Here's another result: Arbitron research shows a 10 percent decline in audience from 1993 to 1999. ''People are noticing, and [they're] tuning out,'' says Julie Pahutski, senior vice president of EmpowerMediaMarketing. ''I don't listen to talk radio — and I'm in advertising! — because the commercials drive me nuts. If I want to listen to talk, I put on NPR.''
Amid all the clutter, though, advertisers are beginning to feel the audience's pain. ''If people are turning the dial or going into another room or whatever,'' says Pahutski, ''there's no point in having your ad running.'' Adds Geraci: ''Essentially, what clutter does is devalue [an advertiser's] product.''
If radio is frustrating, TV is downright confounding. How's this for failing upward: The broadcast networks have lost 37 percent of their audience over the past decade. In 1990-91, the No. 1 show, Cheers, averaged 20.1 million viewers; this past season's champ, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, averaged 18.7 million. And yet the 1999-2000 TV season earned the major nets a record $16.8 billion in ad revenue. And 2000-01 is expected to be another banner season: Two weeks ago the nets walked away from their upfront confabs in New York with approximately $8 billion, and that's well before the season has begun.
One would hope that such wealth would translate into better programming. Don't count on it. Silverman, who now exec-produces Diagnosis Murder, recalls a telling conversation: ''One network president said to me, 'You know, we could introduce the worst schedule ever, and we'd sell it out in five seconds.'''
As if The Steven Weber Show won't give viewers enough to moan about next season, consider this: According to a study by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), '99 saw nonprogramming time on the nets increase to a record high average of 16:43 minutes per hour in prime time, up 59 seconds from 1998. Among the big four, ABC was the most cluttered; indeed, the running time of sitcoms was clipped from 22 to 21 minutes or less.
Peter Mehlman, an exec producer at Seinfeld, created last season's It's like, you know... for the Alphabet. ''I was used to NBC, and when I got to ABC I was shocked,'' says Mehlman, who notes that you could never do Seinfeld's trademark intercutting storylines in 21 minutes. ''I felt at ABC like the break at the show's middle was interminable. I wrote the shows and I couldn't recall what the plot was by the time we got back.''
Of all six nets studied, though, the struggling WB and UPN were, perhaps not surprisingly, the worst offenders. And in the 1998-99 season, UPN reportedly lopped two minutes off its highest-rated series, Star Trek: Voyager. (UPN declined to comment for this article.)
Today executive producer Jeff Zucker admits that the impending expansion of NBC's morning champ to three hours is partly a response to an increase in commercials that have contributed to the show's losing roughly 10 percent of its program time. ''We do about two segments less today than we did six years ago.''
