NBC Smells Cord Cutting On The Wind, Will Reduce 'SNL' Ad Load By 30% Next Season
from the adapt-or-die dept
For several years now we've noted how instead of adapting to the cord cutting age, many in the cable and broadcast industry have responded with the not-so-ingenious approach of aggressive denial, raising rates as fast as humanly possible, and stuffing even more ads into every television hour. And when broadcasters can't get the ads to fit, they'll just resort to speeding up or editing programs to ensure that they're hammering paying customers with more ads than ever. Given the rise in alternative viewing options, this obviously isn't the most ingenious form of market adaptation.But in a sign that somebody over at the Comcast NBC Universal media empire is at least making a fleeting attempt at sector evolution, the company has announced that it will be dramatically reducing ad loads in some programs. More specifically, the company says it will be reducing the advertising load in each episode of "Saturday Night Live" by around 30%:
"NBC's "Saturday Night Live" is paring down its commercial load, with plans to cut about 30% of ads out of the sketch comedy show next season. It will do this by removing two commercial breaks per episode, giving viewers more content, said Linda Yaccarino, chairman-advertising sales and client partnerships, NBC Universal."The catch? The company's going to be experimenting with more native, sponsored, and product placement advertising as part of the attempt to combat cord cutting and ad-skipping simultaneously:
"And for advertisers, NBC will also be offering a limited opportunity to partner with "SNL" to create original branded content. These native pods will only occur six times a year, Ms. Yaccarino said. "As the decades have gone by, commercial time has grown," Lorne Michaels, creator and executive producer, "Saturday Night Live," said in a statement. "This will give time back to the show and make it easier to watch the show live."While it's not entirely clear what these "native pods" will exactly look like, it's not so much an evolution in advertising as it is a return to the bygone era of fifties TV sponsored product placement:
NBC and advertisers are responding to the fact that prime time ratings and traditional cable TV subscribers continue to drop. Nielsen (the same company that used to call cord cutting "purely fiction") notes that most broadcasters continued to see up to a 4.1% decline in the number of homes tuning in to traditional television last month. That's again thanks to both cord cutting and "cord trimming," or the act of cutting back on the number of channels or premium networks a users subscribes to -- both in turn a response to high prices, restrictive viewing options, and flagging quality.
And while creatively experimenting with how ads get delivered is certainly part of the solution, it's not going to be a substitute for the one thing broadcasters (and by proxy cable companies) have been totally unwilling to do: offer the same content at a lower price. Ultimately the sector's going to have to take it on the chin, lose significantly more money, and begin seriously competing on channel bundle flexibility and price. That's an utterly unappealing proposition for an industry used to raising prices at four-times the rate of inflation, but the alternative is letting pesky, innovative upstarts walk away with legions of younger, disenfranchised television viewers.
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Filed Under: ads, commercials, cord cutting, native advertisers, product placement, saturday night live, snl
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What hasn't grown is an ability for a CEO of an entertainment industry to think beyond its own damn idiocy.
If the industry wants to change, it needs to do the following:
-Remove the mindset that the captive audience exists. Long gone are the days of forcing people to pick one show over another, so why still program shows like it exists? Stupid.
-Stop with the idiocy of affecting DVR recordings. The stupid "end a show early or start a show late" to purposely screw with DVR recordings is a fantastic way to ensure people stop using cable services, morons.
-Definitely stop with the 1/3 screen bombardments of whatever show the network is showing next, or tomorrow, or Thursday. Viewers are well informed on what shows the network airs, so stop treating them like they're two.
-Stop with the hiatus crap. If the network can't put out a show consecutively, don't waste our time. Reruns? Save those for future Netflix or Amazon licenses.
-Here's a brain tumor inducing idea to some executives: STOP PAYING ACTORS MORE MONEY THAN THEY'RE WORTH. Pro-tip: most people tune in for the story, not the actors. As we've seen many times, you can replace people without anyone caring (Fresh Prince, Bewitched, Last Man Standing) or completely remove them without anyone caring (Happy Days, Family Matters).
To pay a bunch of kids $1 million each to sit around a damn couch and make jokes is the reason why "commercial time" has grown.
Oh, and one more thing: perhaps, and this is just a recommendation, NBC actually make its own content instead of paying an arm and a leg for other productions?
Netflix is doing it, and NBC should be mindful of this, because once Netflix has enough original content of its own, no one will need NBC anymore.
So wake the hell up.
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This. I'd go for soccer players too and paying scientists what they are worth but that's another story.
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That's a sad reality, but there it is.
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How much money something is "worth" is the exact amount that someone else is willing to pay for it. No more and no less.
The fact that we as a society are willing to pay insane amounts of money for jobs that contribute relatively little to improving people's lives, while insanely underpaying those that have a large impact, is seriously depressing.
It's one of the reasons why I have a disdain for professional sports and the upper tiers of the entertainment industry.
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Geeze Gramps, couldn't come up with examples from *this* century? :)
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Re: Re:ointment
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Well, considering I don't watch traditional TV anymore, nope.
Those examples I pulled from a quick search. :D
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Don't occupy the 1%, outsource them.
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1. Upper management continues to outsource all of the jobs that require actual skill or talent.
2. People who discover that they have reached adulthood with no useful skills or talent will go into Marketing or Management.
3. Eventually Management's dream is realized. All unskilled talentless people are domestic and highly paid. All skilled and talented work is done by underpaid foreigners.
What they don't see coming.
4. Eventually other countries, who now have all the talented and skilled people will recognize that they can just create their own businesses without the top heavy layers and layers of bureaucracy and management. They'll out compete US companies.
5. Profit
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I watch TV to relax. The ticking clock makes it seem very stressful.
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I'd say this is as bad to them as it's annoying to us. If you increase the number of ad placements and time ten-fold then you are greatly increasing the offer. But this takes value away from advertisement as their effectiveness start to drop.
And, really, if I'm paying for no ad then I want no ad. End of the story.
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Almost makes you feel sorry for the industry
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While I will happily accept some ads on a free to air TV channel offering catchup (like I'll accept some ads on websites)- It's getting silly as regular 'live' broadcast and just drives me away again so I won't use their catchup...
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Re: Sunken Chests
Another stunning win for the broadcasters.
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Almost but not quite good enough
Once people get accustomed to on-demand services like Netflix or Amazon's offering it becomes rather difficult to convince them that 'Watch when it's on or miss it completely' is anything more than a hassle, one best ignored, and 'slightly less commercials' isn't really going to cut it for most and convince them to put up with that hassle.
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Re: Almost but not quite good enough
I do not watch commercial cable television with advertising. Period.
Five minutes of content interlaced with (seemingly) five minutes of ads? And, usually, always the same ads?
Drives me crazy, so I cut the cable TV cord years ago.
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Yup, that'll do it for sure. /s
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SNL has always been ad heaven
That will raise their funny joke per hour ratio to just over one.
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I did cut the cord 4 years ago. I'm not going back ever. I get most of my TV from a Antenna and Netflix. So I already get NBC and SNL though I can't remember the last time I watched SNL. It's all recorded onto my TIVO Roamio, and these days, it's now a 1 button push to skip all the commercials for each break.
How a 30% cut in one late night weekend show and adding more Product placements changes anything? Are these people this dumb? How about the Insane prices you push onto cable company's in the form of Re-Transmission fee's!!!! Something that in fact helps YOU get more viewers to watch your channel so you can charge more money for Ad's!!! There should be no fee, yet it's never enough. More and more money which in turn raises Cable costs much faster then inflation when in the end people have enough of the high costs and CUT THE CORD!!!
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Good luck with product placement NBC
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A double-edged sword
Or will the time be filled by lengthening the opening or closing credits?
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Re: A double-edged sword
The market will figure it out. They will be compensated for the value they provide or they won't. If they aren't they will quit and go elsewhere.
Why is it so hard to figure out that the market will dictate things like this? Maybe people will start watching YouTube where people get paid very little to produce their own content? If the creators are willing to do it then who cares?
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Re: A double-edged sword
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Market shifts should not be so painful
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What's 70% of 145%?
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Graham Kennedy
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Hard to understand where you are going...
You of course realize that NBC is OTA, totally completely and utterly free? There is no cost related to viewing SNL unless you choose to pay someone for cable rather than receiving it OTA. Most cord cutters freely admit that they have rabbit ears or another form of antenna to receive the free OTA. So arguing about cost to view SNL is a total non-starter.
The real take away here though is that (just like with adblockers online) they are just going to move to a model that is in the end even more annoying, turning their "content" into "advertent". So that may mean product placements, ad signs, lower third advertising, brand name usage in the programming, and the like. It's way harder to filter out, and potentially even more valuable to advertisers. It's also more annoying to viewers in the long run. It turns every programming into a sort of disguised informercial, with the content of the show perhaps skewed to fit the products rather than the other way around.
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Re: Hard to understand where you are going...
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Re: Hard to understand where you are going...
Two points:
1) Since the digital switchover, lots of people are no longer to receive OTA broadcasts at all.
2) OTA is not free. You pay for it with the ads. So this debate is not about whether or not viewers will pay, but rather how much they will pay.
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Re: Hard to understand where you are going...
I have been getting the impression that many TV shows are just one long advert, broken up by blocks of annoying ads.
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