Viacom’s Spike cable network, in certain episodes of its off-HBO airiing of "Entourage," has run ad breaks ranging anywhere from six minutes in length to something approaching an eyebrow-raising 10 minutes in total, Advertising Age reports, adding, "In some cases, the ad breaks are longer than segments of the show, episodes of which have in recent weeks taken as long as 48 minutes to run."
According to the article, " ‘Viewers don’t like clutter,’ said Debbie Solomon, managing director-business planning, at WPP’s MindShare. She has studied the effects of ‘commercial loads’ since the 1980s. ‘Every study we’ve seen on the subject says the same thing: More clutter is bad for your commercials.’
Jeff Lucas, executive VP-sales, at MTV Networks’ Entertainment Group, which includes Spike, told Ad Age, "We don’t want to put our customers in an environment that is not appropriate for their commercial messages. "If there’s a problem, we’ll fix it."
To read the entire Ad Age article, written by Brian Steinberg, please click here.
To watch (or try to watch) anything that MTV Networks controlls is nearly impossible because it always seems like the content to commercial ratio is about 1:1, not counting product placements within content. I’m surprised that their demo will put up with all that…