A tale of two studies—each with a woeful message. According to the 2001 Television Commercial Monitoring Report released last month by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), spot clutter increased in virtually all TV dayparts. The only decrease—albeit slight—was in prime time, where there was an average of 16 minutes and eight seconds of non-program content per hour in ’01: nine seconds less than in the prior year.
All-time-high clutter records were set in early morning (18 minutes, two seconds per hour), daytime (nearly 21 minutes) and local news (17 minutes, 10 seconds).
"While we are pleased with the decrease in prime time clutter, unfortunately, the level of non-programming minutes in the remaining dayparts seems to increase inexorably every year on both broadcast and cable networks," stated O. Burtch Drake, AAAA president/CEO. "The agency industry has long complained about clutter because it continues to represent a negative environment for our clients’ commercials."
ANA president/CEO John J. Sarsen, Jr., similarly observed, "We are disappointed that clutter in some dayparts is at a record high, since it can only decrease the impact of each commercial message."
The study defined clutter as being "all non-programming content," which includes network and local commercial time, public service announcements (PSAs), public service promotions, promos aired by broadcast and cable networks, program credits not run over continuing program action and "other" unidentified gaps within a commercial pod.
The inclusion of PSAs in that definition, however, appears to be charitable, because amidst all this clutter, there’s little room for public service messages—at least according to a separate study released last week by the Menlo Park, Calif.-based Kaiser Family Foundation. According to its report, titled "Shouting To Be Heard," broadcast and cable TV allocate 15 seconds per hour for PSAs, and nearly half of that airtime falls between midnight and 6 a.m. Another finding per the report was that a mere nine percent of that time made available for PSAs falls during prime time.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) disputed the prime time contention. NAB research has concluded that there’s a fairly even distribution of PSAs throughout the various dayparts. And the NAB estimates that local donated TV time for PSAs last year was valued at some $1.8 billion.
The New York-headquartered Ad Council, which spearheads public service campaigns covering myriad issues, reported that some 30 percent of its spots run during the middle of the night—considerably less than the nearly 50 percent reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
This has led to the claim that the Kaiser research—conducted by a team at the University of Indiana—was perhaps too limited in its scope. The study was based on an analysis of a week of programming on ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC; the Spanish-language Univision network; and cable networks CNN, ESPN, MTV, Nickelodeon and TNT. Public service directors at local TV stations were also polled to help gauge airtime for PSAs.
Rather than debate the validity of scientific method, I instead offer some unscientific perspective. Over the years, I’ve been hard pressed to see any of our industry’s best pro bono public service work on mainstream Los Angeles television—the latest example being the Ad Council’s child hunger awareness campaign directed by Joe Pytka of Venice, Calif.-based PYTKA for Bartle Bogle Hegarty, New York. One of those spots, "Ketchup Soup," was moving enough to help Pytka earn a Directors Guild of America nomination last month as best commercial director of ’01. But I’ve never seen it on air—neither has Pytka.
