Ads About to Get Much Shorter During NFL Games on Fox

Having already killed everything from golf to Applebee's, it looks like millennials have their sights set on the 30-second ad spot. AdvertisingAge reports Visa ran two six-second ads during an NFL game on Fox last Sunday. And T-Mobile will follow suit during this Sunday's Dallas Cowboys game on Fox, according to USA Today. The six-second spots, which Fox first experimented with during the Teen Choice Awards last month, "appear similar to online pre-roll ads." And one Fox executive says they're about to be commonplace on the network: "This is a new opportunity for advertisers, since it changes how ads can run in games. We are going to expand this to Major League Baseball broadcasts and every single NFL game starting next week."

Six-second ads were first pushed by YouTube before being adopted elsewhere on the web. A Visa executive says research has shown viewers remember the messaging better in short bursts, and that Fox executive says the six-second ads could appeal to millennials and their shorter attention spans. "We know that short-form videos perform better in digital and that consumer attention spans are increasingly shorter," a T-Mobile executive adds. Thanks to cord-cutters and DVR's ability to fast-forward through commercials, Fox had little choice but to try something new, Fortune reports. Fox has said it may insert the six-second ads into down moments of the games themselves, which could make them both harder to skip and allow the actual commercial breaks to be shorter—a bonus for viewers. (More advertising stories.)