LEADER: The long and short of clutter in China

Anyone who has watched local television in China will appreciate the dilemma that marketers who advertise on mainland TV face. In a nation where television penetration is almost complete, TV arguably offers the best way to reach the mass market. But clutter, a fact of life in most markets today, takes on a whole new dimension on the mainland. Imagine commercial breaks that can sometimes last as long as 20 minutes. That's not all. A media agency doing a check of what the situation is like between 7.30pm and 8.30pm one recent weekday found that viewers were inundated with a staggering 368 spots in that hour alone. To a large extent, the situation is the result of structural deficiences. China doesn't permit advertising breaks during programmes, hence the mad dash to air spots before and after shows. Which may explain why Chinese consumers are showing signs of advertising fatigue this early on. Don't expect the situation to improve anytime soon. It was consumer complaints - particularly during 1998's nationwide broadcast of the highly popular Princess Huan Zhu drama, when commercial breaks were longer than the show itself in some cities - that prompted the ban in the first place. Sadly, the ban was introduced without a real understanding of how advertising works in a capitalist economy. In such a scenario, there is the likelihood that the situation could actually worsen if consumers kick up another fuss over unduly long commercial breaks between programmes. Crucially for marketers, the question is what should they be doing in the current cluttered environment. Should they be using the short, fleeting spots favoured by local companies or stick with the foreign corporation's preference for longer spots of 30 seconds or more? Shorter spots are of course cheaper, but what chance has a brand of making an impact amid the 20-minute onslaught of ads? It's a dilemma that advertisers and agencies will need to quickly resolve.

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