Should Ofcom OK a rise in TV ad time?
Last week Ofcom announced a consultation on this question. As things stand the rules for terrestrial broadcasters are quite strict. Currently, broadcasters may carry an average of seven miniutes of advertising an hour. Within that, the average can rise to eight minutes between 6pm and 11pm, with a cap of 12 minutes of ads in any hour, provided the average is maintained. New European rules allow these limits to be increased substantially to 12 minutes an hour overall. You might imagine that the offer of potentially more advertising minuteage would prove irresistibly attractive to Britain’s hard-pressed (or green-eyed – depending on your point of view) commercial broadcasters. But no. The problem is that unless the price were to drop a long way – so low as to be a threat to commercial TV – demand for TV advertising is thought to be relatively fixed. As one senior advertising executive put it – if the price of milk drops by five pence you don’t buy more of it, you just expect to pay less