Television: The TV Ad and Its Afterlife

Abstract

The collision of syncopated images that is the television advertising break powers commercial television in the UK and around the world. The TV ad break drives the whole economy of broadcast television, and without it non-public service television would have no credible funding base. In a postmodern, digitized, convergent media environment (Jenkins 2006), online marketing forms strive to draw revenue and influence from television advertising. Viral promotional methods via social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, along with the digital video recorder (DVR) and video streaming services such as Netflix, allowing time-shifted television viewing, conspire with traditional prejudices – the ads interrupt the programmes – to destabilize the form. But as Jenkins (2006: 16) reminds us: ‘convergence refers to a process, not an endpoint’. At the start of the twenty-first century, the outlook for conventional televisionadvertising, the TV ad break, appeared gloomy. Jenkins quotes Rishad Tobaccowala, president of the media buying group Starcom MediaVest, as sparking a panic at a gathering of television executives in 2002 when he offered ‘the premature prediction that the thirty-second commercial would be dead by 2005’ (Jenkins 2006: 67). As broadcast TV Britain became entirely digital in 2012, the plethora of financially viable commercial channels powered by the ad break confounds this prediction. The TV ad break is a match forged by Mammon, created in fairyland, and accepted by the public as a Faustian compromise. The current paradigm is that viewers are complicit in trading content they want to watch on television with about 12 minutes of marketing in every hour of viewing. The symbiosis between advertiser, product and viewer stimulates economic growth, entertains and provides a cosmopolitan backdrop to television schedules. It also shifts products, reinforces brand awareness and drives sales. However, MacRury confirms that convergence ischanging this paradigm: ‘The media-as-host and advertisement-as-parasite relationship identified by critics (e.g., Thompson 1932), or the ad-media symbiosis accepted as the default for commercial media, is being challenged by new mediaadvertising hybrid genres’ (MacRury 2009: 227). By 2012 television advertising revenues had stabilized and given ITV, the UK’s main commercial channel, a timely boost. Not only did the ad break not demise, but television commercials are the highest generator of income and initiate more sales than any other promotional form or activity (Alps 2011). Pay TV and subscription TV generate substantial revenues for satellite TVstations such as SKY. Other ways of generating sufficient income for terrestrial TV to provide quality television content have been tried and, apart from the UK’s licence fee system, do not deliver enough revenue to support the quality content viewers demand: TV drama, documentaries, professional sports, current affairs and news. TV on demand via streaming services such as LoveFilm and Netflix, launched in the UK in January 2012 for £6 a month, is gaining traction mainly for films and past quality TV content.