If you’re old enough, you remember a nasty World War II Japanese procedure – hara-kiri.
We saw the technique in “The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” in which the actor Sessue Hayakawa, playing the role of a prison camp commander, found himself outwitted by British prisoner-in-charge Alec Guinness. So Hayakawa dressed himself in his finest silk robe and prepared to rip out his own guts.
Do you see a parallel with network, cable and local television…and radio, for that matter?
Broadcast’s darling-targets, the 24 to 49-year olds, are migrating to the Web. Fresh cable channels are eating up the new capacity of fiber-optic lines. And yet…
The established maximum allotment of commercial time within a television hour used to be eight minutes. Then it was 10…12…16. Now some hours carry 18 minutes of commercials. And in the same pod we’ll see a Mercury automobile commercial back to back with an Acura spot. Here’s Volvo, followed immediately by BMW. Burger King and Wendy’s can be podmates.
OK, if broadcast stations want to blur the competitive lines, that’s their right. So it follows that if they want to commit hara-kiri, I guess it makes sense. It’s the only honorable thing to do.
But I just flat-out don’t understand why the advertising agencies don’t kick up a hue and cry about one of the most obnoxious practices television has ever implemented: butting two commercials against each other without a fade-out/fade in, so the viewer can’t even tell that one has ended and another one begun. It’s bleep-bloop-bleep…where am I? What this “just-splice-’em-together” approach shows is contempt for the hand that feeds the medium.
Would we ever send out a direct mail package that included a pitch for a local Mercury dealer and a pitch for a different Acura dealer and the next day have Volvo and BMW together in a combination as uncomfortable as the principals of that “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire” fiasco? No, I’m not referring to “marriage mail”…although if television sells its spots, especially network spots, as marriage spots, both seller and buyer have a cranial defect. It’s a marriage made in hell.
Those of us who make our livings by professional exhortation that we carefully structure to generate singular buying decisions are totally out of sync with television’s hara-kiri. Eighteen minutes of commercials? That’s 36 commercials, minimum. If a third of those are split-30s, it’s 48 commercials. At what point does the Law of Diminishing Returns turn that shot in the foot into a gangrenous mess?
The ludicrous invasion of television as an advertising medium by dot-com companies, accompanied by ludicrous commercials for dot-com companies, has been a bonanza for the stations. Sane commentators long since have agreed that aside from the confusion they add, these spots have dried up barter time and infomercial availabilities – the manna DRTV marketers have to feed on, or perish. But the benefit to the broadcast stations is that they don’t have to deliver a specific audience. (Purists please note: I’m aware that the true meaning of “audience” is a group that hears something.) They air the “Whee! We’re here for whoever out there might be interested in what we do, which we aren’t about to tell you” commercials, the 21st century version of “I shot an arrow into the air; it fell to earth I know not where.” Make that “I care not where.”
I guess we direct marketers can quit apologizing for our own brand of clutter – the multiplicity of “You’ve been pre-approved” financial mailings with dollar and percentage numbers that defy any eye-blink test. At least ours are coherent mailings…with coherent messages.
Imagine two dot-com commercials back to back. If they’re typical of what’s been churning out of the “Let’s prove we’re in the big leagues” spots that play up names without giving us a clue of what the company does, TV viewers are like the line in “Fiddler on the Roof” – “When a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick.” (I prefer the old Pennsylvania Dutch saying, “You can’t hatch chickens from fried eggs.”)
Incidentally, the commercial overload isn’t just on independent or ethnic stations. NBC and ABC have been well beyond the 15-minute mark for months, in prime time where the cost-per-spot is highest. NBC’s West Coast president is quoted: “Compared to most cable networks we are rather conservative.” Oh? The director of media research at J. Walter Thompson USA commented, “This is now out of control.”
Now here comes radio. Broadcast stations have a new gimmick that cuts the pauses out of talk shows and newscasts. No dead air! They’re adding two to three minutes of commercials.
The Numbness Factor has to set in. If broadcast marketers adopted the same disciplines direct marketers observe, they’d recognize that bulk can be self-defeating. Oh, the food section of a newspaper has a batch of competitors advertising side by side; but the assumption that newspaper advertising, with its clip-and-save and “Let’s take another look” capabilities, parallels having a Progresso Soup commercial and a Lean Cuisine commercial with parallel videos and parallel “lunch time” claims butted together without even a fade-out/fade-in…well, that’s suggesting all media can transmit the same message.
But OK, let’s be realistic and relegate idealism to classrooms, where analysis is an end, not a means.
We can draw these conclusions:
– First, any medium is entitled to maximize monetary return. If greed results in a self-shot in the foot, that shouldn’t bother anybody else.
– Second, it’s stupid and non-communicative to tie two spots together without any transition at all, even a six-frame cross-fade. No, make that stupid because it’s non-communicative. These people are in the communications business.
How about this as a deal? We’ll agree to quit criticizing the way TV stations put their commercials together if they’ll agree to quit inserting promotions for their sitcoms, weakly designed as news, into their newscasts.
Oh, no you don’t, commercial managers. You first.
Network
