Too fast to Fast-Forward

New York Times reports this morning that a Broadcast Newtork will soon offer advertisers two more ways to try holding the attention of viewers throughout those commercial breaks that consumers love to hate.

One idea is to run quickie commercials of only five seconds each. The other is to schedule a series with no commercial breaks at all, and instead incorporate sponsors’ products into each episode.

Executives of the network CW outlined their plans yesterday as they offered Madison Avenue a preview of their prime-time lineup for the 2007-8 season.

The proposals are the most recent to be advanced by the major networks, broadcast and cable, as they grapple with the problem of keeping viewers from changing channels during commercials — or, if the viewing is being done on digital video recorders, from fast-forwarding through the spots.

The presentation by CW was part of what is called upfront week, which gets its name because the broadcasters share their programming with advertisers and agencies before the fall season begins. The upfront week for 2007-8 ended yesterday with sneak peeks at the schedules of CW, owned by the CBS Corporation and Time Warner, and Fox Broadcasting, part of the News Corporation.

Last month, Fox tried interspersing humorous program snippets between commercials, and executives said they would try other versions of the snippets during the 2007-8 season.

The other reason to tinker with traditional commercial breaks is the penchant of DVR owners to skip through spots when they play back recorded programs. That problem is getting worse as more households acquire DVRs.

The two CW ideas are based on the network’s experience since September with a device known as a content wrap, which CW produced for almost 20 brands during the 2006-7 season.

In content wraps, products of advertisers like Procter & Gamble, Toyota Motor and Unilever are integrated into a set of three short program segments on topics like fashion and music. The segments were interspersed in commercial breaks during episodes of series like “America’s Next Top Model.”

The five-second commercials, intended as shorter versions of content wraps, are called “Cwickies” — a play on the network’s name, just as the initials of “content wrap” are “CW.”

CW took in $600 million to $650 million during the upfront market last spring, while Fox sold an estimated $1.8 billion.

The 2007-8 upfront week began on Monday with NBC. The presentations continued on Tuesday with ABC and Telemundo, then with CBS and Univision on Wednesday before ending with CW and Fox yesterday.

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