Do we want more TV ad time?

Interesting story in the Media Guardian today, about Ofcom and whether it should raise the amount of TV advertisement time.

Currently broadcasters can carry an average seven minutes of advertising an hour, which can rise to eight minutes between 6pm and 11pm – that amount is capped at 12 minutes per hour. If Ofcom brings us in line with Europe, the average can be increased to 12 minutes at all times, an increase of around 50 per cent.

The problem, is that there is no demand for more TV advertising, with people either irritated at the current level of interruptions to their viewing, or the more tech-savvy increasingly using hard drives to record programmes and skip past the adverts altogether. Throwing more time at TV adverts is at best short-sighted. There will come a time when TV ads as we know them now will not exist, so the industry needs to look to new ways to drive revenue instead of burying its head in the sand..