Jim Meskauskas writes a thoughtful piece on MediaPost countering the irrational fear among the ad community of TiVo-like technology’s ability to skip ads. The point he drives home is that most people are scared of technology and too lazy to take the effort to put PVR technology to use. He likens it to the scare advertisers experienced when the VCR was introduced. Well, the VCR is still flashing 12:00 and is not being used to record TV shows and skip the ads as was originally foreseen. He claims there is too much importance being placed on the early adopters of PVR technology.
“Do studies show that current PVR households skip vast quantities of ads? Sure. Are current PVR households actual vectors of ‘time shifting’ within the television-watching time-space continuum? Certainly. Are PVR households representative of the rest of the human race and indicative of a trend? Highly unlikely. Saying that current PVR households are ad skipping time-shifters and they set the pace for the rest of the world is like saying that astronomers who have telescopes in their house do more star-gazing and so therefore star-gazing is going to be the next big thing.”
Middle America is where its at when it comes to determining what’s really going on and most of middle America has not even heard of TiVo. Advertisers can breath a sigh of relief for the time being and go back to placing their :30’s.
