Though I keep up on all design- and advertising-related topics, I don't normally cover broadcast advertising news in this space. I'm making an exception here because this little radio advertising story feeds into placement and advertising across all media.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a story recently about six Pittsburgh-area Clear Channel-owned radio stations reducing the length of their commercial breaks to keep listeners from changing channels; the story was picked up by Marketing Power, the newsletter of the American Marketing Association. Here is an except from that article:

In her travels in motor vehicles with young people jamming to the radio, Pat Wockley?an executive who buys advertising time for a living?has witnessed disturbing behavior. "The minute they hear the commercial come on, they just switch stations," she said.

The maneuver?quickly punching programmable buttons?may be done in the privacy of people's cars but has been gone unnoticed across the radio industry.

Yesterday, the nation's largest owner of radio stations basically conceded it has overdone the commercials. San Antonio-based Clear Channel Radio, which owns six Pittsburgh-area radio stations and 1,200 nationwide, said it will cut the amount of ad time per hour and the length of commercials packed into one ad break starting in January.

"It's refreshing," said Petra Arbutina, senior vice president and director of media services for Downtown ad agency Blattner Brunner.

"Listeners are getting fed up, I guess, with such a long period of commercial time," said Arbutina, who hopes the move will hold people for a longer period of time.

A general explosion of commercials everywhere, and not just on the radio, has been popular topic at ad industry get-togethers. With online advertising hitting record levels, the formerly tame world of three major TV networks growing into dozens of cable channels and guerilla marketers turning everything from trucks to retail floors into promotional sites, many worry consumers are tuning it all out.

Okay. I really can't help myself. It's just screaming to get out...

Duh!

Either Pat Wockley and Petra Arbutina are playing nice to the reporter in the above article, or they genuinely were naive about radio advertising. If the latter, if Wockley and Arbutina actually thought consumers listened to radio commercials, then shame on them for not doing their research. If they really were naive to such a critical habit of radio listeners, then neither has any business buying media, and neither has any business handling clients' money.

A few years ago I led a project for a Clear Channel competitor who owned four Central Florida radio stations (and has since expanded into other markets). While sitting in the Program Director's office, one of the four stations' broadcast booth just outside the door, I heard (and saw) the DJs break for commercial at twelve minutes past the hour. The string of pre-recorded spots ran three and one half minutes, returned to the morning show, then back to another commercial break at twenty-eight minutes past the hour whereupon it ran for four minutes. In between those two advertising cycles the DJs, a nationally syndicated duo, did their shtick and read aloud two live spots?these were short blocks of commercial copy inserted into the cart to be read live on the air at certain times. So, inside of fifteen minutes, there were two full commercial breaks and two live spots.

At the end of a later commercial break during the same meeting, the Program Director glanced at his watch and jumped out of his seat yawping like a victorious gladiator. Quickly he punched the presets on his office stereo; every other station was still in commercial. "I win," he shouted. "You hear that? WXXX is the first one out of commercial. I win!"

The Program Director was, of course, referring to the average listener's habit of channel surfing away from commercials in search of content, be it music or dialog. Because his station was the first one to start playing music again, he knew his frequency would capture listeners scanning through the dial, either for the first time or after leaving his station at the inception of the commerical break. "It's all about timing," he said. "Get into commercial the same time as everyone else, then get out first. They may leave, but they'll come back if you're the first one out [of commercial]."

That conversation took place in 1998. While the program director's enthusiasm may make it sound like his revelation was inspired, he was the type of salesman who made a lunch order sound like an epiphany. I doubt he knew anything that his counterparts didn't.

Consumers are being assaulted with advertising at every turn. One can't drive down the road without seeing a half dozen trucks or vans plastered with bright, distracting murals. Online pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-tarts, and flash-commercials of ever increasing length obscure web pages and sought after content. At first a relief from online advertising, it was only a matter of time before RSS was used to slam even more ads into our faces.  Building-sized billboards in New York and other major cities tower over consumers as if to say:  "We are Goliath. You, small and insignificant, cannot stop us. You will buy." At the movie theater we have the privelage of paying eight bucks to be hit with more commercials. Our cell phones are being targeted for ads by enterprising companies; its only a matter of time before Tommy Hilfiger ads are ubiquitous broadcast on the cellular networks. Radio and television ads are more frequent, longer, and less distinguishable from editorial content than they've ever been. Product placement in films and television are increasingly pervasive. So too are print ads?with advertisers pushing for more. Advertisers want more ads, more advertorials?editorial content that pushes one product or brand over others, or, worse, marketing-written ads disguised as standard content.

Advertisers myopically perceive the answer to higher ROI as bigger, more frequent, more in your face. If Pepsi has a two-story neon billboard, Coke has to have two of them, each three-stories tall. It doesn't seem to occur to any advertiser that bigger is not better, that consumers will turn a blind eye to the gigantic Coke ad as readily as they've tuned out the big Pepsi billboard.

Modern advertising methods are failing.

All the numbers support it. Across all media ad buying and ad response are down. One media blames it on another:  Radio spots aren't as successful because consumers are listening to MP3s?before MP3s the pronounced culprit was CDs and before that cassette tapes. Magazine advertising isn't pulling numbers because the Internet is luring readers away from print. And, on and on. To combat other-media market-erosion, advertising agencies are shinnying to find new media and new ways to exploit existing media. With each effort they push their clients to launch a market blitz, trying to saturate consumers with a particular brand so the consumer has no choice but to buy. Ultimately, they're chasing their own tails.

The phenominal ad saturation we're witnessing in the early 21st Century is back-firing. It isn't getting consumers to buy; it isn't building brand loyalty. One person shouting in a room gets attention, but when everyone is shouting, no one of them can be understood. Ten thousand advertising voices screaming raspily at the top of their raw, bleeding throats is nought but building a cacaphony of half-heard, unintelligable white noise.

Consumers are numb to the shouting, to the giant, to the flashy, to the popping?up, under, or around?and they don't care about advertisers' products or the carefully crafted, homogenized marketing stories built around them.

Consumers are changing the channel.

Click.