Radio’s latest ‘innovation’: 30 commercials in a row

This is what passes for a revolutionary approach in radio: A rock station in Sydney, Australia, has drawn worldwide attention for its promise never to play more than two commercials in a row. A locally owned country station in Lisbon, N.D., made a similar pledge a few weeks ago.

Result: The Sydney station rocketed to the top of the ratings and the North Dakota station won immediate and strong praise from listeners.

But in most of the radio industry, such breaks from the rule of eight-, 10- and even 15-minute marathons of commercials are viewed as an aberration.

Defenders of the standard American “stop set” -- the industry term for what happens when the music stops and a station plays one ad after another -- say that only stations facing little competition can afford to cut their commercial load. Most stations face competition in which the other guy offers advertisers discounted rates, which means you have to lower your price for air time, which in turn requires you to sell more time to make the same money -- thus, ad clutter.

Not long ago, the standard radio ad break was perhaps 90 seconds or two minutes. But the meaning of “We’ll be right back” has changed dramatically in recent years. Federal regulators once set a cap of 18 minutes of commercials per hour, but all government guidelines for programming were erased in the 1981 radio deregulation.

Now some FM stations’ ad packs are approaching the interminable -- up to the 15-minute breaks heard on talk shows such as Howard Stern’s morning raunchfest. Ad breaks on the Stern show have been clocked at as long as 18 minutes 48 seconds, with as many as 30 separate spots jammed together.

With commercial loads of 25 minutes per hour increasingly common on the radio, does anyone stick around until the next segment of the program?

Stations sell ad time based on research showing that the fewer times programs break each hour, the happier and more loyal listeners will be. Thus evolved the two-per-hour stop set.

What should stations do? The trade magazine Radio World recently urged stations to reinvent how they present commercials, with fewer and shorter spots that might well prove more effective for advertisers, who aren’t exactly thrilled about having their message run as No. 17 in a clump of 25 consecutive ads.

As for listeners, they continue to flee to Internet radio and satellite radio, both of which are largely commercial-free.