Tonight We Pull the Plug on the 30-Second Ad

from NPR's blog:

I'm sure you wouldn't dare miss Friday Night Smackdown on the CW
tonight, but be careful not to rush to the bathroom during the breaks.
Tonight, we bid farewell and good riddance to the 30-second ad.

The video game company Electronic Arts will debut 10-second ads in the
program. Which matches up with the attention span of the teenage
audience they hope to reach.

But there's something serious going on here. The CW network calls them
"cwickies" and hopes to sneak these ads in before you can reach for
the remote. And just to totally throw you off your fast-forwarding
rhythm, the company will have a 90-second ad at the end of the
program. Ad Age points out how revolutionary this is:

Model-busting ad ideas, such as the cwickies and "content wraps"
-- CW's series of long ads placed over the course of a single night --
do something that gives network executives the willies. They make one
marketer's commercials more memorable than others airing in the same
program, threatening to ruin a decades-old ad system. In the past, one
TV ad had as good a chance as any to get noticed. Now, as the old
saying goes, some ads are becoming more equal than others.

Thank God. It's hard to believe that the 30-second spot has gone
unchallenged this long in a revolutionary media environment. And who
knows what's next? Advertisers have already floated some other ideas:
company logos dancing on the bottom of your CSI episode, split-screen
ads during Grey's Anatomy. In order to save TV, sounds like they are
willing to destroy it.

- Robert Smith