During the season / series finale of Lost, in my recap / review of Lost I noted how it felt like we were getting TV ads every 10 minutes. Though the ads felt over the top in frequency, I thought I was joking! I thought that because I wanted the show so badly that any interruption was too much interruption! Maybe not.
Advertisers knew that many folk would be tuning into Lost for the final time (that you know of) and advertisers jumped on the bandwagon with droves of money. The finale of Lost was like a mini-Super Bowl!
Considering that the usual 30-second ad spot on Lost cost just over $200k, it came as no surprise that the much coveted 30-second spots during the finale of Lost were being sold by ABC for $900k. That’s $900k for every 30 seconds of advertising.
Hang on to that thought for a second.
If you do the math, you’ll find that despite being on the air for 2 1/2 hours or 150 minutes, programming itself only accounted for 1 hour and 45 minutes. That is 105 minutes of Lost while we were subjected to 45 minutes of TV ads.
That comes down to 1 minute of TV ad for every 2.3 minutes of TV series. Maybe my eyeball estimate of an ad session every 10 minutes no longer looks that far-fetched.
Knowing How Many Ad Minutes Played
Now that we know that we had 45 minutes of TV ads where we could sprint for the bathroom, the kitchen or headed to Amazon to scoop up Lost seasons [Amazon's Lost Store
Now I’ve noticed that ABC is one of the more aggressive advertising networks on ON DEMAND and that’s fine. It is ABC, aka Disney, but for those few hours of Lost, the network added $81 million to their checkbooks.
Sure, it sounds awful. But a network does have to generate income to be able to produce shows like this. Without advertising, your favorite TV shows disappear. I just wish there were better ways for a network to generate income because ads are starting to become the thorn in everyone’s side.
Ah, but more on that in a later article I’m building. For now, we know that Lost rocked it out and the Target ads, being targeted to Lost, were pretty damn funny.
