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122 MORAN August
The author also was asked about the length of television-film commercials. The networks have established this rather closely. Spots, commercials made and run independently of sponsorship of a program, are usually fixed for television at twenty seconds for short spots, one minute for long spots. The twenty-second length is becoming more and more popular, probably because it can be put in between the important programs ; and because its position can be guaranteed and not be pushed off when a sustaining show becomes a sponsored one.
On programs, the usual total time is three minutes for an evening half-hour show. Normally there are two main commercials of a little over a minute each and a short opening and closing. The openings usually will not run more than fifteen or twenty seconds because the opinion of most television men is that it is very important to get a show off to a fast start. The main commercials and the openings and closings together use up the total three minutes. Three minutes is about 10 per cent of the program time and, with slight differences, that proportion holds for almost all radio and television programming. Therefore it is important to make every second of commercial count.
There has been some discussion of using one long rather than two short commercials on television programs but the eventual outcome of this is unknown. In radio, the Nielsen charts show the way in which customers tune in and out of a program and prove that more people will be reached if the three minutes of commercial are broken into several units and distributed at different points throughout the program. Probably this will hold true for television, too, and the single long commercial will not be used very frequently by advertisers.
One question is about the re-use of film commercials, because film commercials are expensive to make, especially good ones. Some commercials, of course, can be used again and again in exactly the same way. Some never can be used again. Probably most advertisers would be satisfied to make but three commercials in the course of a year, and then repeat the group three or four times to cover their program period.
Anyone who wants to do a little mathematics can decide what this means in terms of film footage. At the present moment television stations in New York, which is the most highly developed area, are on the air an average of forty-seven hours per week. If this increases to something like twenty hours (1200 minutes) a day of operation, and if