NBC Universal Realizes That Ads Are Content Too

from the good-for-them dept

Thu, Aug 9th 2007 6:33am — Mike Masnick

For years, we've been trying to convince people to stop thinking of ads and content as two separate things. Ads are content and content are ads. This doesn't mean that content needs to be infused with product placement, but just that you recognize that any bit of content advertises something. At the same time, it also should make companies rethink how they view ads. After all people will actively seek out good commercials because they enjoy the content. As has been pointed out repeatedly, people don't hate advertising, they hate annoying, intrusive and irrelevant advertising since it wastes their time. But good advertisements are content and people seek out good content.

NBC was actually one of the earlier entertainment companies to at least grasp this concept, and have experimented with a variety of attempts to make commercials more entertaining and interesting, from turning them into mini-movies with plots of their own to even doing product placement within commercials. Now, NBC Universal has announced plans to set up a new site called Didja.com, which is going to make tons of old commercials available online. The NBC execs quoted in the story seem a little too giddy about the prospect of people swarming to the site to see old commercials (and also in the semi-ridiculous idea of social networking around what commercials you like), but it does show yet another glimmer of realization that the barrier between "ads" and "content" went away a long time ago.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: advertising, content
Companies: nbc universal

24 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Stephen, 9 Aug 2007 @ 6:43am

terry tate
there's a reason i have a copy of the terry tate/nike ad that parodies "office space" somewhat on my computer, and it's not because i care about terry tate or nike. it's because it's funny. which brings up the prime problem of ads as entertainment: in their attempt to entertain, do they lose their effectiveness as ads?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 9 Aug 2007 @ 7:26am
  
  Re: terry tate
  the point of ads isn't so much to convince you that they're the best. its just to get their name in your head. if they do it right, when you go out to buy that type of product, you'll think of them. and if they had great commercials, you'll think of them in a positive light. you'll already have a bias (a good one) when deciding between their and someone else's type of product.
  
  For example, going out to eat.
  "Hey, where you wanna get something to eat?"
  "Let's go to blah."
  "Why?"
  "I dunno. First thing to pop in my head."
  "Ok."
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- jay, 9 Aug 2007 @ 11:35am
  
  Re: terry tate
  the terry tate commercials aren't nike. They are reebok. I guess that proves how ineffective entertainment ads can be.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Andrew Pass, 9 Aug 2007 @ 12:31pm
  
  Re: terry tate
  Of course they don't lose their effectiveness as ads. Indeed, they probably gain greater effectiveness. Think gym shoes, what do you think of first? I bet the answer is Nike. That's the purpose of an ad.
  
  Check out my living textbook: http://www.pass-ed.com/Living-Textbook.html
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Ajax 4Hire, 9 Aug 2007 @ 6:58am

Movie makers have learned this years ago..
Wave of the future.

Movie makers will actively petition manufactures for ad placement.
the James Bond Drive, Transformers are all GM, Is it a Coke or Pepsi movie?

Some television producers are beginning to realize the benefit: "24" is a Dell and Ford commercial.
With the advent of TiVO and other technology to skip commercials, Television will need to move to the Movie maker model and do continuous ad/product placement; there will be no pause for a commercial because the commercials will be integral to the content.

content is ad is content.
Wave of the future.
it coming, you can either surf it or be rolled under it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Shawn, 9 Aug 2007 @ 7:05am

People Don't Hate Advertising?
Only an ad man could actually believe that people don't hate commercials. I am a person, and a fairly typical one, and I hate them all, without exception. FYI. Long live TiVo.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 9 Aug 2007 @ 7:21am
  
  Re: People Don't Hate Advertising?
  No, people other than ad men can like commercials. i fast forward through a majority of commercials because a *huge* majority of them are annoying. but sometimes one will catch my eye for whatever reason. if all people hated advertising, commercials wouldn't be such a big deal during the Super Bowl. too bad they just don't try that hard all the time with their commercials. unless the NFL patented or copyrighted good commercials so they can only air during the Super Bowl.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Nasty Old Geezer, 9 Aug 2007 @ 7:59am
  
  Re: People Don't Hate Advertising?
  I don't hate advertising in general, I just want a way to limit what ads appear. I ignore most of them because they have no relevance to me. A few I actively dispise -- for example, there is a local BMW dealer that has the most arrogantly condescending ads I have ever seen. But, some ads I find useful and/or amusing.
  
  Interstingly enough, many "good" ads -- even award-winning ones -- are not effective because viewers don't remember the product being advertised.
  
  Bottom line though, without the ads, there would be no "free" content.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Elohssa, 9 Aug 2007 @ 9:43am
  
  Re: People Don't Hate Advertising?
  Different strokes, hoss. I'm no football fan, but for a few excellent years that you whipper-snappers probably don't recall, I watched the Super Bowl without fail just for the Bud Bowl commercials. They were the best commercials ever, and when they stopped playing them (for reasons I will never understand,) I stopped watching the Super Bowl.
  
  Maybe I'm weird, but I'm probably not the only weird one out there.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Josh (profile), 9 Aug 2007 @ 10:08am
  
  Re: People Don't Hate Advertising?
  Shawn, you seem pretty adamant about hating commercials. I have to ask though, how did you wind up coming to this site? Did you hear about it from a friend, click on a link, or just happened to defy all odds and randomly type in characters in the URL to navigate here.
  
  All but the last were because of some form of advertisement, i.e. they were commercials.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 9 Aug 2007 @ 7:24am

NBC was somewhat creative with their Chuck advertising. I watched an entire 10-15 second clip or something over a few minute span. Mainly because it was made specifically for DVR users. It's basically almost like a subliminal message thing where a bunch of text, images, & video are flashed really quickly on the screen. Only way to watch & read it all is with a DVR. That was an interesting enough hook to get me to watch and to talk about it to other people. It also lead me to find out more about it and that it was actually about a new show they're going to have (surprisingly, you couldn't really figure this out from the commercial, you could guess, but thats it).
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Killer_Tofu (profile), 9 Aug 2007 @ 7:52am

Commercials
Are they going to have all of the Geico commercials on there?
Those are great.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Tin Ear, 9 Aug 2007 @ 8:12am

Commercials aren't all bad.
I remember that years ago I got the biggest laugh from a simple commercial. I haven't seen one like it in years, but while it ran, I always got more than a chuckle from it.

It went like this:

You see a DQ logo on a white screen. Suddenly you hear a Tarzan yell and a banana swings in from stage left on a vine. As the vine reaches center screen, the banana falls off the vine. Fast cut to the top of a waffle cone and a scoop of ice cream lands on top with a squishy noise. Cut to logo and pitchman voice-over announcing some flavor of ice cream cone they were pitching.

All in all a nice, short piece with a message, but delivered in such a manner that always made me smile.

On a side note, has anyone watched the Cleo Awards on TV? That's like the Oscars for the best commercials. I try to catch it every year. Some 15 and 30 second spots are not just entertaining, they are brilliant!

Then there were ads like the early Infinity cars ads that had other ad-men referring to their dealerships as "ashrams" instead of showrooms. Remember those?

I guess my point is that while commercials are a necessary 'evil' on TV, the producers go to a lot of trouble to put something out that will tempt you to buy the product without insulting your intelligence. Some fail, but more do the job quite well. For me, most of them I tune out. Once in a while one of them catches my attention and tickles my funnybone. I will continue to watch.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
ike, 9 Aug 2007 @ 8:16am

My girlfriend didn't have tv for a while. This help her notice that her friends talked more about the commercials they had seen than the tv shows they had seen. Didja sounds like a great idea.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Duane, 9 Aug 2007 @ 8:25am

So Close. FIRE!
If you can name that commercial, you'll know the longevity of a GOOD commercial!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Lars Calls, 9 Aug 2007 @ 8:48am

Ads
Intrusive, abusive, irritating ads also cause me to shut off my listening to any ad because I have learned to think that ads are irritating. To bad for the good ones.
Lars
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 9 Aug 2007 @ 9:13am

Seems like I can't go to a major movie anymore without some sort of product placement. I actually think it's kinda neat, and even funny, how the products get portrayed (the Nintendo Wii in Transformers that gets turned into an evil robot is hilarious). To me, this is not obnoxious, annoying, and irrelevant advertising. It's fun and entertaining (rewatch the movie to see how many product placements you can find! LOL), and I think the actual advertising part works really well too.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
charlie potatoes, 9 Aug 2007 @ 9:19am

jack in the box commercial
Jack is asked if people will find his 'sirloin burger' more attractive than the competitor's 'Angus'... best commercial in a long time, it made me laugh out loud.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Stephen, 9 Aug 2007 @ 9:48am

Elohsaa

No maybe about it. You're weird.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Gary, 9 Aug 2007 @ 12:14pm

Who said that advertising is the porn of capitalism?

Ads are annoying. Period. If you need to advertise your product, then you are trying to create a market for a product that isn't needed or you're trying to increase demand. Otherwise a balance exists between supply and demand. For example, do you ever ads on TV for car towing? USB thumb drives? Pencils?

Maybe I'm wrong and there are commercials for these things, but are they "content"? No. It's noise.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 9 Aug 2007 @ 3:00pm
  
  Re:
  Off the top of your head, name a towing company.
  
  Some companies don't need to advertise because either
  A) They're locally based and therefore just get their consumer base their (not many towing companies in one area, therefore if you want to find one, you normally just look for the closest one... not one who advertised)
  B) They're heavily branded and therefore only have commercials about their name. Sometimes Nike commercials have *just* commercials about their name and "Just Do It".
  c) In the computer world, very little is actually advertised on TV. Why? Because their advertising is on the computer. USB thumb drives? Go to a site that manufactures them, I'm sure they have a very ad-like sounding page dedicated to them.
  
  You have to put the content where your target audience will find them. Pencils are too common. You won't call a place and say, "do you have these kind of pencils?" no, you just go to your local store and look to see at the selection and choose.
  
  There is a purpose to commercials. They are required. That's like saying salesmen are completely irrelevant. Do you really think if I opened a restaurant, did *no* advertising, that people will just magically come? Advertising also informs people that your product exists. It's like campaigning. Would you vote for somebody who didn't campaign at all?
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
yogi, 9 Aug 2007 @ 3:31pm

Hasn't anyone read the
Space Merchants?
It's a great sci-fi book by Fredrik Pohl ans C. Kornbluth describing exactly this kind of society: ad placement as part of life, or should i say - life as a part of an ongoing omnipresent marketing campaign. pretty terrifying stuff.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Gary, 10 Aug 2007 @ 9:21am

I've read "The Space Merchants." Written in the 1950s, it's a prescient book.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Jayson C., 15 Aug 2007 @ 4:42pm

Commercial Content
I agree with most of the comments posted here and I have wonder why Ads as content aren't more wide spread given the advent of DVR's. If advertisors are so concerned with things like Tivo and people just skipping the commercials they just have to be willing to spend a little more time and money to sell as well as entertain. Personally I'm a fan of the Gieco commercials and if there were more like that I wouldn't care about commercials.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]