IT’S THE OTHER GUY’S COMMERCIAL

Only the Media Can Reduce Clutter. So Why Not Help Them When They Try?

By Erwin Ephron

A wise man said “If you can measure a thing, you can begin to manage it.”

That’s probably why the 4A’s stopped its clutter-watch report. Agencies can’t manage it, so why try to measure it?

Clutter is always the other guy’s commercial.

Besides, clutter has an upside for buyers. It is the price advertisers are willing to pay to limit CPM’s. When the ANA asked advertisers “would you spend 10% more for 10% fewer commercials,” only 10% said “yes.”

Clutter is the Medium’s
Problem to Solve

If advertisers and agencies can’t manage clutter, it becomes the medium’s problem to solve. And indeed it is the medium’s problem. Advertisers have options, while clutter and the commercial avoidance it produces, threaten the cost-effectiveness of ad supported broadcast.

With most of the focus on TiVo™ and television, it’s ironic that the first move to manage clutter comes from radio.

Clear Channel Radio’s unilateral restructuring of its station commercial patterns (they call them “clocks”), is timely, courageous and very unusual. The last time a medium cut back on advertising was in 1966 when the New Yorker limited ad pages. But that was for reasons of Art not Commerce.

Less-is-More

In brief, “Less-Is-More”, which is what Clear Channel calls the plan, attempts to keep listeners listening. It reduces total commercial time by shortening the duration of commercial breaks and the length of commercials. The price to advertisers (and how can there not be a price?) is a transition from 60’s to 30’s priced at more then half of the cost of a 60.

The prudent response of many buyers has been: “Never mind the clutter smokescreen. That’s a price increase.” And indeed it is, but only because we know the cost of a 30, but we do not know the cost of the clutter we are reducing.

The Cost of Clutter

We know too many commercials result in fewer, less attentive listeners. So the advertiser benefit of controlling clutter is reaching a larger number of attentive listeners. But “larger number” is not a number. And that’s what we need.

My best “cost of clutter” estimate puts the audience loss from inattention and tune-out at about 7% for each commercial following the first one. This is a extrapolation from recently released Navigauge drive-time commercial tuning data and other earlier studies. [1]

That number suggests that moving from nine commercials to five in a pod, as Clear Channel proposes, will increase the real exposure count of the average spot by close to 15%. That is clearly a cost benefit to the advertiser produced by reducing clutter.

Where is TV on This Issue?

The proposed higher relative cost of 30’s compared to 60’s is a companion issue. On a pro-rata basis, a 30 is worth half of a 60. On a communication basis the difference is far smaller. A Clear Channel commissioned Burke study shows a 30 is worth 70%-to-80% of a 60 in listener recall. And that number is credible. It supports what we all suspect and mirrors TV research. Sixty--seconds is too long a time for most messages.

But Burke recall scores are a narrow frame for value analysis. We need to consider the total ecology of commercial scheduling, because the number of listeners delivered to a radio commercial depends on the holding power of the commercials preceding it.

It is in the advertiser’s interest use the unit that holds audience best. That is the shorter unit. But if some advertisers opt for 60’s, all advertising that follows will suffer. That’s why radio has to eliminate some advertiser options to manage clutter. Get rid of the 60, run fewer commercials and charge more for the 30.

But relax. The actual cost is still negotiable.

Are 30’s Worth the Money?

Television faces similar challenges and has been slow to respond. For example, cable has frequent lengthy commercial interruptions and cable’s low ratings require a large number of spots to deliver each rating point. This results in the frequent repetition of commercials which loses viewers.

To avoid avoidance, the advertiser can instruct the agency to spread the messages, and many do. But until all advertisers do this, the problem remains. If your commercial follows a commercial repeated too often, you lose viewers too. In this case the problem is truly “the other guy’s commercial.”

Only the networks can solve this, but instead of policing the problem, they add to it by constantly repeating their own promos. And agencies don’t seem to care.

Broadcast over-commercialization has alienated consumers and advertisers from the media. Clutter reduction plans, like the one proposed by Clear Channel seem to be a reasonable compromise. We know clutter threatens the effectiveness of broadcast advertising. And we know only the media can clean it up.

It is shortsighted for us not to support them when they try.

[1] September-November 2004 Commercial Break Structure Analysis, released January 2005.

- March 3, 2005 -

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