Media Planner Says Embrace Ad Skipping
Using far more words than necessary but still making a good point, Chicago-based media planner Cece Forrester suggest the ad industry embrace PVR ad skipping rather than fighting against it. Citing the shift towards absolute control of content from media companies to consumers and that as skipping has been around forever (i.e. trips to the fridge or bathroom), Forrester writes TiVo should enable viewers to skip, not fast forward through, to the end of any commercial and the beginning of the next.
TiVo's competitor, Replay, had a feature, that has since been disabled, which would skip thirty seconds at a time. Forrester's suggestion builds on this claiming ads, like content, should earn the attention of viewers rather than being served using the current force feed method. Attempting to prevent people from bypassing things they don't like is a losing battle. TiVo would be wise to act early and come to terms with this.
Comments
Yes, Marketers need to embrace the future. Both TV makers and Ad Agencies need to find new ways to work together.
The problem is, I fear, Tivo is a short term technology. Tivo will be replaced by systems like BitTorrent coupled with RSS. At that point, there will be no ad skipping. Just no ads. What do advertisers do then?
See more on BitTorrent & Rss here:
http://www.psfk.com/2005/05/bit_torrent_rss.html
Piers
Actually, Tivo too has a 30 second skip feature. You just have to press:
3 0(or something like that) to enable it. Look it up on the internet.
Yup, John. Aware of that but, easy as the fix is, the average person is unlikely to go to the effort.
The TiVo skip is done by entering into the remote
select-play-select-3-0-select
repeating the entry toggles the feature on and off and a power loss toggles it off.
It's not the "effort" (wow, 6 keystrokes!!!) that prevents users from doing it, it's the lack of awareness. Media planners would like to keep us all in the dark.
even if a system coupling torrents with rss (a ridiculous idea) is put into place there will still be commercials placed within all forms of dloadable media -- unless of course you dload illegal, edited, and unlicensed content which is what you(PSFK) seem to be doing now.