December 26, 2005



Fewer TV Commercials

Posted by Eric Jaffa
Thursday October 20th 2005, 7:12 am
Filed under: Media Watch, TV, Radio

for one episode of “60 Minutes“:

CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday will resemble a show produced during the early days of television when a single advertiser sponsored programs and when viewers saw only a single ad during a commercial break. Sunday’s program will be presented in its entirety by Philips Electronics, which is paying about $2 million to be the sole sponsor — about what all of its advertisers together would spend, according to today’s (Wednesday) Wall Street Journal.

As a result, each segment of the magazine show will be lengthened, allowing for “more content and less clutter” in the words of executive producer Jeff Fager. The program will include 6 1/2 minutes of ads for Philips, network promotions and local-station ads, instead of the usual 12 minutes. Fager told the Journal that he would gladly do such a deal “every week if I could.”

It’s good that the public will be able to enjoy fewer commercials, for at least one hour on CBS.

I’d support a legal limit on minutes of commercials-per-hour on broadcast TV and radio.

The public would benefit by having more content on our airwaves.

TV and radio stations wouldn’t suffer because they could charge more if commercial time became a more precious commodity.



2 Comments so far

My two sons do not want the commercial with chucky in it on their disney channel. It should not be on there they say because it is not suitable for kids my 9 year old comments. My 6 year old says.. because its too violence.Please remove you are adding nitemares to our home sweet home.
brenda

Comment by brenda 10.20.05 @ 2:58 pm

brenda -

You can contact the Disney channel if you think they’re running an innappropriate commercial.

Comment by Eric Jaffa 10.20.05 @ 3:28 pm



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