Radio Drops #3: Too Many Commercials

Why does radio have such long commercial breaks now? The video runs 2:19.

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How Many Spots Are Too Many?

When the Top 40 format was first created in the ’50s, the game plan was simple. The jock played a song, a couple, three commercials, another song, another couple, three, 24/7. It stayed that way until the late ’60s.

What happened then was album rock. There was just too much great new music coming out in the 1960s for one format to handle.

Album rock decided to be the opposite of Top 40. If Top 40 had an uptempo jock who was always happy and grooving, album rock would have jocks that kind of whispered to you, man. Top 40 played commercials after every song, so album rock played long music sweeps and bunched their commercials together. Of course, in the beginning those stations had maybe five or six commercials in an hour, so it was easy to do.

Album rock started taking audience from Top 40, so Top 40 program directors started doing what the album rock stations were doing. That gave us these monstrously long, cancerous spot breaks, and they’re still doing it to this day. I do not understand it.

Let me tell you something true: people like commercials. They really do. Commercials are informative. If you’re looking for a new car or kids’ clothes, you pay attention to them. And if they’re well done, commercials are entertaining. The only thing people don’t like is too many of them.

And how many are too many? Four. I saw some marketing research on it a long time ago, put together by some smart guys, and I think it still applies. Three commercials was tolerable to everybody they studied. At four, a significant percentage said that’s too many. At five, the majority. At six, everybody.

We’ve all got to make a living. Heck, commercials have paid my salary most of my life, and they still do in a secondary way. But these excessively long breaks that corporate radio has put upon us have got to end. This is not doing us any good, guys. I’m sure I’ll get on this topic again.