We're Killing the Commercial Break

I did something most of us advertising people rarely do last weekend – I watched broadcast TV and lots of commercial breaks. What I saw was pretty alarming. The ads and the constant interruption of your show with ad breaks make watching TV a pretty awful experience. In a world where 50% of people 22-45 no longer watch ANY broadcast or cable TV, we need to rethink the entire ad experience or we risk losing the other 50% over the next few years.

Below are 10 reasons why the ads and commercial experience are in trouble and what we can do to fix the situation:

1)  They lack courageousness. There’s a complete over-reliance on what has worked in the past vs. a new idea/format to get people to pay attention. Focus groups and quant testing are seen to minimize risk, but they trade off of established criteria for success, making everything look and sound the same.

2)  They fail to engage emotionally at a level comparable to the programming that is being interrupted – people are watching Pixar and the ads show up with sock puppets. Make your #1 criteria delivering BIG emotion – make people laugh, think or cry.

3)  The first 5 seconds don’t pull you in. If someone makes a decision to actually sit through an ad break, you need to do something in those opening seconds to not lose their attention. The original YouTube skip button was the channel-changing button on the remote control and the viewer has all the control. Do something in the first 5 seconds that earns attention there’s a good chance they won't flip the channel back to that rerun of Golden Girls.

4)  They don’t build any anticipation to see what comes next. There are only a few ad campaigns that build over time – most just continue to drive the same points over in the exact same way, with the exact same characters for way too long. I find Geico is one of the few big advertisers that keep the viewer wanting to see what comes next.

5) There are simply too many ads and ad breaks. If one should attempt to watch The Godfather on AMC with commercials, plan on being on the couch for a solid 5 hours. The whole system could benefit from decreasing the number of ad breaks by 25%. Super Bowl ads are amazing and something we all lean in to pay attention to because there is scarcity (due to the high cost and limited inventory).

6)  They’re not relevant to the audience. We are still living in the stone age of targeting. Unlike the segmenting that can be done on digital, the broadness of TV means that I will be forced to endure a handful of pharma ads for the elderly that only resonate with someone 30 years my senior. Every marketer needs to sprint towards Addressable Media buying in the next 2-3 years.

7)  We don’t study TV advertising enough. The people making the ads don’t watch many TV ads or ad breaks, but are expected to know exactly what ads people will like to see. If you’re a marketer or advertising executive, how many TV ad breaks do you watch each week? Who won the Grand Prix for film last year at Cannes? Try setting aside 30 minutes each week to watch the latest ads breaking on primetime – iSpot.TV is a good place to bookmark (https://www.ispot.tv/browse)

8)  The same ads run and run and run. I pray nightly that someone will make a new Kars4Kids ad to replace the one that’s been running every 2 minutes on what seems to be every channel for the past 5 years. PLEASE. MAKE. IT. STOP.

9) Brands aren’t expressing real truths. 84% of millennials don’t trust traditional advertising. People don’t trust advertising because ads simply lie and make outrageous claims that no sane person (with the ability to know the truth just a few taps away on their phone) would believe.

10) Death by a thousand cuts – You can tell most final spots on air have been through at least 5 rounds of revisions from the agency, brand and market research. Too often, what goes on air is something a committee has deemed worthy of going forward vs. an empowered creative leader.

Thanks for reading. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Let's make some better ads before it's too late :)