CRTC BOWS OUT OF AD CONTROLS Keith McArthur and Grant Robertson – Globe and Mail For decades, the amount of advertising on Canadian television has been set in Ottawa.
Now the decision will be left up to the networks – and how much their viewers are willing to stomach.
Canada's broadcast regulator announced Thursday that it is getting out of the business of regulating how many ad minutes broadcasters can air each hour.
“You don't regulate what you don't have to,” Konrad von Finckenstein, chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, said Thursday.
“I don't see why we should regulate advertising. It's up to the Canadian consumer to decide with his remote how much advertising he wants to see.”
The CRTC said broadcasters will be permitted to sell 14 minutes of commercials during prime time – up from 12 – for the start of the 2007-2008 television season.
The cap will be eliminated two years later.
The networks like the new freedom, while advertisers worried more commercials would mean that consumers would pay less attention.
But in reality, viewers may not notice a big difference.That's because U.S. networks air upwards of 14 minutes of commercials an hour and English Canadian networks fill the gap in U.S. imports with news updates, promos for Canadian television programs and public service commercials.
“It's not going to make any difference at all to viewers,” said Jeff Wills of , who buys advertising on behalf of marketers at Wills & Co. Media Strategies.
“If these shows are simulcast at prime time – the big shows that people actually care about – they are going to be restricted by how many commercials they can run based on how long the show is from the U.S.”
The networks had been lobbying the CRTC to help them boost revenue by taking a share of cable fees and for the freedom to sell more commercials.
While the CRTC balked at the first request, it had sympathy for the second.
The regulator said time restrictions will be eliminated by September, 2009 “unless significant contrary factors are brought to the commission's attention.”
While most broadcasters like the change, Canadian advertisers and some media buyers complained that each new commercial makes the others less effective.
“Broadcasters think it will be good news for them, but it won't be good news for them as viewers turn off television,” said Bob Reaume, vice-president of policy and research at the Association of Canadian Advertisers.
Lauren Richards, chief executive officer of Starcom MediaVest Group said the CRTC's decision is disconcerting for advertisers and called on broadcasters to hold off on rate increases that exceed inflation.
The broadcasters said they will exercise their newly acquired freedom with caution, so as not to turn off their viewers.
“We're happy about it, but that doesn't mean that the inventory of minutes is going to grow immensely.
“If in prime time we bombard people with 16 or 17 minutes of advertising, they may switch elsewhere,” said Luc Lavoie, a vice-president at Quebecor, which owns the French network TVA and SUN TV in Toronto.
Ironically, the networks' ability to sell more commercials may come at a time when they are least able to take advantage of it.
Forces such as fragmentation of the media landscape, ad-skipping technologies like digital video recorders and broadband internet content could put pressure on networks to reduce the number of commercials they air over the coming years. |