Killing the Goose

Now, I'm not a tidy person - my desk's a mess; I file in heaps.  That's not it.  The clutter I'm referring to is on my TV, every time there's a break. 

It's not even the number of ads, it's all the other stuff that's crammed in; station ID stings, weather reports, news updates, promotions for upcoming programs, the endless reminders to tune in next week that all lead me to tune out.

By the time we get back to the program, I've lost the plot. Worse yet, I've also wiped my memory ‘tape'.  I can't remember a single thing I've just seen.  Nil, nada, zilch.  And that's got to be a worry for the client whose ad was stuffed into that jam-packed break.  I glimpsed it briefly, but then I lost it in the crowd ...

The Golden Age?

Not so many years ago, commercial breaks were just that: a few ads and back to the show.  Typically, four breaks - each of two or two and a half minutes - giving eight to ten minutes per hour in total.  Each carried four 30 second ads, or three 30s and a couple of 15s, for a total of four or five impressions. And it worked.  Everybody was sweet with the deal. The ads people saw meant they got free telly - and hey, some of them weren't bad. But even if you didn't much like commercial breaks, they were only brief interruptions to the show you were trying to watch.  Not now.

Now it's ‘non-program time'.  And it's risen inexorably to almost a third of the hour: one minute in every three. It's too much. Count the impressions in a typical break: a dozen different items is not uncommon.  It's too many. We can't cope, and we can't be bothered to try.

The answer is seven.

My solution: cut it off after seven impressions.  Why seven?  Because it's a magic number.  Many things come in sevens: days in the week, dwarfs, wonders of the ancient world, deadly sins, digits in a phone number (OK, now it's often eight, but the first one doesn't really count if it's always ‘9').  Seven seems to be the maximum number of things we can easily recall.  The limit to human RAM, if you like. (Test it yourself: name all seven dwarfs).  But more than seven and we go blank.

The Golden Goose?

TV Stations, adding their ‘free' crud on top of the paid advertising that is their lifeblood, make the clutter problem twice as bad. Nobody asked for it and nobody wants it - except the stations themselves. Their short-sighted greed is helping kill the goose that has, for over fifty years, laid golden eggs for advertisers and stations alike.

Let's end it.  Cap all ‘non-program time' at 28 spots or 14 minutes per hour: maximum four breaks, each of seven impressions. Everything counts towards the magic ‘seven': shorter ads, promos, news, everything. The station can choose to run seven paid spots - or its own material at zero revenue. We'd soon see how much they really value those station IDs. News and weather would slink back into their own timeslots. 

One simple, universal rule: seven hits, and on with the show.  Then we just might be able to remember what we were watching, what we've just seen and - who knows - maybe even an ad or two.

Ian Gee

Regional Brand Planning Director

Initiative