Report: Fox Hopes To Limit Commercials To 2 Minutes Per Hour

The Wall Street Journal is reporting Fox Networks Group’s ad sales chief Joe Marchese is setting a lofty goal for the broadcast network: reducing TV ad time to two minutes an hour by 2020.

Joe Marchese

Marchese announced that target at a private industry event it hosted last week in Los Angeles, where advertisers, buyers and executives from rival media companies discussed TV advertising’s woes.

Bringing commercial time down to only two minutes would be a major change. In 2017, the average amount of ad time an hour on broadcast was a little over 13 minutes, according to Nielsen. On cable it was 16 minutes.

For Fox to avoid a steep revenue drop-off, it would likely need to charge a lot more money for the scarce inventory it has left after cutting ad time to two minutes.

The shift is contingent on the industry changing the way it buys and sells media. Mr. Marchese wants to sell ads using a metric based on time spent with content, versus the number of views.

The move is in line with a trend toward fewer ads on TV, as consumers increasingly ditch ad-supported cable and broadcast television for ad-free streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon.