Clutter is a growing problem on U.S. TV but now cable is as big – if not bigger – offender than conventional according to the 2006 Clutter Watch study recently released by MindShare USA. The study reports that commercial minutes during prime time on conventional networks rose by 2% in 2005 over 2004 while cable nets increased by nearly 5%. MTV jammed 2.5 more non-program minutes into each prime-time hour for a total of 16 minutes, 13 seconds.
While MindShare Canada has no new Canadian data on TV clutter, Jake Norman, the agency’s managing director/director of Insights, says some of its current work highlights some interesting facts related to clutter – including that Canadians watch less television than their U.S. counterparts and are less tolerant of clutter.
Norman says, ‘While regulation controls the amount of pure commercial minutage, by running the same shows as the U.S. in the same time slot you effectively still have the same amount of clutter if clutter is defined as being anything that is not a program. We know from our MORe panel work that Canadians are less accepting of commercials on television than their US counterparts.’
MORe (MindShare Online Research) is an online omnibus survey of consumers across North America that allows MindShare to speak to Canadians about specific topics as well as to compare answers to their U.S. counterparts. The latest survey asked respondents whether commercials are the price to be paid for having free television, only 53% of Canadians agree as opposed to 58% of their U.S. counterparts. This perspective is also apparent when they were asked whether there is too much advertising on television – 83% of Canadians agree with this statement compared to 78% of the U.S. sample. Only 17% of Canadians feel there is the right amount of advertising on television compared to 22% of Americans.
The U.S. deregulated advertising time on TV in the late 1980s. About three years ago, figures accounting for all dayparts on U.S. TV indicated that 20.57 minutes per hour – or over two-thirds of broadcast time – was non-program material. Clutter in Canada is exacerbated by the fact that U.S. programming is generally produced to allow for at least 15-minutes of ads per hour. With Canadian broadcasters limited by the CRTC to just 12-minutes each hour, additional minutes are filled with exempted non-commercial content such as PSAs and the promotion of Canadian programs.
Additionally, in late 2004, the CRTC introduced an incentive program for rewarding TV broadcasters with extra advertising minutes per house based on the amount of money they put into the production of English-language Canadian drama. Broadcasters can earn between 30 seconds and eight minutes of additional ad time for each hour of original drama aired depending on the level of Canadian participation in the production, the budget required, time of the broadcast, and the source of the funding.
While there is no limit to the number of additional advertising minutes that may be earned under the incentive program, broadcasters may not air more than 14 minutes of advertising in any given hour.
Most broadcasters routinely stretch these guidelines according to clutter studies conducted by the Association of Canadian Advertisers (ACA). In some cases, they have gone as high as 22 minutes of non-program content per hour. It is most evident on daytime television between the hours of noon and 4:00 p.m. when the U.S. broadcasters slot a higher ratio of minutes.
