Another fun Super Bowl marred by tedious simultaneous broadcast commercials here in Canada. While Americans are watching inventive, high-budget commercials that are arguably more entertaining than the game, we get stuck with endless iterations of the same truck commercials we have been watching in every regular season broadcast all year. The advertisers are not served well by this phenomenon at all, because they miss out on the one time of the year when Canadians would stay glued to the tube, paying attention to the message. Instead, everyone rushes to YouTube to see what he is missing. So advertisers are unhappy and Canadian viewers are unhappy. Who is served? The broadcaster thinks he is, but I think even that is in doubt.
The CRTC rules on simultaneous broadcasting exist to force advertisers to pay Canadian broadcasters for air time, rather than just paying the American network then picking up Canada for free when the Canadian broadcaster runs the show. The premise is that Canadian broadcast companies would collapse without the American advertising dollars. This is probably true of the existing companies that have been built around the present regulatory regime. But what we see in the Super Bowl is that most American companies don't bother to buy time in Canada anyway. Whatever the CRTC and broadcasters are trying to do isn't working. They aren't even successful in driving the prices up. Commercial slots in the last Canadian broadcast were going for $115,000 - 3 percent the cost of time on the American broadcast, which is about a third what we should expect to get given the difference in populations. Yes, yes, the Super Bowl slots are special because it is an international phenomenon and the spots will be seen all over the world for much longer than the program runs, but the Canadian price still seems too low. Canadian ratings are weaker for football, but I bet a lot of that comes from Canadians seeking ways to watch American broadcasts in order to see the commercials.
Isn't at least possible that Canadian broadcasters could get a better deal by negotiating with the American networks for a slice of the advertising revenue in return for beaming those ads to 30 million relatively well-off viewers? Why wouldn't the American advertisers pay extra for an extra 10 percent coverage?
Of course, any negotiation requires the possibility of failure, but we have competing networks in Canada and if one doesn't pick up the broadcast, another can. You know, market forces. If those are what the CRTC is trying to protect Canadian broadcasters from, all they will achieve (and have achieved) is a weaker industry.
Now that bunny ears are a relic of the past, Canadian broadcasters have pretty much total control over what their viewers see. They already negotiate exclusive broadcasting deals with the American network that carries the Super Bowl. They have an audience, and exposure to that audience has a value. My guess is that Canadian broadcasters are actually seeing less of that value now than they would if they just got a slice of the U.S. revenues instead of trying to sell Super Bowl ads all over again to advertisers that have already maxed out their budgets.
