Pi-Consulting

Ask Silvio Berlusconi where advertising clutter comes from. If his memory gets hazy, remind him about his motorcycle days.

Long before his expansion into the politics racket, Signor Berlusconi established himself as the capo di tutti capi of Italian TV. Back in the 1980’s, advertisers were complaining that the dead hand of RAI, Italy’s then monopoly state network broadcaster, was restricting their access to the airwaves. The young Berlusconi spotted an opportunity, and invested much of his newly-minted property fortune in snapping up local TV stations across the country and forging them into networks.

When the government slapped an interdict on national networking by anyone that wasn’t their own RAI, Berlusconi biked hundreds of tapes of his sultry soap operas and sexy variety shows to his provincial TV stations. By pure coincidence, they all decided to transmit the same shows at the same time, turning hundreds of individual TV stations into de facto national networks again. The stratagem toppled RAI’s top shows from their dominant position in the ratings. The “bicycle thief” had broken the government monopoly. The law duly bowed to the inevitable (Italian laws often do), the Berlusconi networks were legalized, and Don Silvio unleashed such a torrent of TV ads on a goggle-eyed public that it surprised even the Italians. Advertisers were delighted.

Back in the 80’s, Italy was Europe’s “Clutter Central”. Now, two decades later, Italy has been left behind. Other countries such as Spain, Germany and Russia have elbowed their way to the front in the TV clutter “rogues’ gallery”. Russia allows 25% of all transmission time to be taken up by commercials, and four more countries allow 20%. By contrast, the UK is still at the lowest end of the scale of television ad saturation, however much British audiences may complain of being “bombarded with adverts”.

Clutter is in the eye of the beholder. It’s partly a question of what audiences are used to, and what they have been conditioned to tolerate. The ad content allowed by individual countries’ regulations and the quantity of ads that actually go to air in a given hour may be two entirely different things.

In reality, commercial intrusions range from the modest to the incessant. Nordic countries like Norway and Sweden, with their paternalist tradition of government-run public broadcasting, only allowed the first TV commercials onto their screens in the last 20-odd years, and even then in sparing quantities. Scandinavian programmes are still interrupted by relatively short commercial breaks today. In Europe’s sunnier Southern countries, a combination of commercial tradition and soft application of the rules has always fed a higher hourly diet of TV advertising to complaisant audiences. In Spain, TV ads are so pervasive that the programmes have a tough job getting a word in edgeways.

An average of over 20 spots per commercial break? Breaks with over 50 commercials? What can those Spaniards be thinking of? The answer goes back to the post-Franco era, when a newly-liberal government freed up the airwaves. Numerous new broadcasters crowded into the market, and began to compete aggressively for Spain’s booming advertising budgets. The dominant competitive ploy was to try to boost revenue by undercutting rival stations on pricing commercial airtime. Discounting went crazy, to the point that some networks ended up staring into the abyss of insolvency. But the madness was already unstoppable. Pretty soon big advertised TV brands were throwing major tantrums if they were “only” getting a 95% discount off a TV station’s rate-card. A lot of those discounts were given out in the form of bonus spots. Legislators shrugged, and the broadcasters just kept on stuffing more and more bonus spots onto the airwaves, until Spain ended up with commercial breaks long enough to pop out for a three-course meal and still have time to phone your mother.

Now audiences are voting with their hand-held remotes, and drifting away from ad-saturated terrestrial stations to the relatively uncluttered offerings of cable and satellite TV. While overall viewing continues to rise, broadcast television is watching a steady erosion of its own share of viewing levels. So why are the terrestrial broadcasters still bombarding their audiences with such off-putting levels of clutter? Fundamentally, because they can. Commercial TV stations generally only get to attract revenue by ad sales, and they respond blindly to the money-making imperative by pushing as many commercials onto the airwaves as they think they will get away with.

Of course commercial broadcasters immediately leap to their own defense. “On average”, they intone, “we only put out a modest (supply number here) commercials per hour”. But averages are misleading things. The law of averages states, for instance, that, if you are standing with one foot encased in a block of ice and the other foot in a bucket of scalding hot water, your feet should on average be perfectly comfortable. It doesn’t actually work like that. The “law of averages” allows broadcasters to load disproportionate concentrations of commercials into those time-zones where they will command the highest prices. It’s all a question of supply and demand, they will tell you. If advertisers are clamouring for spots in prime-time, they shrug, who are we to deprive those fine companies of what they want? If audiences don’t like it, that’s tough.

Occasionally someone fights back. Consider an anti-clutter device pioneered in Japan. At about the time that commercial saturation was becoming a problem in Europe, it was already an epidemic over there. Japanese audiences complained they could no longer follow the plot of movies on TV because of the incessant commercial interruptions. The giant Mitsubishi conglomerate responded by sponsoring a series of popular James Bond movies, buying up their entire advertising content, and then NOT running any ads in them at all. Aside from the movies themselves, all viewers saw was the tiny red triple-diamond logo at screen bottom-right, and a discreet caption saying “This movie comes to you commercial-free, courtesy of Mitsubishi Corporation”.

Maybe less really is more, after all. Could the tide of clutter ever roll back the other way?