Ad Skipping: A question of relevance?
Hi everybody, Double-oh Steven here again. It’s time for a new feature on Kiosk.net, something I like to call This Week in DVR. So let’s flip on our patented Media Box and see what comes up, shall we…?
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Advertising!
The August 8 issue of BusinessWeek reported on a new form of ad media called Visible World (don’t click on the link if you hate flash sites), which has revved up relevancy in order to grab more viewers and beef up ROI (return on investment for all you normal people). According to BusinessWeek, the company and their clients, including heavy hitters like Fox, Reuters Group and Comcast, see the new form of advertising as an answer to ad-skipping technology such as DVR i.e. TiVo.
The concept is this: The market has become more fragmented and fed up with advertisements. The solution presented by DVR is to just skip it. Enter Visible World, the company that claims that if commercials were more relevant, personalized and informative (and less annoying and repetitive) people will see them as a form of entertainment and actually watch them. In order to accomplish this, technicians in white lab coats worked furiously for many months on a huge machine with many blinking lights and ticker tape spitters. This machine, so they say, has the power to instantly customize commercials to certain demographics, down to shockingly tight groups, with the push of a button. The same commercial could be altered with different background music to suit individual tastes. Instead of “check your local listings” you would see the exact time day and channel for a new show. Commercials would direct viewers to special promotions happening within blocks of their houses. Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria!!!!!
And, more importantly, people might not skip the commercials…
Yeah, right.
Jon Fine at BusinessWeek postulates (and Kiosk.net agrees) that people skip ads not because they are not relevant to them, but because they are annoying to them. Ad skipping has already become learned behavior. As he says, “Had Visible World hit Broadcast TV before ad-skipping technologies did, it might have influenced consumer behavior…But DVRs came first, and the remote long before…These horses are distant dots on the horizon. It’s a little late to be shutting the barn door now.”
That’s all for now. Tune in next week for another installment of This Week in DVR. If you’re like me though, and can’t get enough speculation, try looking here for some more opinions on the future of advertising.