NCAA Basketball Tournament: Too Many TV Commercials

The 2010 NCAA basketball tournament is off and running, and within CBS tournament coverage, so are the TV commercials.

For every two minutes of NCAA basketball consumed, one minute of TV commercials obliterate the CBS tournament coverage. Two-thirds, one-third. Some among us believe the TV ads have become excessive to the point of ruining the fun, so we are tuning out.

Last year's TV ratings for college basketball's championship game were the lowest ever, according to the Nielsen ratings. Ratings for the total 2008 tournament were the lowest ever, except for 2003, a year of true March Madness when the Iraq War started at the exact same time.

Let's Count the B-Ball Time vs. the Ad Time

On the 2010 tournament's opening night, March 18, I grabbed a simple Timex watch, a Bic pen and a yellow legal pad. Notes were taken to record the action, and the breaks in the action, during a spell between 9 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. There were 61 minutes of basketball and 29 minutes of commercials, some of which ran repeatedly, including a young lady sniffing a young guy's armpit over and over because so-and-so deodorant makes his pits smell so good. (These ads seemed always to be followed by fast-food ads, which sort of limited the immediate appeal of KFC's latest Five Dollar Box.)

At the 9:03 p.m. mark of our Timex test, there were two minutes of ads. Greg Gumbel took 15 seconds to tell us, "We'll be back." Then came another two minutes of ads, and then a return to courtside with a 25-second scroll of sponsor logos. At that early point I'm wondering, is it possible that ads actually have reached the point where the ads exceed the basketball?

C'mon Coaches, Call Some Timeouts!

But there are a couple stretches when CBS, perhaps out of shame, seems to do better. There's a nice span from 9:17 to 9:29 p.m., 12 straight minutes of hoops. Seems almost like HBO has taken over! We also go from 9:40 all the way to 10 p.m. with only one commercial break, although the CBS hands are tied this time. A tight game is heading down the stretch and two uncommon coaches both are refusing to overcoach. In other words, neither is calling the usual string of timeouts, and so CBS is stuck. We can hear the bean-counters cursing.

The span after 10 p.m. is when CBS reverts to its mortal sins. Three more games begin close together. The there is a rash of early timeouts for our early game here in Michigan, and thus a rash of commercials. We're saying, couldn't CBS instead give us just a teeny peek at those two other games. So here's what happens: Our game finally resumes, and only then does CBS update those other games, pulling our own game right in the middle of the action. Rude, rude, rude.

'The Masters: A Tradition Unlike Any Other'

The CBS ad that disgusts me the most is the one that has run the longest. It's an in-house promo for the network's upcoming Masters golf telecast in April. The Rev. Jim Nantz, Golf's Worshipful Minister, intones, "A tradition unlike any other: The Masters." What a tradition! The Masters didn't integrate until 1975, which was like, 21 years after Brown v. Board of Education. What a tradition!

There's another Masters tradition. Nantz annually proclaims at the hallowed grounds of Augusta that in order to ensure "limited commercial interruption," only four minutes of ads will be shown per hour (often sponsored by the same banks and investment companies that we've bailed out lately).

Four minutes of ads per hour at The Masters. Twenty minutes of ads per hour at the NCAA basketball tournament. That pretty much says it all. Now that this piece has been researched and written, I can turn off the television again.

SOURCES

Personal TV commercial time tracking

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/04/ncaa_march_madness_finals_hit.php