Granted that commercials provide the revenue needed to pay salaries and keep stations and networks functioning. So does anyone else agree with me that there are just too many commercials jammed into half-hour or hour programs? It has got to the point that one commercial is cut short by another commercial. And let's not forget how many car-crash attorneys and big Pharma ads monopolize the airways. Nothing will change of course, but I just wanted to see if anyone else feels the same way that I do.
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Enough Already With All The Commercials
- Thread starter The Real Mark Giardina
- Start date
You can pay for ad free streaming services. Most Paramount/Viacom owned stations are worst on linear, though. There are 36 minute slots sometimes for 30 minute shows and I have seen "Pop" play Mr. Deeds for 2 hours and 30 minutes (its runtime is 1 hr. 36 mins).
The better commercials are the old ones from like the 80s-early 2000s. I find it funny when before I got Youtube Premium, I used to watch compilations of the old timey commercials but ever so often, a commercial of today interrupts commercials of decades before. Like you're watching some 1-800 commercial or an AOL commercial then gets cut off and you see the newest iPhone ad pop up. Maybe Youtube is trying to remind us how "far and advanced" we are with telecommunications.
Yes, I am one of those who gets the premium account of streaming services so I wouldn't have to hear or see commercials of today since they are terrible these days.
Yes, I am one of those who gets the premium account of streaming services so I wouldn't have to hear or see commercials of today since they are terrible these days.
The law of supply and demand states the more of something that exists, the less valuable each individual iteration of it will be. Grains of sand on a beach are worthless. Cans of soup are cheap but still cost something. Limited edition prints are expensive. One of a kind paintings are priceless.
The same is true of commercials. The more ads broadcasters air per break, and the more breaks they air per hour, the less ROI you as the sponsor will see from placing your spot. Simple reason being, the more commercials a listener hears in total, the more he will disengage, zone out, and/or tune away, lowering the effectiveness of your ad. And then, when you accordingly balk at what the station is charging for that low ROI and push for a price reduction to reflect it, the station has no choice but to agree, and predictably tries to make up for that lost revenue by adding one more :30 to its hourly queue. Repeat this ad infinitum. It's a vicious cycle that's been going on for decades. Network TV, for example, started with hour-length shows that ran around 57-58 minutes in the early '50s. Now you're lucky if an hour-length network show cracks the 40 minute mark because of the 20+ minutes of garbage advertising each one is packed with.
The only way out of this quicksand is to make each :30 commercial slot valuable again by eliminating most of its competition. I.e., return to having just a handful of spots per hour and to charging lots of money for each of those handful. The ROI each sponsor sees once listeners learn to stop knee-jerk reaching for the tuner knob each time a commercial break starts will justify the increased cost. In the old days, commercials got results because each spot could sometimes be the only one in its break. You as the sponsor literally had a captive audience -- and your message was internalized and got remembered. When ten different sponsors are all shouting at a listener in the space of five minutes, the listener can't help but tune them all out for his own sanity's sake.
Of course, there's one catch. For this reversion to 1950s style commercial loads to work, the entire industry would have to start doing it together as a whole, all at once, and then sustain the practice long enough for listeners to come out of their shells. Knee-jerk reactions are muscle memory; they take time to fade once the causative stimuli ends. If just station X goes back to 1950s commercial loads, its listeners will still knee-jerk tune away from it when breaks begin simply because all the other broadcasters will be keeping them in a hyper-sensitized state with their still-intolerable, 2020s commercial loads.
Considering the financial straits linear television and radio are in today, I don't know if the industry as a whole would even be willing to try this though. They are hanging on by their fingernails already and since a transition like this would require loss-leading for a while (as people learned to come out of their shells), that might just be enough to send a lot of the participants into bankruptcy. There's something not unlike an end-stage narcotics addiction about all this with them. They're all injecting so much, it's killing them, but they're also so addicted, the stress of the withdrawal from cutting back might kill them even faster.
The same is true of commercials. The more ads broadcasters air per break, and the more breaks they air per hour, the less ROI you as the sponsor will see from placing your spot. Simple reason being, the more commercials a listener hears in total, the more he will disengage, zone out, and/or tune away, lowering the effectiveness of your ad. And then, when you accordingly balk at what the station is charging for that low ROI and push for a price reduction to reflect it, the station has no choice but to agree, and predictably tries to make up for that lost revenue by adding one more :30 to its hourly queue. Repeat this ad infinitum. It's a vicious cycle that's been going on for decades. Network TV, for example, started with hour-length shows that ran around 57-58 minutes in the early '50s. Now you're lucky if an hour-length network show cracks the 40 minute mark because of the 20+ minutes of garbage advertising each one is packed with.
The only way out of this quicksand is to make each :30 commercial slot valuable again by eliminating most of its competition. I.e., return to having just a handful of spots per hour and to charging lots of money for each of those handful. The ROI each sponsor sees once listeners learn to stop knee-jerk reaching for the tuner knob each time a commercial break starts will justify the increased cost. In the old days, commercials got results because each spot could sometimes be the only one in its break. You as the sponsor literally had a captive audience -- and your message was internalized and got remembered. When ten different sponsors are all shouting at a listener in the space of five minutes, the listener can't help but tune them all out for his own sanity's sake.
Of course, there's one catch. For this reversion to 1950s style commercial loads to work, the entire industry would have to start doing it together as a whole, all at once, and then sustain the practice long enough for listeners to come out of their shells. Knee-jerk reactions are muscle memory; they take time to fade once the causative stimuli ends. If just station X goes back to 1950s commercial loads, its listeners will still knee-jerk tune away from it when breaks begin simply because all the other broadcasters will be keeping them in a hyper-sensitized state with their still-intolerable, 2020s commercial loads.
Considering the financial straits linear television and radio are in today, I don't know if the industry as a whole would even be willing to try this though. They are hanging on by their fingernails already and since a transition like this would require loss-leading for a while (as people learned to come out of their shells), that might just be enough to send a lot of the participants into bankruptcy. There's something not unlike an end-stage narcotics addiction about all this with them. They're all injecting so much, it's killing them, but they're also so addicted, the stress of the withdrawal from cutting back might kill them even faster.
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I agree with this statement right here, why don't they remove the commercials on streaming platforms? So that everybody can enjoy watching it without commercials unless paying is the only thing they can do for the commercials to be remove
Yes I agree and it's why I don't have cable or satellite and I don't even have an antenna hooked up to my TVs anymore. And this is as someone that used to have ownership in broadcast TV stations.
I would say commercial loads have not grown longer but that the frequency of the same commercial and more irritating per inquiry ads are now commonplace. Most syndicated programming has X number of avails and you cannot exceed that without your programming clock being off. You might speed up a show a tad or run closing credits and the start of the next show as a split screen to get another commercial or two slipped in.
Tall Guy is right. The place you have freedom is in local programming. That includes news blocks and movies. You can squeeze in all you want.
Here's a bit of reality. The number of choices, even back when everybody was on cable, had pretty much destroyed the commercial rates of decades earlier. For many older folks, growing up on 3 channels versus 200+ on cable TV a few years later, spot rates dropped because audience size per channel dropped. It was a bad thing to be a stand alone. You want to own several 'channels' to leverage sales. Your spots rates, and few understand this, are dictated by advertising agencies who say they'll pay a certain rate per thousand once you are in the target market for their client. So the #1 on the buy sheet won't stoop to the cost per thousand, so those down the list get stuck at a bit lower rate. In a nutshell, costs of operation has gone up, budgets trimmed and spot rates dropping. You still have to make enough to pay the expenses just like any business. And in a large market or for a nationwide business, the advertising is controlled by the advertising agency the company chooses. There are no direct buys. Any direct buys would be for pennies on the dollar because only the smallest business doesn't have an agency.
Tall Guy is right. The place you have freedom is in local programming. That includes news blocks and movies. You can squeeze in all you want.
Here's a bit of reality. The number of choices, even back when everybody was on cable, had pretty much destroyed the commercial rates of decades earlier. For many older folks, growing up on 3 channels versus 200+ on cable TV a few years later, spot rates dropped because audience size per channel dropped. It was a bad thing to be a stand alone. You want to own several 'channels' to leverage sales. Your spots rates, and few understand this, are dictated by advertising agencies who say they'll pay a certain rate per thousand once you are in the target market for their client. So the #1 on the buy sheet won't stoop to the cost per thousand, so those down the list get stuck at a bit lower rate. In a nutshell, costs of operation has gone up, budgets trimmed and spot rates dropping. You still have to make enough to pay the expenses just like any business. And in a large market or for a nationwide business, the advertising is controlled by the advertising agency the company chooses. There are no direct buys. Any direct buys would be for pennies on the dollar because only the smallest business doesn't have an agency.
Maybe I should write an annoying commercial myself. Picture people dancing to the lyrics “ I’ve got herpes….I got herpes…I got herpes who could ask for anything more?" And the tagline would be: Crochula: The cream that works in hours. (In fine print: This medication doesn’t work for everyone; actually does not work on anyone.)
That's not how pricing in radio & TV works. They buy audience. So as the audience for linear TV decreases (which it is) the price for spots goes down.
The shift of audience from traditional TV to streaming is devaluing linear TV. The users of TV are doing this to themselves. Conversely, they are causing subscription prices for streaming services to go up.
Once again, that's not how prices are set. They're set by the size of the audience. If the size of the audience is dropping, so is the price. You can't charge more money to reach fewer people. But the costs keep going up. So the media companies are caught in the middle. That's why all the media companies are laying off staff. That's why they're looking to sell their linear TV divisions. If we were back in the 60s, when advertisers only had linear TV and people didn't have streaming options, then your supply & demand analogy might work. But that's not the current marketplace.
The way to make :30 spots valuable is to eliminate all of the streaming options people have, and force them back into the same world they lived in 50 years ago.
About a year ago, the streamers found that they can actually make more money if people subscribe to their lowest, ad-supported tiers. Makes sense---they get money from viewers and from advertisers.
Since that discovery, the streamers have been raising the price of ad-free tiers, hoping to drive more business to their ad-supported ones by making it too expensive to watch ad-free.
Case in point: One of our favorite shows, Only Murders in the Building, returned for a new season yesterday on Hulu. Up until now, there was usually a $3.00 per month difference between ad-supported and ad-free ($9.99/$12.99). Now, Hulu ad-supported is $10.99----and ad-free is $17.99.
My wife and I tend to watch shows that work best without interruption (I can't imagine Ripley on Netflix with spot breaks), so I popped for the extra seven bucks a month. But I thought twice before I did.
Sure, I understand that. What I was trying to express is that the size of a commercial spot's audience is never the same as the size of the audience watching the show it is interrupting. If advertisers are smart enough to pay lower rates based on a program's lowered ratings (audience size), they should also be smart enough to offer even less money if the way the broadcaster runs their commercials reduces that audience's attention to those commercials below the level of attention it is giving the program the commercials are interrupting. Assume 100% of audience X -- simply based on its psychographics -- will sit through a :30 commercial break, but that only 25% of that same audience will sit through that same break if it's instead 2:00 long (i.e., assume the remaining 75% press mute or temporarily channel surf elsewhere). In that case, any advertiser buying one of the :30 spots in that 2:00 break will only get 1/4 the ratings for his ad as the program that ad is showing in. So: if all the advertisers know this and base what they're each willing to pay for each of those :30 spots in that 2:00 break on "(the ratings) divided by 4," wouldn't it make sense for all parties concerned if that 2:00 break was reduced to just :30 (i.e. to just one spot), and if that one :30 spot's price was raised 400% by the broadcaster? Would the advertiser not care, as it would still be paying exactly the same amount of money per set of eyeballs either way? If so, why can't the industry move in this direction to help put linear television on the path to recovery from its reputation for being saturated with too many commercials? Especially when shedding that reputation would bring back some of the audience lost to streaming, which would cause general program ratings to start climbing back up?
The research has been done on this and the advertisers know what the audience is. That's what PPM is all about. They can see minute by minute audience numbers, and can look at the exact time their spot aired. The advertiser is ALWAYS looking to spend less money. They will use ANY excuse to get a discount. This is why your theory of charging them more for fewer spots is unrealistic. The fact is the audience for traditional media is declining. That means broadcast radio and linear TV. The spot prices are based on the size of that audience at the time the spot runs. The audience is declining regardless of the spotload. So they know what they're buying. You're basing this on an assumption that is not correct.
If your theory was correct, advertisers would be lining up to buy program sponsorships on non-commercial radio & TV stations. Instead, what's happening is the money for those sponsorships is declining as people use less traditional media. Just like commercial media. That's why non-commercial broadcasters are also laying off staff.
The other thing advertisers want is what we call "in program advertising." You hear it in sports a lot. "We're coming to you from the Tire Rack studios." So instead of a :30 spot, there are lots of little :10 host reads of sponsorships. Do you prefer that?
What advertisers want is to reach the most people. If a traditional media seller wants to close a sale, the best way is to offer more than just spots in traditional media. It's far more complicated than the way you present it.
I record everything. I can skip any commercial on a program I recorded but I still see the commercials as I fast forward. If I haven't seen it before, I'll watch it.
Doesn't work when I go on vacation but there are lots of really entertaining commercials I didn't see at home. Because the advertisers didn't put those commercials in the shows I watched. Sometimes I do get tired of the same commercials over and over. There are things I can do during those breaks, though. Very long breaks, but it helps.
Doesn't work when I go on vacation but there are lots of really entertaining commercials I didn't see at home. Because the advertisers didn't put those commercials in the shows I watched. Sometimes I do get tired of the same commercials over and over. There are things I can do during those breaks, though. Very long breaks, but it helps.
Maybe he wants to keep his magic incantations beneath his hat, but I will certainly blab a few.
For Roku users who hate Youtube's datamining and ads:
https://github.com/iBicha/playlet
For web browser users who hate Youtube's datamining and ads:
https://docs.invidious.io/instances/ (example: https://yewtu.be/search?q=airchecks)
Actually, for people who hate datamining generally:
https://privacydev.net/services.html
As a Gen Zer I may be biased but commercials peaked in the 2000's with the maximalist style type graphic design that was everywhere in the mid 2000's. However I do love watching old commercial breaks from the 20th century, especially the 90s.
2010's is when you start to lose me. some good stuff here and there but i feel the current trends of ads are either boring and annoying. Commercials are important to pay the bills though.
2010's is when you start to lose me. some good stuff here and there but i feel the current trends of ads are either boring and annoying. Commercials are important to pay the bills though.
I watched the Weird Al movie (a fake biography) on Roku and no commercials.
I may have had one on the finale of "Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist".
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