What
are Break Inventories? How do channels plan them? What is the
effect of seasonality and demand on them? These are some of the
questions that Media Planners as well as Broadcasters and Channel
Personnel need to be aware of. This paper looks at answering some
of the often asked question. It also looks at some key channels
to see how they manage their Ad Inventories.
Break Inventories:
Break inventories is nothing but the time between the start of
a 'break' till the end cumulative for all breaks in a specified
time-period. Typically break inventories could have all or some
of the following:-
-
Advertising (Commercials, Infomercials)
-
Channel/
Network Promotions
-
Program
promos (Paid, Clean, Tagged, etc)
-
Trailors
and Fillers
-
Break-Bumpers,
Credit-titles
-
Vignettes,
'Coming Next' screens
-
Public
Interest Announcements
-
Contest
Promos, Greetings messages
Now, some
networks/ channels have various stipulations on managing break
inventories. These could be on:-
-
The
total amount of time per hour that a channel has as 'break duration'
-
The
number and duration devoted to credit-titles, break-bumpers
-
The
proportion of Advertising to Promos (Program/ Channel) that
the channel can run within an hour
-
Duration
of fillers, trailors, etc
As
you can see, the advertising on a channel is only a subset of
the total break inventory. If we try and understand that of 24
hours of programming time available to a channel, how much of
time per day goes into Breaks, we come to a very interesting information
set. Given below is a chart that plots the MIN, MAX and AVERAGE
values of Break Inventories in a comparison of almost 100 channels.
.
As
you can see, on an average, for a single channel, close to 3 hours
24 minutes of time (204 minutes) are devoted to Breaks! Now while
this is the picture that emerges for the Oct-Dec quarter, the
same for the other Quarters could be completely different. That's
because the last quarter usually is very high in terms of advertising
pressure on account of Festive Season Advertising as shown in
the chart below:-
In the next
part we will look at how some of the largest channels manage their
Break Inventories. We will also look at the Advertising component
within the Break Inventories to see variations there across different
channels.
A TAM Educate*
Study on ADEX data
* TAM Educate
is a division of TAM Media Research that attempts to raise the
industry bar by 'attacking the slope of our learning curves'!
The TAM-Mate program started last year, the TAM-MICA workshop
at World Trade Centre, regular Newsletters are just some of the
efforts that TAM Educate has spearheaded within the industry.
(To be concluded)
Atul Phadnis, director, S-Group, TAM Media Research
|
