NPR: Tonight We Pull the Plug on the 30-Second Ad

Tonight We Pull the Plug on the 30-Second Ad

I'm sure you wouldn't dare miss Friday Night Smackdown on the CW tonight, but be careful not to rush to the bathroom during the breaks. Tonight, we bid farewell and good riddance to the 30-second ad.

The video game company Electronic Arts will debut 10-second ads in the program. Which matches up with the attention span of the teenage audience they hope to reach.

But there's something serious going on here. The CW network calls them "cwickies" and hopes to sneak these ads in before you can reach for the remote. And just to totally throw you off your fast-forwarding rhythm, the company will have a 90-second ad at the end of the program. Ad Age points out how revolutionary this is:

Model-busting ad ideas, such as the cwickies and "content wraps" -- CW's series of long ads placed over the course of a single night -- do something that gives network executives the willies. They make one marketer's commercials more memorable than others airing in the same program, threatening to ruin a decades-old ad system. In the past, one TV ad had as good a chance as any to get noticed. Now, as the old saying goes, some ads are becoming more equal than others.

Thank God. It's hard to believe that the 30-second spot has gone unchallenged this long in a revolutionary media environment. And who knows what's next? Advertisers have already floated some other ideas: company logos dancing on the bottom of your CSI episode, split-screen ads during Grey's Anatomy. In order to save TV, sounds like they are willing to destroy it.

- Robert Smith

1:26 PM ET | 08-10-2007 | permalink

Comments (Send a comment)

You say that like destroying tv is a bad thing!

Sent by Heidi Stone | 2:27 PM ET | 08-10-2007

those bottom of the screen ads are annoying. I cant remember what show this was on, but it was at least 10-15 years ago, and if I'm not mistaken it was Max Headroom, where they had these super fast commercials that would jam 30 seconds of information into 1 second commercials, but this started causing some peoples heads to explode. awesome concept!

Sent by tim | 7:24 PM ET | 08-10-2007

It seems like the 30-second commercial has been dead for a while, at least on prime-time network and high-ranking cable channels. (You still see them on the lower-end cable channels, usually for miracle cleaning agents or whatnot.) I'd bet money that most ads (in primetime) these days run ten, fifteen, twenty seconds at most. I counted a dozen ads during one 3-4-minute break during an episode of House last fall, including network promos and local news promos. You can see I'm not a Tivo owner. But too many ads is one reason we watch more DVDs on our TV than broadcast televison.

Sent by Susan D-L | 9:20 PM ET | 08-10-2007

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