A chimpanzee brought Xerox to the masses

It is impossible to overstate how important/useful Xerox copiers were to offices (and anyone else who needed to make copies on small scale, e.g. schoolteachers, churches, zine authors, ...). The previous state of the art was

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestetner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermofax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_paper

all of which are more or less terrible by comparison.

> I guess it was a different time?

The target audience of this demo were all people born before World War II - most of them growing up in the 1920s and/or 1930s. For adults in year 1960, the whole concept of electrical appliance - whether at home and in the office - was something new. Magic being created in front of their eyes. We are talking about people who remember a telephone first appearing in their community, many probably even remembering electricity first appearing in their community.

So yeah, it definitely was a different time. Most of the things we see around us - the tools, the appliances, the materials themselves, were all developed during their youth and adult years. They and their parents were the two generations that created modernity - this was not just the time of electrification, but also chemical revolution, general automation, the time shamanism turned into medicine. Theirs was the time where all the pieces fell into place, and they were the ones to make humanity jump from a pile of farmers playing with coal and steam, to a technological civilization that sent people to the Moon. All in under a century.

Regulatory frameworks and operational principles and safety standards? Yes, they were all also being developed back then, as part of playing fast and loose with all the new wonders, and figuring how to handle them safely along the way. The guy to complain their new copier caught fire three times in four months? That would be the equivalent of today's person complaining their fancy new self-driving industrial cargo carrier robot self-drove itself into a tree while parking. Sure, the tech is not ready yet for the general population, but it can be used safely when operated with care and forward thinking.

Because watching a copier from 1959 actually, literally take 40-odd seconds to make one copy in real time is boring, even if it was novel for the time. The ad's runtime took as much time as the copier, which was the point.

Yeah, it's filler. They did a bunch of filler ads. The article ignores this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vJk_JVl9ME

So: you're critiquing the editing of a commercial from 60+ years ago? The point being... what?

Back then, it was an important aspect of ads that they were self-contained, pleasing stories. They sold products by becoming a cultural reference. Also, the rather abstract, but still charming scene (the girl walking by the chairs, and wandering on) not only adds to the development of the story, but also adds a style and production value, which not only separates the spot from what came before and what came after, but which – at the best of times – becomes also associated with the product. It's probably the essential pivot of the spot, establishing style, pace, and mood, and by this claim. Showing the copier running for a minute in real-time couldn't have achieved any of this, and it wouldn't have conveyed a great message either, when there were already wet process offset copiers running 50, maybe even 150 copies a minute. Also mind that these wet processes were much more complex, requiring specialist jobs, organisation, etc., something that the story, namely, "a little girl does it on her own in a minute", brings home.

It's a joke - there was a very well known scene where I think they cut 15 times in 5-10 seconds to show Liam Neeson jumping a fence. (Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by4UZ-79MK4 )

I'd say moviegoers were more aware of filmmaking starting in the 80s, and most people know about complex things like green screens and the like today.

And for some reason, your description reminded me, in turn, of Ra

https://qntm.org/ra

Maybe they start feeding you longer ads if you don't skip them? I never skip (but I don't watch much of Youtube, either), just turn the volume down to zero.

Yeah, some ads are about 6s. Many are 15-30s. Some are around 1 minute. Several have been about 5 minutes, this seems actually quite common. The longest I've seen was about 2 hours and 10 minutes.

What I really meant was that it depends on the context. Imagine a family gathered around the TV set, with some rather conventional (as in "boring") series or the multiple hours long Saturday evening show. Where – in the absence of greater sensations – the message is mostly the medium, the spot (as a short, self-contained, often engaging and pleasing story) is a delight! Now, on a format like YT, even a 15 seconds ad is much more invasive, and ads and ad blocks are becoming even longer than this. Moreover, in a context where you switch rather short snippets of content on your own initiative, ads are generally invasive, while the are competing for attention. By this, what was once a cultural reference has become entirely meaningless to the potential consumer: it's just an annoyance, by which you pay for the service.