What the world of 1955 can tell us about the battle between media platforms and adblocking technology.

If you suddenly find yourself staring at a grey screen when you sit down to watch a video on YouTube, you could be one of the millions of people, worldwide, caught up in the escalating war between adblockers and media platforms.

Applied specifically to internet advertising, it’s a war that has been some two decades in the making. But applied to the broader advertising landscape its roots go back far further and run far deeper.

But let’s start with the internet first. And let’s go back twenty years to mid-1996, when a company called PrivNet launched a $10 plugin for Netscape Navigator which allowed users to block web banners and tracking cookies.

For which they got sued and, ultimately, forced out of business.

And that was the end of adblocking, right?

Unfortunately not. Or fortunately not. Or a bit of both, depending on your point of view. Whichever way you look at it, we’re now at the point where somewhere around a third of all internet users, worldwide, either currently use, or have used, some kind of blocking software. In some markets, like Central Europe and Southeast Asia, the figure is far higher.

As for advertisers and publishers, the cost in lost revenue is estimated to run into tens of billions of dollars worldwide. So, it’s not surprising that as blocking software becomes more prevalent and more sophisticated, tech platforms are pushing back with new strategies. One is server-side injection, where ads are embedded directly into the video stream itself, making them hard for software to distinguish from regular content. Another is introducing artificial delays in playing content whenever blocking software is detected. And so on. And so forth.

At this point it’s worth taking a step back to the 1950s to see things from a wider perspective. Because the tension between ads, and what you might call ad-blocking technology, has actually been around for rather a lot longer than you might think.

It was on a Thursday evening in the September of 1955 that Britain saw its first-ever TV ad. It was a 60-second slot for Gibbs SR toothpaste. It featured a tube of the product inside a block of ice, with a voiceover explaining how brushing with SR made your gums feel ‘tingling fresh.’

It’s fair to say that reactions were not universally positive. Some thought it a “disgraceful” corruptor of British culture. Some thought it an unwelcome harbinger of creeping Americanisation. Some complained about the interruption to their viewing. Most of those who weren’t outraged were underwhelmed. Like Bernard Levin, who reported feeling ‘neither depraved nor uplifted.’

But 1955 also saw the launch of something else, whose trajectory would become intimately intertwined with the rise of TV advertising: the Russell Hobbs K1, the UK’s first fully automatic electric kettle. Which, in addition to boiling water and switching itself off, spawned whole generations of similar electric kettles which for tens of millions of people, for the next fifty years or so, functioned as the pre-internet age’s most effective ad-blocking technology.

If the ads came on, and you didn’t want to see them, you went out into the kitchen and switched your Russell Hobbs on. It took approximately three to four minutes to boil. This, as it happens, was exactly the same length as an average TV ad-break. So, you came back into the living-room with your steaming mug of tea just as the ads were ending and your programme was getting started again.

It’s worth considering how the advertising industry reacted.

For one thing, they didn’t sue Russell Hobbs, or Kenwood, or any of the other kettle manufacturers. They didn’t take out injunctions against the importers of tea, or the manufacturers of Digestive biscuits.

In fact, those very same brands were amongst the biggest TV advertisers of their day.

It’s an interesting symmetry that the more of their product they sold, the more it provided consumers with an activity that allowed them, amongst other things, to avoid watching the ads for those very same products.

Let’s look at how they squared that circle.

In 1956, less than a year after the introduction of TV ads – and electric kettles – PG Tips launched its ‘chimps’ campaign, featuring a cast of chimpanzees. People loved it so much that instead of going out to make a cup of tea in the ad break, they stayed put and watched ads for tea. Within two years PG Tips had gone from number four in the tea market to number one. The brand’s success endured for the next 45 years through what came to be recognised as one of the most effective campaigns of all time.

Understanding what happened then gives us another way of looking at where we are now. Where we are now, when it comes to adblocking, is that the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. And genies, once out of their bottles, are not so easily put back in.

You can take software developers to court. You can escalate the technological arms-race with the developers. You can do all sorts of stuff to make viewing a less pleasant and more frustrating experience for users who have the affrontery to install blocking software. You can do your utmost to force people to watch the ads against their will. But in the end people will find ways to do what they want to do.

Witness, for example, the Australian government’s well-intentioned efforts to use the law to stop children signing up for social media. Witness the various ways the kids have worked out to get around the rules. If that’s not enough for you, sit down and watch the exact same drama about to be played out all over again in the UK.

That’s where compulsion gets you.

So maybe it’s time to learn from the 1950s, when they came up with a different way.

Their answer, back then, was to reimagine advertising as a branch of the entertainment industry. This meant investing in making ads that people actively wanted to watch. Ads that offered viewers as much pleasure, or more pleasure, than the content in which they were presented.

You may say, what if someone develops the ‘perfect’ adblocker that excludes every single ad? How will anyone ever know if ads are creative and entertaining or not? To which the answer is, we’re a long way from getting there yet. And if we can improve our ads right now, and make people actively want to see them, we will reduce the incentive for that ever happening.

If we can that, everyone wins.

It will be something we should all pour out a nice hot cup of tea and raise a toast to.

First published in WARC in June 2026.