• by Joe Marchese , November 2, 2010

The television commercial is shrinking. Don't worry, this is not a television-bashing session. After all, it was only a couple columns ago I wrote "Why Television Is Still King." And it is. But the television commercial is still shrinking, literally. According to Nielsen, the number of 15-second television commercials is growing compared to the number of 30-second spots. USA Today has a great column from AP's Emily Fredrix whose title says it all: "TV commercials shrink to match attention spans."

There are lots of great reasons to move toward shorter commercial formats, for marketers and programmers, and Fredrix explores a lot of them. But viewers' shorter attention spans -- just another way of saying a lower level of consumer tolerance for long-form advertisers -- create an interesting challenge to marketers looking to tell a more complex story. This is why many marketers for whom it will take longer, perhaps even longer than 30 seconds, to drive home a message, should be looking toward engaging consumers digitally, where the sky is the limit with regard to time spent.

It seems counterintuitive, but consumers are willing to spend a significantly greater amount of time with brand messaging when it involves/requires interaction, than they are when they the advertisement is a "lean-back experience." As John Greening, associate professor at Northwestern University's journalism school, puts it in the AP story, "It used to be that the most valuable thing on the planet was time, and now the most valuable thing on the planet is attention." The challenge and opportunity for digital media is to deliver marketers both time and attention to allow for the communication of those marketing messages that might not fit into 15 seconds.