Channels undeterred by I&B Ministry’s 12min/hr ad limit

The Conditional Access System (CAS) has brought with it yet another ‘condition’ for all television channels. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has issued a notification to all television channels to limit the advertising time to 12 minutes per hour after the CAS comes in to effect from December 31, this year.

Out of this, 10 minutes are for commercial ads while the remaining two minutes are for the channels’ own promos.

It is said that the rationale behind such regulation is that when consumers have to pay a premium for television content in the post CAS era, they shouldn’t be bombarded with excessive ads.

agencyfaqs! tried to find out the effect of this regulation on the business of these television channels, and surprisingly most of them seemed to be undeterred by this regulation.

According to the broadcasters, they all have been avid followers of the same, barring a few instances.

As Kunal Dasgupta, CEO, SET India, says, “We have always followed this 12 minute per hour benchmark. So in a way, our business is least affected by this regulation.”

However he also agreed that for channels such MAX, the limit may have increased to 13 minutes per hour, but that too on rare occasions.

Even STAR India maintains that this isn’t a new theme for them, as it has been consistently and voluntarily adhering to it. In fact, the channel claims that it has only ten minutes of advertisements per hour on any of its network channels. “We have always tried to be sensible with our viewers,” says Paritosh Joshi, president, ad sales and distribution, STAR India. “We ensure that ads run for five minutes every 30 minutes or for 100 seconds, thrice in half an hour.”

It is also learnt that many channels increase the duration of ad slots during popular programmes, which deliver better ad rates, and decrease the same during less popular programmes. This way, the channel also maintains an average of 10-12 minutes of ads per hour.

Joshi of STAR is of the opinion it’s very difficult to keep a tab on broadcasters to ensure that they abide by these regulations. “Instead there could be self regulatory bodies such as ASCI (Advertising Standards Council of India), which could be empowered to act in such circumstances,” he says.

agencyfaqs! had also tried to contact executives at ZEE Network, but they weren’t available for comments.

While media owners try to portray themselves as clean, media buyers have a different story to say.

As Debraj Tripathi, general manager, Maxus, says, “Leading general entertainment channels (GEC) such as ZEE TV, Sony Entertainment Television or STAR Plus generally try to abide by this rule, but at times, especially during festivals, they tend to exceed the limit.”

But then, these popular general entertainment channels can still abide by this system, but there are also channels which maximises its revenues by increasing the frequency of ads.

The list includes special interest channels, news channels, second line entertainment channels, regional channels and Hindi movies channels which cannot demand such higher ad rates as the popular GECs. And according to Punitha Arumugam, group CEO, Madison, these are the channels which will be worst affected by this regulation.

But then they are also hopeful that channels will surely devise a game plan to get out of it.

© 2006 agencyfaqs!