Ask the Broadcast Professionals (or what would you like to know about advertising)

In My Humble Opinion
61

Don’t forget interactive. :wink:

I oversaw a $100 million budget when I was at Y&R 10 years ago. The vast majority of it was Network and Cable TV, network radio and magazines. No Internet (well, that we paid for anyway).

These days, probably 75% of our spending is on Internet, wireless and other interactive media. Granted, I don’t have the bigger clients like I worked on at the big agencies, but interactive has taken on a huge role on the modern media landscape, especially for advertisers who need to be very efficient because they don’t have a big ad budget.

62

Where do you live? In the states we don’t air the show and the commercial at the same time, with one minimized to make room for the other.

63

Some other stuff you may not know:

The broadcast day starts at 6am.

The broadcast week runs Mon-Sun.

The broadcast month ends on the last Sunday of the month.

The broadcast year ends on the last Sunday of September.

So, for us, October starts on Sept 25 and that’s when the new deals for the 06-07 upfronts kick in.

64

In Spain and it’s a pretty new thing, quite uncommon. I’ve mostly seen it in sports events; when they can, they do it while “nothing’s going on”, for example in breaks during tennis. I think I’ve only seen that particular chain do it (la 2: we have 2 public chains and “la 2” is the one that’s supposed to “not be about money”, they show lots of documentaries, cultural stuff and sports).

65

I do believe it’s actually 5am. We can buy a Tuesday all the way to 459a of next day. At 5am is when we call it Wednesday.

This broadcast year actually ends on December 31st for a change. Though, last year it ended on the 26th.

66

Everywhere I’ve worked it’s 6a. Maybe because you’re an hour behind in your neck of the words?

67

That’s true for the Mountain time zone. Our TV prime time is 7-10 p.m. and our radio broadcast day is 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. We’ve learned to take into account the hour offset when talking to the coasts.

68

And I’ve only worked on the coast, so 6a-6a is the rule for me. I knew Central was different, but it didn’t occur to me that broadcast day was different too.

69

Fairly often I’ll see the exact same commercial run twice in the same commercial break. Is this usually deliberate or an accident?

70

Most of the time, if they are 30-second spots and run in the same pod (the technical term for each break), it’s most likely an error and the station will end up having to credit the spot. Some clients just want to run as often as possible and will pay a dirt-cheap rate w/ the stipulation that their spots can be run anywhere. It could also be that the station is running “bonus” spots for the client to make up for past problems or as added value in which case the two spots would usually be acceptable.

A lot of clients have seperation guidelines that dictate how close together spots may run. For some, it’s one per half hour program - but most have either a ten or fifteen minute seperation rule.

If the spots were 15-seconds each, they’d be what are called “bookends” where two spots run in the same break w/ a commercial or two from other clients running in between. Usually these commercials are different, but tie together - but sometimes they may run the same copy.