Guest Commentary by Ted Faraone

Bring Back TV Code, Commercial Limit

Broadcast TV can't win by packing more and more spots into its programming. The industry needs to make its ad time a scarce commodity again by codifying commercial limtis. "It has to provide a Tiffany-type environment for the marketer, in contrast to the Internet, which is waiting with jaws wide open to eat broadcasting's lunch."
TVNewsCheck,

The time has come for heresy. It's time to bring back the Television Code, specifically the part that limited the number of commercial minutes per hour.

Why should we revive a relic of the 1950s? It's simple. Survival. 

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When Richard Nixon's Justice Department successfully challenged the NAB over the Television Code as an antitrust matter, the folks who stood to gain were the marketers, who, with additional inventory coming on the market, theoretically could get lower prices to put their spots on TV. In theory, the savings would be passed on to the consumer. Practice was another thing.

After digesting the ban on cigarette advertising, television was a growth industry in the 1970s. The growth continued into the 1980s underpinned by an ever-growing demand for commercial time. Broadcast TV was king. Cable was a novelty.

That situation has been turned on its head by a three-year advertising depression that shows no sign of ameliorating.

Into the midst of the advertising depression, where broadcast TV already competes with an ever-expanding array of cable channels, strides a medium with infinite capacity for creating inventory: The Internet. It is impossible for broadcasting to compete with a medium that creates inventory almost out of thin air. 

In a race to the bottom against the Internet, broadcasters are bound to lose.

Along the way, abominations such as NBC's late, unlamented Lipstick Jungle rear their ugly heads. It was about as hard to watch as root canal. The show stopped, it seemed, every five minutes for a commercial break. And the commercial was often for a cosmetic product and featured one of the female stars being made up with it. Lipstick Jungle was not a program. It was a program-length commercial.

Commercial breaks are acceptable, but too many commercial breaks that go on for too long drive away audience. In TV, our product is not what we put on the screen. It's the eyeballs in front of the screen that we sell.

Commercial television has long had a sort of social contract with its audience. Broadcasters show their stuff for free in return for the audience's attention to a relatively small commercial load, some of which is actually entertaining. The broadcasters then sell their audience's attention to marketers, who pay the bills for the service. 

Since the Television Code was made voluntary there has been a steady increase in the number of commercial minutes per hour. The original network episodes of I Love Lucy were something like 26 minutes and 30 seconds long. In the intervening five decades, they were cut by about three more minutes. So it became news in the industry when Viacom restored them to their original length to show them on one of its cable channels.

It's time for the TV industry to remember what made TV commercials special. Creative directors understood the value of simplicity, mnemonics, celebrity and scarcity. 

TV advertising virtually built Revlon in the 1950s. Who can forget, "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz"? How about the Mr. Clean genie?  Or "Mikey likes it!"?  Who didn't feel like taking a road trip after hearing Dinah Shore belt out, "See the USA in your Chevrolet"?

Broadcasters cannot control the creative choices of marketers and their advertising agencies, but there is one thing broadcasters can do to maintain primacy: Rediscover scarcity.

The time has come for TV broadcasters to agree to limit their commercial load in a new Television Code. It will take a congressional antitrust waiver similar to what Major League Baseball to ensure that the code has some teeth.

Fox showed with its short-lived experiment in limiting primetime inventory that it won't work in the face of desperate competitors.

To survive, advertiser-supported television has to differentiate itself from other media. It has to become special again. It has to provide a Tiffany-type environment for the marketer, in contrast to the Internet, which is waiting with jaws wide open to eat broadcasting's lunch.

Ted Faraone is an longtime New York-based PR man. He can be reached at 212-489-1313 or ted.faraone@verizon.net.

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Comments (6) -

RustbeltAlumnus2 Nickname posted over 3 years ago
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Bring back scarcity? Good luck. The internet and cable have forever changed the media model to one of abundant choice. Limited choice was the linchpin of mass media audience. It's gone. Meddling with codes and inventory won't bring it back. Even worse, the internet has taught the consumer to get it all for free. Clutter didn't kill Lipstick Jungle. It was just a bad show. Dancing with the Stars gets an audience regardless of commercials because it's entertaining to a large number of people. But no hit show will ever match the 1950s because the audience has too many options nowadays. Now is the time to be creative, because cookie-cutter TV has chased the viewers to Burn Notice and The Closer and Netflix and Hulu. And TiVo, where commercials are skipped no matter how sparingly they might be scheduled under a resurrected code.
Gyro Nickname posted over 3 years ago
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When the NAB code was in force in the 60's, you couldn't run a Preparation H commercial and not violate the code. I don't think we need to go that far. Rustbelt is right about abundant choice. But a lot of the junk that exists on cable, only exists because cable and satellite subscribers are forced to pay for channels they might not subscribe to if they had the choice. Give consumers a choice of what cable and satellite channels they want to pay for, and watch many of the marginal cable channels and even more marginal shows disappear. Wouldn't be a bad thing in my mind. Forcing cable and satellite customers to pay for stuff they don't want is a tax. No other way to describe it.
Ted Faraone posted over 3 years ago
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Gryo makes an excellent point about cable channels. Today's model for cable is the TV equivalent of theatrical "block booking" which was banned decades ago on anti-trust grounds. Another issue that may well face us before this depression ends could be the death of MyNetwork (likely) and the CW (plausible). Given all the competition, I suspect that it is unlikely that six, English-language broadcast TV networks can survive. Perhaps one of them will become the nucleus of a third, full-service Spanish-language network. Demographically, Spanish-language is still growing, although it has been hit hard financially by the advertising depression. To a great extent, cable put independent TV stations into the network business because of its demand for feature films. Let's say that two of the six English-language networks fold. One becomes Spanish. Would 150 or so suddenly independent TV stations be viable? I'd love to read others' thoughts on this.
formergm Nickname posted over 3 years ago
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The commercial glut problem is even worse on the local level. Many stations run 10 + minutes of commercials in a half hour newscast. Then they wonder why the audience is abondoning them. For stations to survive they need to cut the clutter by 25%. Will they do it? Not a chance.
Gyro Nickname posted over 3 years ago
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Ted is right. If today's cable channels, had to actually secure a license, build a station, and survive solely on advertising like over the air stations currently do, most would not survive. That of course assumes that channels would be available. What I don't understand is, why don't channels like RFD-TV, or GAC, or some of the other cable channels that can't seem to get decent penetration on the lower cable and satellite tiers, approach the digital TV broadcasters? If one of my local TV stations put on GAC or RFD TV as a 2nd channel, I would definitely watch. THIS Network has started to gain an audience, beating the major networks at times in larger markets. I think some of these fledgling cable stations are missing an opportunity.
bobk Nickname posted over 3 years ago
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If there were a genuinely accurate assessment of how much of the audience clicks their "remotes" to access other programming during excessively long commercial breaks, it might change a lot of thinking.

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