Dark Angels Note 175

Dearest Friends

Welcome back to our Friday Note – our weekly collection of writerly thoughts. 

Observing

Today in 1926, inventor John Logie Baird gave a demonstration of the world’s first working television.

Named the ‘televisor’, the device was initially demonstrated from Baird’s attic laboratory in Frith Street, Soho, to a small and sceptical crowd. The images were described as “faint and often blurred” by one journalist.

By early the next year, the first television sets were on sale in Selfridges, but it wouldn’t be until two years later that ‘experimental broadcasts’ would begin with help from the BBC. 

Watching

The invention of television and the beginnings of this broadcasting media brought a new opportunity for advertising. The first ever TV advert was broadcast via WNBT (now NBC) in the US in 1941 before a Brooklyn Dodgers game. The advertisers paid only $9 for their 10-second ad.

Watch the first-ever TV advert here via The Drum. 

Writing

The above television ad uses just five words to share its message to the masses.

Try this: Choose an everyday object from your surroundings. How would you create a short TV ad for it? Sketch out a rough idea for a storyboard and a short slogan of five words or fewer.

We’d love to see what you come up with if you’d like to share. 

Sharing

Congratulations to 26 & Sophie Gordon!

We’d like to say a hearty and well-deserved congratulations to Dark Angel, Sophie Gordon. Sophie has become the new chairperson of 26, the organisation set up at the same time as Dark Angels. Many of you are members of 26, so you’ll appreciate what a landmark appointment this is. Sophie takes over from Martin Clarkson who has done a brilliant job for 20+ years.

Photo by Benjamin DeYoung on Unsplash