Pat Weaver

Pat Weaver was an executive in the early days of TV who helped make it like it is today:

While overseeing NBC's growth, Weaver also worked to enhance its power in relation to advertisers. His experience at Young and Rubicam convinced him that sponsors rather than network programmers actually ran the television industry. Because sponsors owned shows outright, the networks had minimal control over what was broadcast through their services. Some sponsors could even dictate when a show would appear in the weekly schedule. Weaver moved to shift this power to the networks by encouraging NBC to produce programs and then to offer blocks of time to multiple sponsors. He developed certain programs such as Today and The Tonight Show to provide vehicles for this practice. Advertisers could buy the right to advertise in particular segments of such shows but would not control program content. Weaver called this the "magazine concept" of advertising, comparing it to the practice in which print advertisers bought space in magazines without exercising editorial control over the articles. His ambition was for NBC to develop a full schedule of programs and then persuade advertisers to purchase commercial time here and there throughout that schedule. Any given program would carry commercials of several different sponsors. Other networks eventually followed the NBC model and by the 1960s it had become the television industry standard, commonly known as "participation advertising."

Before TV, Pat Weaver worked in radio, at one time working with Fred Allen. Interestingly, both Weaver and Allen passed away on St. Patrick's Day, Allen in 1956 and Weaver in 2002. I ended up with an original copy of the book Fred Allen's Letters from Weaver's personal library, still with Pat's notes penciled in the margins.