NBC is mixing up its advertising strategy for Saturday Night Live next season, and with that comes some good news and some bad news. According to Advertising Age, the network will implement a new approach to ads on SNL during season 42 by removing two commercial breaks per episode, which will result in 30% less commercials. Of course, there’s a catch to all this in the form of branded content:

And for advertisers, NBC will also be offering a limited opportunity to partner with “SNL” to create original branded content. These native pods will only occur six times a year, Ms. Yaccarino said.

Here’s how Entertainment Weekly puts it:

To make it up to advertisers, NBC producers announced opportunities for creating “original brand content” with SNL. “We are excited to try something new and unique that will shape and drive advertiser content too,” NBCUniversal chairman of advertising sales Linda Yaccarino said in a statement. “By partnering together, advertisers can capture an audience that only SNL can deliver.”

SNL has experimented with ads like this in the past – see the Amex commercial from last year, those Cecily Strong/Michael Che Jeep ads, and the Hans and Franz State Farm ads from 2014 – and it looks like NBC has plans to experiment with this further to capture more live viewers: “As the decades have gone by, commercial time has grown,” Lorne Michaels said on the news. “This will give time back to the show and make it easier to watch the show live.”

‘SNL’ Will Have Fewer Commercials But More Branded […]

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