TV commercials adjust to a shorter attention span

o what lengths will television advertisers go to be noticed amid a sea of 30-second commercials? How about 120 seconds, or 90, or perhaps 45 or 40. Maybe 10 seconds, or 15, or 10 - or even a "blink and you may miss it" 5.

Three decades after the 30-second spot became the standard way to sell products on television, marketers are increasingly willing to buy commercials in different lengths - and to run them in different configurations.

For instance, a campaign for Puma athletic wear scheduled to start Monday will feature buff athletes in 15-second spots to be paired, in mix-and-match fashion, in 30-second time slots. And to promote three cars that can go from zero to 60 miles an hour in under 5 seconds, the Cadillac division of General Motors recently ran 5-second commercials.

"People are trying anything they can to get the message across," said Aaron Cohen, executive vice president and director for broadcast at Horizon Media in New York, a media services agency that works for advertisers like Geico and Ikea North America.

When television began as an advertising medium, the standard commercial length was 60 seconds. Thirty-second spots began running not long after cigarette commercials left the airwaves in 1971, Mr. Cohen said.

The television networks, worried about the lost ad revenue from tobacco marketers, started offering 30-second spots at lower prices than their 60-second counterparts "to make it more financially attractive" for other advertisers to buy time, Mr. Cohen said.

The 15-second commercial began to appear in the late 1980's as a way to compensate for the rapidly rising cost of 30-second spots. (The cost of a 15-second spot generally is slightly more than half of a 30-second ad.) According to an analysis released this week by Media IQ, an auditing company in New York, 15-second spots account for more than 36 percent of all commercial time sold by the major broadcast networks.

"It's hard to keep consumers excited about your TV spots when everyone has a kajillion-dollar budget," said Antonio Bertone, global director for brand management at Puma in Boston.

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