Six Second TV Ads Coming To NFL

The six-second television commercial are coming to NFL Games this season.

According to The NYTimes, Fox Networks Group will offer the bite-size slots alongside its standard 15- and 30-second ads for a variety of sporting events after first testing the format on its broadcast of the Teen Choice Awards in mid-August.

People are used to seeing short video ads on platforms like Snapchat, Facebook and YouTube, but not so much on network TV, where the currency for decades has been 15- and 30-second ads. While TV networks have experimented with shorter commercials in the past, largely as publicity stunts for specific brands, Fox is hoping to make six-second ads an industry standard across broadcasters as consumers in the internet era show less tolerance for frequent, bloated ad breaks during shows.

“When the six-second ads are placed in unique positions, it has the potential to gain even more attention than a traditional unit,” Eric Shanks, president of Fox Sports, said in an interview.

NFL fans will first see the ads on Fox on Sept. 10 just before kickoff in the network’s games on the regular season’s opening weekend, and Shanks said they were also being offered for the World Series and other “marquee events.” The network is working to integrate them sparingly into some in-game breaks with 15- and 30-second spots; it may also place them through new formats, like in a box adjacent to players on a field during pauses. The hope is that they will eventually help reduce the overall commercial time that people sit through.

The effort underscores the new strategies that broadcasters are deploying to keep the attention of consumers who often clutch a smartphone or tablet — or both — while watching their shows, or avoid ads entirely through Netflix. It’s a major shift from the typical spots that TV networks sell and will put a new burden on marketers to not only attract viewers’ attention but also pitch a product in less time than it takes to read this sentence out loud.

On network television, the trend has been toward shorter commercials: In the first half of this year, 36 percent of national TV ads were 15 seconds long while 49 percent lasted 30 seconds, Nielsen data shows. In 2014, 29 percent of ads were 15-second spots, while 61 percent were 30 seconds long.