjected to a bright, blaring furniture store ad or that fucking Liberty Mutual bird at 2 in the morning. What the fuck happened?

I suppose car ads are still pretty much the same. Maybe that’s because they’re the biggest buys of your average ad break and usually marketed to parents who would rather not take their kids to school in a fancy death trap (though that doesn’t explain Tesla). Oh, and cosmetics. We haven’t progressed past models with shimmery hair in glowy voids touting the brightest and least damaging hair dye yet in probably thirty years, so I guess that’s a small comfort.