• by June 30, 2004

JUST AN OFFLINE MINUTE (TWO OF THEM, ACTUALLY) - We were still counting the minutes waiting for the arrival of the one-second unit of sale that Fox sales chief Jon Nesvig recently told a roomful of national advertisers would soon become the standard bearer of the TV advertising business, when we opened today's Wall Street Journal -- actually, we clicked on the Wall Street Journal Online - to learn that big marketers may be moving in the opposite direction, purchasing longer-form ad units that wrap multiple brand messages under a new format that the paper dubbed a "show-mercial." The concept isn't entirely new, of course. Marketers have always toyed with long-form as a method of braking through the incessant clutter of blipverts. The logic being: If you don't have the attention span to watch 15- or 30- seconds of our plugs, you're sure to watch a couple of minutes brought to you by our sponsor, provided, of course, that they're somehow entertaining.

Some of the most interesting attempts to develop this new form of advertainment have been San Francisco agency Red Ball Tiger's work with the TiVo Showcase, albeit to a limited base of viewers. But now alpha marketer Procter & Gamble is taking the concept to a conventional TV outlet, Lifetime Television, which will carry two-minute P&G ad segments during its Friday night movies. The segments, reports the Journal, will be more of a narrative than a conventional 30-second spot and will tell "full stories about 13 different women being made over by a 'Glam Squad'" using P&G brands such as CoverGirl, Clairol, Pantene, Olay and Crest.

Imagine that? A cable network like Lifetime running long-form ad messages demonstrating products and brands to consumers in the hopes that they'll buy them. What a concept. Actually, it's not all that breakthrough an idea. They're called infomercials. They've been used for decades. And they also happen to comprise much of the late night and early morning programming of cable networks like Lifetime. That aside, it is interesting that P&G, and according to Discovery Networks' Joe Abruzzese, an automaker, are experimenting with the format. Then again, we seem to recall a young David Verklin, now CEO of Carat, but then a young turk media director at Hal Riney & Partners, developing a similar idea for the launch of a major new auto brand. Some people even believe that that infomerical, the so-called "Spring in Spring Hill" spot, was a key ingredient in the successful launch of Saturn. We'll spare readers the litany of major brands that have experimented with long-form ad formats. Call them show-mercials, infomercials, advertainment, or whatever you want, if P&G is getting behind them, you'll probably see others follow.

Now as far as Nesvig's prediction, which he made a few months ago during the Association of National Advertisers Television Advertising Forum, we don't think he actually meant that advertisers would necessarily be buying one-second spots, though some clearly might. What he really meant, was that the notion that industry standard ad lengths like the :15, the :30, or even the :60, :90, or 1:20, may or may not make sense for a given advertiser or brand and that they ultimately might want the flexibility to customize the length of their advertising message to fit their own particular communications strategy. And that, we agree, deserves a second thought.