Well the title pretty much says it all:
Why Are TV Commercials On At The Same Time On Every Station?
It seems to me almost counter-productive. You would think, in this remote control era, that it’s expected that we will change stations when a commercial comes on. Yet every station you click on is synchronized to show a commercial at the same time. WHY? Why not use those two minutes to hook you into another show, on another station?
It seems to me that if they all have commercials on at the same time, they’re not confident enough that their shows will be returned to.
The ultimate goal of commercial television is not to get you to watch the program. It is to use the program to get you to watch the advertisements. This sync-up of commercial breaks is planned to make the channel surfers give up and sit through the ads.
Half-hour syndicated TV shows are generally sliced up into seven-minute stretches of “entertainment,” separated by two minutes of ads, except at the show’s half-way point, when there are four to four-and-a-half minutes of ads, depending on the station. A similarly simple and standardized system exists for hour-long shows.
Because so much programming is sliced this way, it is to be expected that if you channel surf during certain stretches of time, most of the channels will be at commercial. There will be exceptions, of course, due mostly to cable channels that produce their own shows according to their own timetables, and also due to syndicated programming that staggers out thanks to varying durations for theme songs, intros, etc.
Why does everyone do it this way? Most industries have found that standardization creates efficiencies, and the broadcasting industry is one of them. Under this system, every station that’s purchased “Friends” knows how much time it can sell during this show and exactly when that time will run. This predictability is good from a sales standpoint and from an operations standpoint.
Plus, as a viewer, it lets me know how much longer I have to hold it before the next break.
As a related question, why is it that when there are 3 news broadcasts on at the same time, they all show the same thing at the same time. I really don’t care for sports, but if channel 12 news is doing sports, so is 6 and 4. Same thing for weather, local news etc… I always wished they would change it around a little. That way when sports is on 12, I can flip to 6 and get local news, then later on I can go back to 12 and see another view of the local news I saw on 6 (or whatever).
Has anyone collected data on what percentage of the time is devoted to advertising vs. program. Seems that there has been a long time slow increase in the advertising.
Also the Sunday morning a some afternoon time is devoted to revenue producing infomercials.
It also appears that the cable company (Comcast & Knology here) runs its own ads over the top of the network ads to increase their revenue stream. These are local not nationwide ads as would be expected on the networks.
