Living In A Post-TiVo World
from the embrace-the-technology dept
The latest bit from the McKinsey Quarterly is saying what we've been saying for years. Instead of whining and complaining about how their business model is being stripped out from under them, folks in Hollywood should learn to embrace the new technology and realize all the new opportunities it provides. The reason that people like to use TiVo's to skip commercial is because they don't like the commercials they see. Trying to cram more of what people don't want down their throats hardly seems like a productive business model. What things like TiVo do is provide new interactive opportunities for marketers to actually interact with consumers - and (gasp!) even think about offering them something more appealing. What's funny is how hard it is to get this concept into the heads of broadcasters and advertisers. Here is a technology that will let them do a better job and make their customers even happier. Yet, because it changes the old way of doing things, and might force them to actually think about what they're doing, they react negatively.
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Marketers?
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I watch *certain* commercials
It also has a 30 second forward-skip button that let me skip the commercials I don't want to see. I usually see about 0.5 - 1.0 second of each commercial as I skip forward, so I can tell if it's a commercial I need to see or skip.
There are a lot of commercials I do watch, but I refuse to sit through commercials I have no interest in - feminine hygiene ads, fast food commercials (I'm on a diet right now), any pharmaceutical commercial that encourages me to call my doctor and find out if is right for me, especially if they don't tell you what the medicine is for in the first place. In addition, on channels like SciFi that show their own little branding snippets about 500 times per hour, I skip those as well.
Recently I have made it a point to skip back and watch a Visa debit card commercial starring Charlie and Martin Sheen (very funny), almost all the funny Budweiser commercials, and commercials for products in which I'm interested. Boring commercials or commercials for products I don't want/need get skipped. Commercials I've already seen 10+ times that week, whether they're for a product I want or need get skipped. I've already got the message to use that product, I don't need it pounded into my head.
Does me not watching a commercial for a new scented tampon really hurt the advertiser? Is it going to financially harm the network? I think the answer to both is "no".
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