Networks promise to reduce ads in on-air TV

Move may prompt an unexpected nostalgia for old commercial styles.

Our relationship to television commercials is one of avoidance. We fast-forward our DVRs or sidestep ads altogether with streaming services like Netflix or Amazon. TV networks are looking for ways to claw back (or simply retain) audiences. Which brings us to a recently stated goal from Fox’s ad chief: The network that airs “The Simpsons” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” will aim to snip the amount of time given over to ads in each prime-time hour down to a total just two minutes — two minutes! — by 2020.

That would be a major pruning but Fox isn’t alone, other networks are cutting back as well. According to the Wall Street Journal, last year broadcast ads took up a bit more over 13 minutes in each hour. On cable it was 16 minutes. Now try imagining two minutes.

“It’s a big deal, if it happens,” said Leslie Savan, who wrote a longtime column for the Village Voice about TV commercials. She now writes for The Nation.

“I think a lot of people would cheer two minutes. But the whole ad industry has been in a tumult for decades at this point, and this is just the latest step. It sounds kind of drastic, but I don’t know if it’s going to be the solution because the migration over to ad-free media and entertainment has taken root. So many of us would rather pay for HBO or just stream things than go through all of that. I never had a great tolerance for ads back when, but I really don’t now. I can barely stand to watch anything with ads.”

I haven’t given much thought to TV commercials for a long time now. They used to be shared cultural touchstones, when slogans like “Don’t squeeze the Charmin!” and “Time to make the doughnuts” wormed their way into your pop cultural literacy — whether you liked it or not.

It is weird to feel a vague sort of nostalgia for these commercials? They were once a shared experience. A cultural bond of sorts. And if you jokingly said “Calgon, take me away!” people knew you were stressed out or at the end of a long day — or you were being ironic about the restorative effects of a bubble bath.

Savan wrote about slogans in her book “The Sponsored Life: Ads, TV, and American Culture.” But now, we’re in a post-slogan era. Memes have overtaken the mental place once occupied by slogans.

“One reason you might feel nostalgic is not for the slogans themselves, but the world they represented,” Savan said. “A world where we weren’t so fractured apart. There was consistency to a 30-second ad. A continuity and a form that was repeated over and over again. And as irritating as it may have been — or as entertaining as it may have been, that little burst of pleasure — those commercials remind us of a world that was more ordered.”

There’s another side of that coin that is one to guard against: “It was also a time when commercials were more white, more nuclear family-focused, more straight. I don’t think most people are nostalgic for that.

“But it’s the sense of order I think people crave and now everything seems to have exploded. In the media, everything’s fractured. Your 24-hour day is cut up into little pieces like it never has been before. But there was a form to it, whereas everything seems so chaotic now.”

Commercials once influenced the way we talked, as well. Savan has another book, “Slam Dunks and No Brainers: Pop Language in Your Life, the Media, and Like … Whatever,” where she delves into that. But the shift away from TV commercials has been a long time coming.

William M. Barr is a cultural anthropologist at Duke University whose work specializes in advertising. “When the cable revolution happened and we moved from three major channels to a hundred or so overnight, this meant that the so-called mass market of the ’50s and ’60s became super fragmented,” he said.

Suddenly companies selling golf gear, for example, could narrow their focus and buy time specifically on the Golf Channel. “Prior to that, it was one shot had to fit everybody,” said Barr. “So that’s where slogans would come in like ‘Don’t squeeze the Charmin’ that would hopefully work across classes and ethnic groups and age” — whether or not you were actually the one buying toilet paper for your household.

In truth, a good number of brands have shifted their energies over to social media, where companies now exist in sentient form as a Twitter account. It’s surreal. “That used to be called ‘relationship marketing.’ And so many people don’t mind being part of that branding experience,” Savan said.

Back to those to minutes of ads that Fox is aiming for. It might actually be a first step in getting rid of ad-supported television altogether.

TV networks like CBS and FX have begun launching their own subscription services to compete directly with Netflix and the like, Mediapost TV columnist Adam Buckman wrote in a recent column. And he speculates that eventually, TV networks might see no point in keeping the oldstyle ad-supported channel channels around.

So what of the commercials themselves? Savan paraphrased Marshall McLuhan, the influential public intellectual who focused on media theory in the 20th century.

“Whenever a media becomes outdated, at some point it becomes a piece of art,” she said. “Or an artifact, like antique typewriters that people display on a shelf as a object, rather than something they actually use. So even television commercials, a certain portion of them will become artifacts. And they will be adored and valued for that.”