TV broadcasters are promoting themselves at their advertising clients’ expense, according to a recent report, writes Neil Bierbaum
THE enormous amount of airtime being devoted to TV stations’ own programme promotions is significantly increasing the amount of advertising clutter, thereby making it increasingly costly for advertisers to achieve the same noting levels. This opinion is expressed in a study document released by Media Initiative Africa (MIA). The document also shows that by including these self- promotions, the amount of advertising on TV exceeds the accepted maximum of eight percent of total airtime.
There is an inverse relationship between the amount of advertising and the levels of noting among viewers. The net effect of so much self- promotion, says the document, is that the advertiser is forced to seek increasingly more campaign rating points in order to deliver the same levels of noting and recall that were enjoyed in previous years. This, it says, requires greater expenditure, which constitutes greater airtime demand and leads to inflated airtime costs. In other words, advertisers are spending more and more to get the same level of attention from the viewer.
Possible reasons for the preponderance of self-promotion listed by the document include genuine publicity for forthcoming programmes in order to increase viewing levels. Clearly this is of benefit to the advertiser.
However, there are other reasons for self- promotion which do not benefit the advertiser. One is to fill unsold advertising inventory. The other is to promote the station’s advertising revenue as stated by Nielsen Adindex. The latter includes self-promotion as advertising and hence the more a station promotes itself, the better it looks on Adindex. Thus M-Net was the second-highest revenue-earning station between August 1994 and July 1995, according to Adindex but, taking into account that 18,3 percent of its revenue was self-promotion, it falls some 15 percent behind CCV in terms of revenue earned, and 50 percent behind TV1.
MIA commissioned Constant Watch to monitor TV1, CCV and M-Net’s programming and commercial output for one week, commencing Septemer 18 1995 and between 17h00 and 22h00 (16h40-22h00 for CCV). Promotional airtime was defined as any broadcast which was not programming and not commercial airtime, but which served to impart information about programmes or station services.
The results showed that advertisers are competing not only with other advertisers, but also with the stations which they are supporting through advertising. On TV1, over 35 percent — 90 minutes out of 255 — of the total non-programming time was taken up by station promotions. On M-Net, the amount of promotional time amounted to 22,2 percent of all non-programming time, while on CCV the figure was 11,3 percent. Taking into account the self-promotion, both M-Net and CCV exceeded the commercial airtime limit; M-Net by 26 percent and CCV by 55 percent. (TV1 did not manage to fill all of its available advertising inventory in this particular
The document attributes this high level of programme promotion to the fact that both TV1 and M-Net have been losing audiences and hence are trying to plug the gaps by using self- promotion. For the advertiser this means a greater volume of advertising reaching smaller
Of even greater concern is the positioning of these ads. During the week of analysis, TV1 flighted 63 percent of all promotional slots in solus positions and first or last break, CCV flighted 57 percent of spots in these positions and M-Net 47 percent. These premium positions should be made available to the paying client, without whom the stations would not survive, the document concludes.