TV Ads – Too Many?

We are in the business of providing the material that prevents the commercials from all slamming together . . . that’s what we are doing here. That’s what we are doing on the West Wing set. We gotta deliver them twelve minutes of stuff to separate the Chevy commercials.

— Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr. Executive Producer of the The West Wing. Quoted in an NPR interview, January 2006.

I counted forty-two ads in last week’s episode of Lost. And that does not include any that aired before the show started or after the credits started to roll. Just forty-two ads in five breaks squeezed between six seven-minute segments of content. There were almost nineteen minutes of ads in a sixty-two minute time slot. That’s almost 30% of the air time dedicated to noise from advertisers.

Marketers and media moguls wonder why the ad-supported model is dying. I am saturated. My brain is full. Each ad flashes what seems like an endless stream of sub-second images in front of me. Yes, I have a TiVo, and the 30-second skip, and I fast forward through most of the ads. But I am tired of the noise that is attacking my senses.

On a related note, we canceled our cable today. We kept basic cable service in case we want to watch a presidential speech or catch the occasional episode of The Daily Show. I am sure that the advertisers wont miss me. I wasn’t buying any of their stuff anyway. I am looking forward to spend more time with my Kindle.


What’s wrong with online advertising

When the news broke today that a crane had fallen in New York City I immediately went to the web in search of video footage. CNN was my first stop. As expected, they had a video clip at the top of the page.

The next two minutes were a stunning realization of all that is wrong with the current attempts to monetize online video. The clip was 75 seconds long. In order to watch the clip I had to endure a 30 second pre-roll advertisement . . . for VIAGRA!

I am a woman in my late 40′s who has no need or interest in Viagra. The length of the ad was nearly 1/2 as long as the length of the news clip and I had absolutely no interest in the product. What a waste of my time.

I used to pay CNN an annual subscription to access their online content without advertising. What a pity that they discontinued this service. I would rather pay a few dollars a year for their service then waste precious time and have my brain cluttered with useless advertisements.