Don’t Like Watching Ads? Watch More!

Great little article that Stuart Pickard forwarded to me over the weekend that I thought was priceless. It’s not so much related to Digital Signage (other than you can’t turn off or walk out of a room with our medium) but great fodder to have for discussions.

The main request by broadcasters was to add a subscriber fee because the broadcasters weren’t making enough money. This request was denied, thank you very much.

The real story was the following: Apparently, in Canada, for each hour of television programming, advertisers are allowed to insert 12 minutes of commercials.

The CRTC (the governing body who approves all media decisions), in its wisdom seems to have decided that the way to fix the issue of people not watching TV ads is to increase the amount of commercials you can run in an hour. I think Stuart said it best:

Great idea. Fewer people are watching the 12 minutes of ads per hour, so why not increase the limit to 14 minutes, then 15 minutes, then allow unlimited ads in prime time. Apparently, the CRTC still hasn’t realized that the PVR exists. Oh well, it’ll just make Digital Signage that much more of a worthy spend, compared to TV (in Canada anyway). -Stuart Pickard

The full article is as follows:

CRTC approves more TV ads
While the CRTC did not feel the subscriber fee “to be warranted at this time,” it recognized the financial difficulties faced by conventional broadcasters and decided to remove restrictions on how much advertising they can air as an alternate way to increase revenues.
Currently, broadcasters can show up to 12 minutes of advertising per hour, including segments promoting programs in their lineups.

As of September 1, this restriction will increase to a maximum of 14 minutes of advertising in prime time — between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m.

A year later, the limit will increase to 15 minutes across all time periods. As of September 2008, all advertising time restrictions will be lifted. The CRTC will review the impact of these increased ad times in spring 2008.

“The Commission considers it essential that [over-the-air] broadcasters have the flexibility to maximize advertising revenues to respond to the negative impact of audience fragmentation,” according to a statement from the regulator issued Tuesday.

Me thinks that the broadcasters may want to think about looking beyond what they’ve relied on for so many years as a model to follow. If the whole industry is looking to move to Nielsen’s new “Consumer Minute Data” maybe increasing the amount of minutes will help