Commercial TV

How Much TV Commercial Length has Grown over the Years:

We all accept commercials as a necessary evil because they pay for the shows we love to watch. But, how much is commercial time is reasonable to accept? This question was answered for me while watching a 2004 episode of Star Trek Enterprise. The commercials came so often and lasted so long that is was almost impossible to maintain a sense of continuity with the show.

This situation got me wondering about how much the percentage of time given to a show is lost to commercials has increased over the years. Thanks to the availability of video recordings of past shows this was easy to determine. Scouring my video library I found shows ranging from 1952 to 2004. Here's what I discovered:

1952 - 13 percent of the time was spent watching commercials (only 4 minutes out of every half hour!)

1958 - 13 percent

1964 - 18 percent

1977 - 18 percent

1994 - 24 percent

2004 - 30 percent

2006 - 30 percent

2007 - 30 percent

2008 - 32 percent

2009 - 30 percent

2010 - 32 percent


These were all for main line shows aired during prime time hours.

So, how did the show that kicked this little study off do? Would you believe that a full 35 percent of the air time given to Star Trek Enterprise in 2004 was sacrificed to commercials? It was, and to make matters worse the end credits were pushed into the far right margin to make room for a side bar ad, the station logo was continually displayed in the lower right hand corner of the screen, and twice an annoying pop up add appeared in the left hand corner of the screen during the show. Taking these into account the total effective commercial time was crowding 38 percent. That means only 62 percent of the time was available to watch the show.

Another aspect of modern television that increases the commercial time, though not as distracting as actual commercials, is the "imbedded commercial." This is where a character uses or displays a product in such a way that the brand is clearly evident. Cars and soft drinks are the two most common users of this technique.

Dates are useful bookmarks of significant turning points in history. As far as commercials are concerned, February 2, 2006 will be an important and depressing day to remember. It was a Thursday night and I was watching Smallville when the imbedded commercial evolved from being covert (hidden) to overt (obvious.) Up to this time every imbedded commercial I'd seen was low-profile in nature: you had to look for it to see it. In this particular episode of Smallville, the object of the imbedded commercial was Acuview contact lenses. Instead of just discretely displaying the box, the actress held it up, label pointed directly at the camera, and said in a clear loud voice that Acuview contacts had solved a big problem for her. Only more disturbing than the clumsy and amateurish way it was done was the fact that this marked a major turning point in commercial television. If consumers let this catch on then such imbedded commercials could become so prevalent that the shows between commercials may soon become little more than multiple-product infomercials.

I kept an eye on the 2007-2008 season and am happy to report that the blatantly imbedded commercial did not proliferated. Yes, characters still park cars so that the make and model are clearly visible, but they don't use dialog to draw attention to it.

Correction: During a 2008 summer episode of Eureka, the lead star picked up a deodorant dispenser in such an awkward way to keep the label facing the camera that is was insultingly obvious it was a commercial. Worse still, this was a science fiction show in which the actor was caught in a repeating time loop. That's right, the viewer was forced to watch the clumsy bit of imbedded commercialization every time the time loop repeated.