Throughout the past couple of weeks I had two older people each ask me if I had seen the “Hey Marcel, Watch This” television commercial. The reason for the question is neither person knew what product was being advertised. If you’re ATT that’s not good. The spots are actually for ATT’s U-verse product, and this may be a case of the commercial being so catchy that people get caught up in the content and never pay attention to the message.
Personally, I DVR everything I watch, even live news and sporting events, so that I never have to watch a commercial. Advertisers know an increasing number of TV viewers are doing as I am, so they are working hard to develop commercials people will find so entertaining they’ll quit fast forwarding through them.
I found this number hard to believe, but according to TV ratings company Nielsen, the average American watches 151 hours of television per month. That’s a lot of television! However, it gets worse. Television programs in the U.S. include about 18 minutes of commercials per hour. A little quick math reveals during that 151 hours of TV, you’ll see just over 45 hours of commercials!
Just for fun, multiply that 45 hours spent watching commercials by the hourly wage you earn at work. Depending on your salary you could be looking at several hundred to over $2,000 per month. That makes the monthly cost of a DVR or a few commercial-free premium pay television channels seem mighty cheap by comparison.
Here’s another way to look at this. Throughout the course of the life of someone who lives to be 75 years old, using the above averages, that person would spend 40,500 hours watching commercials. Compare that to a typical 8-hour workday and you’ve just spent 5,062 days being commercialized. Now using a 5-day workweek, you would have just used the equivalent of more than 19 work years viewing TV commercials. Amazing!
I hate to use the word greed, but it does seem to apply here. Back in the 1960s, the average hour of television only included 9 minutes of ads, or half of current standards. During that time television was successful and highly profitable. Throughout the following decades networks kept incrementally pushing the amount of commercial time per hour a little higher every few years. So far the public hasn’t “cried uncle” and I don’t expect the network brass to stop “commercial creep” until we do.
Television is not alone, the same scenario holds true for radio. One popular radio talk show I’ve listened to for many years has now crammed so many commercials in, that when you take out news, traffic, weather and advertisements you’re only left with 16 minutes of programming during a half hour. There’s one commercial break during this show that features 5 straight minutes of ads. I used to keep talk radio on for 5 or 6 hours a day while in my office or while driving, but I’ve almost kicked the habit due to commercial overload.
Of course, music stations are just as commercialized. The few dollars a month I spend on commercial-free SiriusXM satellite radio is well worth it. Plus, I have a much wider variety of music available to select from. More than 22 million Americans now subscribe to SiriusXM and millions more listen to Pandora over the Internet, which also offers a low-cost commercial-free subscription plan in addition to its free plan that only includes about 1 minute of ads per half-hour.
Other media are also playing the cram-in-as-much-advertising-as-we-can game. In some newspapers, you have to hunt for the articles, which helps partially explain why circulation numbers are dropping precipitously across the nation. Of course, in recent years large numbers of us started using the Internet as a source of free news, but even this too is going downhill. A few newspaper related websites like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times have started putting some of their content behind paywalls, requiring a monthly subscription to view articles. Other newspapers are watching to see if it works before they too jump on the bandwagon.
Even free-content Internet news sites have grown tired of just having a few ads scattered around the pages. Now we’re faced with ads that cover the screen for a few seconds or slide across the screen when we first land on the site. Many use neat tricks to allow pop-up ads to appear even though you have pop-ups blocked with your security settings. Then there’s the 30-second video ad you have to watch just to get to see a short video news clip. One news website I absolutely loved loaded so many different types of ad attacks on its pages in recent months, that I’ve just given up and no longer use the site.
Another trend is the website that requires you to register and then login each time you visit just to view the free content. The purpose is so they can set cookies on your hard drive and then sell your demographic info. You would be surprised at how much these companies know about you.
Based on your web usage they may have learned you like gardening, romance novels, drink wine and love the beach. Then they sell this info to the companies that place the ads on the sites you visit. Have you ever noticed how sometimes the ads on a site seem targeted at your specific interests? Maybe you visited the Ford Motor Company website browsing for info on a new truck. Suddenly ads for the F-150 start popping up on other sites you visit.
Here’s my free tip of the day. Go to Download.com and grab a free program called CCleaner (yes it has two “C’s”). I placed the icon for it right next to the browser icon on my desktop screen and every time I finish using the Internet I run the program. It takes about 5 seconds for it to clean all the cookies and other tracking items from your computer’s temp folder.
Call me a fuddy-duddy, but I highly value my privacy. My Facebook privacy settings are placed about as high as they can be set, and I don’t “check-in” at places with Facebook or any other service such as Foursquare that broadcast to the world where I am at any given moment. If I have to register and login in order to use a website, I’ll set up an e-mail account with a free service such as Yahoo! or Gmail and choose a user name that in no way identifies who I am. There are also services out there such as Anonymizer that allow you to surf the web without fear of anyone identifying you through your computer’s IP address.
Though I’m a coupon clipper and love to save some big bucks when grocery shopping, I’m not what you would call a fanatic. I’ve seen some of these folks on television and they can be a little spooky. However, when it comes to trying to avoid commercials and advertising, I am becoming a little extreme.
Our modern media delivery systems such as television, radio, newspapers, and now Internet, are largely based upon the concept that in exchange for viewing and listening to some advertising you get the content for free. If you want to swap out 19 work years of your life in exchange for free television, that’s your call. I just feel this model has been pushed beyond what is acceptable, so I am now proudly part of the anti-advertising underground. Maybe I need to start a new advocacy group. Of course we’ll need a website, and that means we’ll need some way of raising revenue to pay for its creation and upkeep. Anyone want to buy some advertising?
Follow me on Twitter @chuckshiflett and also check out my statewide columns at: The Backroom Report.
