NBC Joins Rivals, Will Air 15-Second Commercials

NBC announced Friday that it will join ABC and CBS in accepting all forms of 15-second commercials, meaning that viewers will be bombarded by more product messages in the same amount of time.

NBC, unwilling to give its rival networks an advertising advantage, will allow what the industry calls isolated 15-second commercials this fall. Earlier this month, ABC said it would start accepting 15-second ads in September. CBS started permitting all forms of 15-second ads last year.

NBC has resisted the shorter ads for several reasons, including concerns about potentially conflicting ads in commercial breaks, that commercial breaks would overflow with potentially conflicting ads and that NBC would have more bookkeeping work. In addition, some NBC affiliates feared that the cheaper ads might take business away from local stations.

Pier Mapes, president of the NBC television network, said in a statement that the decision was made to stay competitive with the other networks and because of “the fact that the majority of NBC affiliates currently accept 15-second isolated commercials.”

With the networks averaging 6 1/2 minutes of commercial time in each hour of prime time, viewers have been absorbing national pitches for hair spray, motor oil and other products in mostly 30-second doses.

For some time, all three networks have accepted 15-second ads during their short news-break segments. Last year, CBS allowed 15-second ads, without any restrictions, while NBC and ABC accepted back-to-back 15-second commercials, but only for products from the same company.

“This will bring more advertisers into TV,” said John Sisk, senior vice president and director of negotiating at the J. Walter Thompson ad agency. “It’s good for the smaller-budget advertisers who only could afford newspaper advertising before.”

Sisk said J. Walter Thompson did a study in 1985 showing that 15-second commercials were 70% as effective in getting their messages across as 30-second ads. That indicated that advertisers could pay the network half the price for shorter commercials without seriously jeopardizing the ads’ recall potential.

With MTV and other fast-paced TV formats, “people pick things up faster now,” Sisk said. Advertisers also have become more creative at packing more information into just 15 seconds, Sisk noted.

The Thompson study also revealed some negative reaction to the shorter ads from better-educated viewers and those subscribing to pay television.