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About a year ago, I posted about a broadcasting industry news story that said Clear Channel was going to roll out a sort of "micro-commercial" on its radio stations.
Flash forward to yesterday: the Boston Globe reports that the four Clear Channel radio stations in Boston -- WKZS AM and FM, WJMN, and WKOX (no, really) have been using the two-second and five-second ads for some time.
Of course, they don't call them "blipverts". The two-second spots are called "blinks" and the five-second spots are called "adlets". This media blog says that they know why the 2-second spots are called "blinks": because the advertiser's money is gone in a blink, with nothing to show for it.
As this October 2006 WSJ article (reprinted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) notes, radio ad revenue has been flat for several years even as stations have added more and more time for commercials into their programming. So the underlying idea behind these extra-short ads is to let the stations cut back on time given over to ad spots, but still cram in as many spots as possible, and hope that they don't lose any more money in the process. Of course, in the interim since announcing the "blinks" and "adlets", Clear Channel has decided to get out of the radio business entirely in the wake of being bought out by Bain Capital, so who knows what will happen to these formats.
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