Yankelovich Takes Adrants Advice: Pay People to Watch Ads

During this week's MediaPost Forecast 2005, Yankelovich Partners President J. Walker Smith and others on a panel at MediaPost's Forecast 2005 conference this week at the Marriott Marquis in New York said it may be time to pay consumers to watch commercials. While it's not a new idea, perhaps they read a previous Adrants article which proposed a radical new economic model for advertising. OK, radical for TV. Not so radical for online media.

Based on the inevitable shift from the measurement of programming to the measurement of the ads within those programs, all effort will be shifted from promoting programming to promoting ads within those programs. When all eyes are on the ad ratings versus program ratings, it will be incumbent upon networks to prove they have the highest "ad viewership" rating. Because of this driver, it will be the networks, not the advertisers, who will pay consumers to view. Oh, the advertisers will continue to pay much in the same way they do today but they'll be paying based on ad viewership ratings and not programming ratings. Conceivably, all the program promotion we now see from the networks will be replaced by promotions for upcoming commercials consumers "must see." Crazy? Sure. Likely? Very definitely. The money is in the consumer eyeball and marketers will be forced to do what is necessary to reach those eyeballs whether it's wild models such as this or more refined permission marketing-based models.