(11 of 11)
What can be done? Chances are that if everyone keeps his fingers crossed and buys the right products, the light-hearted uncommercials will spread and increasingly crowd the ugh-plugs off the air. But that is not enough. Another prospect is that the networks, goaded by viewer resentment, will move closer to the European scheme by having fewer but slightly longer commercial breaks. At present, with 9,000 new items appearing on the supermarket shelves each year, sponsors have started "clustering" cramming more but shorter messages into the same time space. In the past two years alone, the number of products shown on TV has increased by about one-third, most of them in ten, 20-and 30-second shots. There will also be more "piggybacking": promoting two unrelated products in one ad. "Triggerbacking" and "quarterbacking" are just a station break away.
Glorious Hours. Humorist Stan Freberg, a freelance commercial producer who created the Sunsweet prune and Jeno's pizza ads for TV, is pushing another possible cure. It is frankly Utopian. He calls it "The Freberg Part-Time Television Plan: A Startling but Perfectly Reasonable Proposal for the De-escalation of Television in a Free Society, Mass Media-wise." The plan calls for a week like this:
Monday. Television as usual.
Tuesday. The set goes black, but one word shines in the center of the screen: Read!
Wednesday. Television as usual.
Thursday. The set goes black again, but this time we see the word Talk!
Friday. Television as usual.
Saturday. The words Unsupervised Activity.
And Sunday? Says Freberg: "We have to have somewhere to lump all those leftover commercials, don't we? Think of it! Twenty-four glorious, uninterrupted hours of advertising!"
It might just work and it could be worse.
* In a report to Congress last week, the Fed eral Trade Commission recommended by a 3-to-2 vote that cigarette ads be altogether banned from radio and TV. The Commission specifically objected to ads that equate smoking with good times, and noted that in January alone, viewers between twelve and 17 were exposed to a total of 60 cigarette commercials, mainly on such favorite teen-age shows as the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and The Wednesday Night Movie.