Bunny Blog

What are the 2 good reasons for using DVR’s? Skipping commercials, and for watching shows when you want to watch them, right?

Well, according to this article on NewTeeVee, research from Palisades Media Group says that less than half of people with DVR’s reported fast-forwarding through the commercials, and more than half of the shows they’ve recorded were watched on the same day on which  they were recorded.  I don’t get it. If you’re watching it on the same day, and not skipping the commercials, what’s going on, exactly?

Personally, I only ever watch TV at my sister’s house, on her DVR. I’ll be honest, though– she often has to yell at me to skip the commercials, because now that I hardly ever watch TV, I find the commercials fascinating. How are people selling things? What’s working, and makes me want to buy? I remember watching so many commercials in high school that I had every one memorized. Now I see so few that I find each ad interesting– possibly only because I run a company that does such things, and seeing the competition is always interesting.

Most of the ads I see nowadays are when somebody forwards me a link to YouTube. I watched the Skittles ads with vigor, and media-terrorized a lot of people with it (actually dragged people over to a computer and played it for them). And of course everyone loves the Bravia ads, with their clay bunnies, exploding paint, and bouncy balls. (That’s still the only time I’ve ever seen or been excited to see a trailer for a television commercial.)

So maybe I still like watching commercials. After all, they’re in a much better shape, I feel, than 10 years ago, when almost all of them were boring versions of the “Use this product” model. I think I even remember watching a television show about the funniest commercials, and they were almost all European, because all American ads were so dull. Most of the commercials nowadays seem to be versions of the “clever, entertaining film for 25 seconds, logo for 5 seconds.” And that’s why I tend to enjoy quite a few of them. When I hit one that says “You should use this product on your hair or face because you tend to look pretty hideous otherwise,” that’s when I start searching for the TiVo remote.

I think pretty soon, or perhaps in a lot of ways we’re there already, commericials will be indecipherable from programming. We’re already there with product placement. We’re already there with music videos. Imagine watching the Simpsons for free, without ads, because the show is primarily a commercial to sell tshirts and dolls. Oops, wait, things like that are already happening on the internet.

I’m reminded about how Pixar got started– it was a computer hardware company that made imaging computers. John Lasseter started  creating short animations  to demonstrate the level of quality the computers could achieve, and these animations got increasingly famous. Much more famous than the imaging computers, which were selling quite poorly. Pixar started producing computer-animated commercials for third parties as a way to make money, and eventually Pixar signed a $26 million deal to make 3 features for Disney (one of which was Toy Story), and the rest is history. The company’s commercials turned out to be their greatest product.

But yeah, people generally are only fast-forwarding through commercials on their DVR’s half of the time. Which means some people are watching ads on TV, and some people aren’t. Some people are watching viral ads on the internet, some people are seeing products placed in films, some are being called up by personalized messages by Optimus Prime to promote the Transformers movie, and others simply get the Viagra spam emails that all of us do.  Oh, but check it out, pop art fans, spam email has just come into its own:

It almost makes me nostalgic for spam email. Perhaps spam email is the CocaCola Santa of the new millenium.

So what’s the future of advertising?

Everything.

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