A question about early Saturday evening adbreaks on ITV.

I have a question about early Saturday evening adbreaks on ITV. (This might be a stupid question but we'll see how this goes)

I was watch Catchphrase with my uncle tonight and we were both wondering why they was so short, they weren't even adbreaks either, they were trails for other programmes on ITV.

Why does this happen? Did ITV not have any adverts to show other than their own trails?

Many thanks.

The advertising rules are as follows:

You can show a maximum of 12 minutes of ads in an hour
Over 24 hours you can show an average of 7 minutes of ads (on the main 5 channel, 9 minutes on other channels)
Between 6-11pm you can only show an average of 8 minutes of ads, so 40 minutes altogether.

Therefore as ITV can show 36 minutes of ads between 7-10pm they usually only show minimal ads in the 6pm and 10pm hour, but rather than cutting the ad breaks they usually fill them with promos, mainly because they can show the sponsorship bumpers.

ITV can (and do) shift them into later programmes. Higher viewed programmes = more revenue.

It is an average of 12 minutes per hour across the day, not 12 minutes per hour, use it or lose it, So naturally most of this will go after 7pm.

They are allowed to show no more than 12 mins of adverts per hour, and this must be an average of no more than 7 mins per hour between 23:00 and 18:00, and no more than 8 mins per hour between 18:00 and 23:00.

They therefore schedule more adverts in the slots with the highest viewers because they can charge a higher rate for them, and so in other hours with fewer expected viewers the number of adverts is also fewer, or as you've experienced, none.

And they show minimal adverts between 6 and 7 every night, it’s just it’s only noticeable at weekends when it’s within normal programmes rather than the news.

There is the added point tonight that Catchphrase was a repeat and was a change to the advertised schedule.

Yeah, they wouldn't have been showing adverts in the middle of a rugby match.

Impressive that we have so many COSTA experts here, albeit with varying typing speeds

All I'd add is that it's based on a clock hour - Ofcom don't look lightly upon breaks which (accidentally) drift beyond the top of the hour; it makes life interesting for directors on sport channels.

Actually in the middle of a rugby match is when they have to get them in.

Apparently in the early days of football being televised if the ball went out of play it was a signal for the broadcaster to go to ads, and play would resume when they came back.

Of course this doesn't happen now, but you can sometimes see a similar thing when US sports are simulcast over here.

I meant while they're actually playing. ITV have got in trouble in the past for taking a commercial break in a Formula 1 race and missing some major action on the track. And didn't they once accidentally go to ads during a football match and miss a goal? Each part of a rugby match is 40 minutes. In a normal programme, there'd be two ad breaks in that time frame. Not when a rugby (or football) match is in progress.

During live events such as sport the rules can be flexed a little bit provided they don't interrupt the action, which is why for example during the French Open tennis the breaks will be shorter but more frequent.

40 game minutes for rugby (plus "added", which I believe only runs until the ball next goes out of play), but they quite often stop the clock for injuries, third official input, various other reasons so a broadcast of a rugby half can quite easily stretch to 50 minutes or sometimes even an hour on occasion.

As to the ads during football, that was ITV HD only. SD wasn't affected. Effect was exacerbated to an extent by the fact it was an England goal that was missed.

Re: F1, that was because they left it too late and had to cram a final ad break in towards the closing end of the face, so it was an issue of their own making.