Since the early 1970s, television has been undeniably targeted: systems will have to last 30 minutes or an hour to be interrupted by 30-second ads. Since at least 2017, 30-second rated ads accounted for less than 50% of rated TV ads, according to Nielsen.
More recent studies show that at the end of a 30-second ad, other people are already disconnecting, so ads are shorter.
“It’s almost as if there’s speculation among traditional TV creatives that if you buy a 30-second ad, you get 30 seconds of attention from your audience,” said Max Kalehoff, vice president of marketing, expansion of RealEyes, a New York company. corporate based on measuring excitement and attention in virtual video, streaming, games and mobile apps. “And what virtual platforms do is point out that this is not literally true.”
Knowledge of RealEyes shows that people’s maximum attention decreases after 15 seconds and that the last 15 seconds are a wasteland. Expert advertisers have already taken advantage of this research. Kalehoff points out that Domino’s Pizza has lately aired 6-second ads in iterations. If you like mushrooms and onions on your pizza, there’s an ad for you.
Nielsen knows that ads rated 10 and 15 seconds are the maximum dynamic formats.
Of course, there is no shortage of other people who claim that the 30-second TV ad has been dead for some time. “There has to be, and there is, a life beyond 30 seconds,” said Jim Stengel, then P-G’s global marketing director, at a media buyer conference in 2004.
There is no shortage of culprits, adding the relief of Americans’ attention span, the fragmentation of the 1,000-channel universe, the decline of traditional television, the avalanche of ad-free television channels such as Netflix, and the expansion of virtual advertising.
Kalehoff said he had trained consumers to read very well about the first few seconds of an ad and then disconnect. Recently, he noted that a 74-second ad from Chicago’s Wiener Circle was very creative, but with a poor pace, waiting 25 seconds to navigate a parody of generic Covid-19 ads before converting the tone.
In the early days of television, ads lasted 60 seconds, however, rising costs and the loss of cigarette advertisers in 1971 led to the transfer to 30. Since then, virtual has opened up a new world of video advertising. A 2017 investigation through Nanigans found that the average length of a video ad on Facebook was 11 to 20 seconds.
While creatives may complain that it’s hard to create the kind of ranked ads that win prizes when you’re only about 10 seconds old, how do you reconcile that with a quest like Kalehoff’s?
Deepak Varma, Kantar’s global director of neuroscience wisdom, points out that reducing the duration of classified ads cannot be explained simply by reducing attention span. Varma raises increased over-surveillance as a corollary to the appearance of shorter advertisements. “This should have happened to you where the episode ends and you don’t press the leak,” Varma said. “And you don’t avoid it, so let it go to the next episode. As long as the content is engaging, other people will see it.”
The key, according to Varma, is to have an audience of emotional interaction. It’s imaginable to do this with a position of 15 seconds, he said. One way to create an emotionally attractive place at the time is to reject a 30-second ad. “I would say that 70 to 80 percent of classified ads lend themselves to a reduction,” he said. “You can always tell a coherent story in 15 seconds.”
I am an experienced journalist in advertising with a penchant for technology. I have also witnessed first-hand radical adjustments to the media landscape for the past two or three years.
I am an experienced journalist in the advertising industry with a fondness for technology. I have also witnessed first-hand radical adjustments in the media landscape over the past two or three decades. I was the final editor of Brandweek of Adweek and the founding advertising editor of Mashable. My paintings have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Economist and elsewhere. My interests come with technology, marketing, media and dogs. My favorite movie about the advertising industry is How to advance in advertising and my favorite TV screen is, of course, MadMen. I live in New Jersey. You can register for me at [email protected].