Industry Challenges

Owing to the widespread popularity of TV, the TV commercials are generally considered the most effective mass-market advertising form but with the introduction of digital video recorders (also known as digital television recorders or DTRs), such as TiVo, and services like Sky+, Dish Network and Astro MAX, which allow the recording of television programs onto a hard drive, also enable viewers to fast-forward or automatically skip through advertisements of recorded programs. Television advertisements appearbetween shows, but also interrupt them at intervals giving the break to the viewer and also capitalize on their interest. This method of screening advertisements is intended to pull the attention of the audience, keeping the viewers focused on the television show so that they will not want to change the channel; instead, they will (hopefully) watch the advertisements while waiting for the next segment of the show. However, remote have now made it easier for audiences to "tune out" advertisements simply by allowing them to turn down the volume or even switch channels when the advertisement comes on. Also people tend to do other things while the advertisements are on, while waiting for the program to resume. Additionally, television recording mechanisms such as DVR and TiVo have also allowed viewers to skip advertising completely during television programming.


Advertisements take airtime away from programs. Commercial breaks have also become longer. In the 1960s a typical hour-long American show would run for 51 minutes excluding advertisements. Today, a similar program would only be 42 minutes long; a typical 30-minute block of time now includes 22 minutes of programming with six minutes of national advertising and two minutes of local. Some networks even use an 18 minutes of show/12 minutes of commercial split. A television broadcast of the 101-minute film The Wizard of Oz (1939) for instance, could, in the early to mid-1960s, take two hours even with commercials. Today, a telecast of the same film would last approximately two hours and 15 minutes including commercials. In other words, over the courses of 10 hours, American viewers will see approximately three hours of advertisements, twice what they would have seen in the 1960s. Furthermore, if a 1960s show is rerun today it may be cut by nine minutes to make room for the extra advertisements In the 1950s and 1960s, the average advertisement's length was one minute. As the years passed, the average length shrank to 30 seconds (and often 10 seconds, depending on the television station's purchase of ad time), but more of them are now shown during the break, while in the '60's, only one or two advertisements would be shown at each break. However, today a majority of advertisements run in 15-second increments (often known as "hooks").