New Fall Commercials: Don't Blink! by Lynn Ziegler, UnderstandMedia.com Contributor
According to Stewart Elliott’s recent piece in The New York Times (“Ads That Are Too Fast For a Fast-Forward Button,” 5.18.07), the CW network has some new advertising tricks up its very corporate sleeves. CW, you may recall, is the love child of CBS and Warner Brothers (formerly known as the WB.) As they announced their lineup for the Fall 2008 season, they outlined some new approaches to the bottom line.
CW ‘s president for entertainment, Dawn Ostroff, said that the fight to keep viewers watching commercials is “intensifying” for a number of reasons. The first is that Nielsen Media Research is about to change the way it reports the ratings data used by advertisers to decide where to run commercials. As of May 31, Nielsen will begin “measuring the viewership of commercials as well as programs.” But the other reason is that DVR owners tend to blast through commercial breaks when viewing a recorded program, a problem that worsens as more households avail themselves of that service.
Elliott notes that last year, CW used “Content Wraps”—short program segments integrating the sponsors (Unilever, Toyota Motor and Proctor & Gamble) and framed by topics like fashion and music, which were “interspersed in commercial breaks in series like America’s Next Top Model.“
The coming season’s efforts will be more concise: 5 second Commercial Wraps, in another play on the CW’s initials, called “CWickies.”
CWickies will be signaled by a logo, and sold in 15-second packages of three, to be used in a single show or throughout the evening’s programming.
Bill Morningstar, Executive VP for sales at CW, suggests that a movie studio could run three CWickies to tease the plot of a new release, and then follow up with a standard 30-second trailer.
CW may offer a “commercial free” program called CW NOW, a new gossip-entertainment-movie/music/mayhem show (think EXTRA!) targeting the 18-34 demographic…..but the program “will incorporate brands into the fabric of the show,” according to Morningstar. Stewart Elliott has a more accurate description: Content Wraps on Steroids.”
The blending of brands and programming raises the hackles of members of the Writers Guild of America, who feel that when writers are asked to incorporate brands in the telling of a story, they are doing a job that they a) did not sign up for and b) are not being paid to do. The more subversive thinkers among us point out that stockpiling shows that use products (and product placement) could be a way to ward off the impact of a future strike by writers who don’t want to be told to move a product as they move the plot along.
And it’s contagious—John Nesvig, a FOX network exec is quoted in the NYT article as saying his co-workers think “weaving program snippets into commercial breaks was the best way to keep eyeballs glued to the set.” It is, after all, how a little franchise called The Simpsons began (as program snippets in The Tracy Ullman Show from 1987-89.) Remember?
We can celebrate one thing about these new modifications to the entity formerly known as the commercial: lots of material for future media literacy lessons.
Can’t Wait.
