Our friend Michael Learmonth moves around so quickly he can be hard to track down, but he’s at Advertising Age now and has this article on how the broadcast nets are combating ad skipping in a world of diminishing ratings:
Endangered species
Broadcast audiences have been on a steady decline since the mid-’80s. This year prime-time network TV viewing is down 2.9% at CBS, 9.7% at ABC, 14.3% at NBC and 17.5% at Fox, according to Nielsen Media Research. At the same time, the networks are getting a significant amount of viewing on DVRs — more than 4 million viewers for “Grey’s Anatomy” and 3.5 million for CBS’s “CSI” during one recent week in October.Since DVR penetration is likely to hit 50% in the next few years, the business model is looking like an endangered species, unless the networks can figure out how to insert a fresh ad into programming when it’s watched after the fact. – Read the rest on AdAge.com
I think the most important part of the article came at the very end:
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“We have to be very careful not to overstep our bounds,” said Chris Allen, director-video innovations at Starcom MediaVest. “People won’t accept five- or six-minute [advertising] pods you couldn’t fast-forward, but three or four ads over a one-hour show — they are fairly tolerant of it.”
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I would not say I watch a lot of television on the Internet, but I watch a fair amount, and I do feel the thirty second ad breaks are acceptable. And, thirty seconds really isn’t long enough to give people time to do much of anything else. Expand the ad breaks to two or three minutes and people can leave the computer, grab a snack, or even minimize the video and check e-mail. With only thirty seconds, it’s hardly worth doing anything. Just let the ad play and get back to the program.
Its simple, it will either get like the streaming vids on the net and air one ad during a 45 min show, shortening the length of time a show runs for, but change the technology so that the viewers have to watch the commercial in order to watch the show.
Or they will lengthen a show, and increase the low brow advertising shots of the sponsored advertisers: the milk in the cereal, the car the protagonist drives, the toothpaste the characters use.
The latter makes more sense. It would be funny though if years from now Nets start harping like Colbert jokingly said, “If you don’t watch the commercials, your stealing.”