Slashdot Mirror
TiVo Data Collection Ramifications
www.sharkdefense.com writes "Businessweek has an interesting article on a new TiVo technology which allows ad executives to see which ads are skipped on the DVRs. Thank goodness they still don't know if you went to the bathroom for a break or to the fridge. The article is an eye-opening read."
Blah blah blah. So what if they know if you clicked on their ad or not? Web page banner companies have known this for years. It really doesn't matter.
But it's not the holy grail for advertising agencies and media companies, which have built an industry around the idea of getting a shallow message to a broad audience rather than a tailored message to a narrower one,"
So, let's see... Companies/organizations who sit between the producer and consumer, have made up their own rules and flimsy business model and don't like it when times change and require the business model to change. Where have I heard this before? *cough*RIAA*cough*
I know this isn't the same thing, I just saw the similarity. Oh, and I didn't see in the article, were the better ads replayed? They were during the Super Bowl.
Reality TV, news, and "event" programming such as the Oscars do significantly better at getting viewers to see the commercials.
PLEASE tell me this doesn't mean more Reality TV shows!!! I can't handle it!!! They're replacing the somewhat-good shows that have survived so far.
this technology is far from popular where I live. But it's really odd in one way, do all advertisers actually belive that people will sit and look at their ads when they can get some more coke?
/040
It gotta be more a 'pay per hit' in the same style as web ads often are today, they pay a whole bag of money and get the ads included. And I mean, even if they get the stats all they can do is _maybe_ sue some company, you still won't see the ads.
mention is when your commericial is cool enought that I watch it but I still can't remember what the heck your advertising.
which ads are skipped on the DVRs
All of them?
Thank goodness they still don't know if you went to the bathroom for a break or to the fridge.
I think the point that we all are missing is that we should be watching TV for the ads and taking our breaks during the filler (a.k.a. the actual show). At least, that's the way to be a good consumer.
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
better ads!!! Woohoo! Now when I visit the relatives they'll make me laugh with their epic stories of this funniest commerial or that one with the dog!!! Yeah! Go TiVo!
..end sarcasm...
+4 "funny!"
-2 "A feminine hygene product during the Superbowl is seriously OT!"
Are they talking about Skinimax and the Playboy Channel?
And what is it that is NOT happening again?
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
As long as it's statistical it will tell advertisers a lot. As the article mentions, it's not something the broadcasters want to hear. But if advertisers knew the best time to show ads, maybe we wouldn't get tampon ads during dinner.
Businessweek has an interesting article on a new TiVo technology which allows ad executives to see which ads are skipped on the DVRs.
Maybe this just means we won't have to sit through crappy commericials anymore because the companies can now figure out what the public (dis)likes. It's not like they're stealing your credit card numbers or anything...
Kudos to you, my good man.
One would think that 98% of the people who have DVRs would end up skipping all of the ads they've recorded. After all, that's half the purpose of getting a DVR in the first place, isn't it?
...I'll procrastinate tomorrow...
if the Ad companies that save/make money off of this technology paid for my monthly service fee.
a new TiVo technology which allows ad executives to see which ads are skipped on the DVRs
...
Do they need a new TiVo technology to know that all ads are skipped ?
It's like if my email client told bulk marketers which spam I didn't delete
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Is there some way to flip the evil bit and make it seem like I watch nothing but commercials?
How do Neilsen (sp?) ratings work? I know that I generally change the channel during boring commercials, and I bet a lot of other people do, also. Does the TiVo have picture in picture? If it does, wouldn't that make it seem as though the person was watching the commercials while in reality watching something else? Or does it ignore the smaller picture?
I really WISH the advertisers knew which ads I was skipping, and which ones make me rewind to see what exactly they were doing. There are some good ads out there that are hilarious - the first time I saw the "Stripperella" ads on TNN, for example, you'd better believe I backed the remote up. On the other hand, the guy with the polka-dotted suit needs to quit throwing his money away and get with the program....
What's your damage, Heather?
If it helps advertisers understand what ads people watch and why then you will get better ads. Better ads = more ads people will watch. More ads people will watch will result in higher quality ads, ones that might actually provide information that is useful to you or even somewhat entertaining.
This has to be better than the endless flood of mindless ads they shove at us now. As long as the information is only used in the aggregate, I see only positives from this.
Freedom Is Universal
Linux-Universe
So, how can the ad executives determine if you're skipping the commercial because it sucks or because you've already seen it before?
Heaven forbid they'll find out that on TV nobody actually pays attention to the commercials either. That all this spending on advertising was all in vain anyway. That they had been better off not sacking their crunchies but save on advertising throwaways instead. That it's merely visual and auditory pollution. That people just find it annoying. Surely that couldn't be the case. The horror!
90% of commercials are so annoying the prevent me from buying a product. There are products I haven't bought for years because of annoying commercials. 8% of commercials have no impact on my buying habits, and then there's the last 2% which I like and increase the chances I will buy the product.
If monitoring which commercials people skip causes companies to produce better and more entertaining ads, I'm all for it.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Tivo stock tose to more the $12/share today. It seems that the expansion of services to their customers. both consumer and business who are hungry for more accurate statistical information, had a lot to do with the price drive up. I guess when it comes to consumer protection or the welfare of corporate investment, the companies eventually win out.
Is it just me or does the fact that nearly everything we do/say/watch/browse is being monitored and logged these days?
You'll have that sometimes...
Does that mean we'll start seeing the equivalent of the "please click on my sponsor links" on TV shows?
Something like "If everyone watches all the commercials on the next three programs of Firefly, we'll keep it on the air." constantly running across the bottom of the screen.
And just when I thought the TV watching experience had hit absolute rock bottom...
If companies realize how bad their ads really are, perhaps they'll come up with better ones; although, I'll still skip all of them.
The only damage I forsee is if companies refuse to buy ads on the programs/stations I watch because "viewers of this type of programming don't view enough ads."
See, that's the only reason I don't get Tivo. I'm pretty sure that is the point of Tivo so I won't argue it. But I don't want to be compiled into too many stats and I don't want all my viewing habbits monitored.... But that's just me I guess. Is there another version w/o snooping built in?
(Sponsored by cheeseSource for President 2012)
That's my (and probably others') big pet peeve about them. Oh, they could be less frequent too. There is such a thing called advertisement overload, as where the unsuspecting consumer is so irritated by the advertisement, as where they lose interest in the ad itself, and goes of to take a leak (or to do something else useful, like grabbing a beer or something). Of course, the product doesn't get seen when that happens.
But will "they" learn? Probably not.
So I use my TiVo to record my favorite shows and I consistently fast forward through all of the commercials.
Marketers considering buying commercials on my favorite show determine it is not lucrative to do so.
Funding for my favorite shows plummets; my favorite show gets canceled.
And we're left with only shows with stunned and dulled audiences too stupid or too cheap to buy a TiVO. [And I'll bet most of them take a potty/fridge break during a lot of the commercials anyway.]
"Provided by the management for your protection."
In the UK theres a strange phenomenon in TV ad viewing, that is the "cup of Tea". On UK TV ad breaks tend to be longer and less frequent. UK dwellers also tend to drink alot of tea during the evening, and making a cup of tea takes about the same time as an ad break. For example during the half time break in the soap opera "Coronation Street" the load on the National Grid goes up something like double as 15 million viewers get off the couch and turn on their electric kettles.
So in essense this activity means that alot less viewers are actually present during the ad breaks than in the US when watching live TV. So what's the solution: Make ads that people actually want to see. British ads on the whole are funnier and more episodic than their US counterparts. I've never heard anyone in my time in the US talk about "The new ad for Coke" around the water cooler at work, but in the UK this regularly happens for the soft drink "Tango" for example.
So perhaps the answer is to make ads more entertaining, less repeated (why oh why show the same ad twice in an ad break), and less formulaic. If US ad agencies showed half the imagination that the UK ad agencies showed then people might actually be less tempted to skip over the ads or leave the room.
It's got a bit more technological, yes. Checking out what we skip through. What ramifications will this have? Who knows. Maybe better commercials, maybe less ill-placed commercials, who knows. Only time will tell.
It's still an art though. I sometimes just let the TiVo go while I make a run for the bathroom. Ha! I showed them. So while they think I'm I'm watching the commercial for depends, I'm actually easing the tension on my bladder. So they still have to figure out of those commercials we're not skipping, which ones are being watched. Still a tough game to play for them.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I have a sister-in-law who actually got upset when I tried to switch stations to avoid ads.
For my second try, I muted the TV. That also upset her and the sound had to be reinstated.
Start by drinking real beer, not that american water that passes for beer. Real beer has 5-10% alcohol, and then you won't have to drink so many. With that crap you have, a 6-pack will just give you a beer-gut, with real beer, you'll really start feeling it.
Let's see, on my TiVO, I skip, um, *all* of the commercials. That must take pretty advanced statistics...but I think it woks out to about 100%. :)
These trends don't threaten to kill TV advertising, but they're sure to change how ads are produced and sold. Today, media buyers purchase TV ad time based on program ratings and demographics.
Kind of reminds me about the RIAA battling against p2p filesharing. They refuse to accept that the music market is changing, and they're fighting as hard as they can to keep it like it is.
Now we've got TV execs scared that the people who buy advertising time on their shows will be able to find out just how effective their ad dollars are. Maybe Superbowl spots aren't really worth millions of dollars, and only hundreds of thousands? What TV exec wants less money in their pockets?
What is the best tuner card for a roll-your-own Tivo?
Do any of them actually have a commercial skip function?
Does anyone know if there is a TiVo demographic?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Certainly sounds like it to me. Do they pay for this personal information or just take it, without even a nice thank you note, and a bunch of flowers, or a box of chocolates, and do they enquire of your satisfaction afterwards?
My understanding is that certain ads, especially good funny ones, are watched more than other. So, what do advertisers derive from the fact that, for example, the ad with the chihuahua that says "Yo quiero Taco Bell" is a hit ? that people love Taco Bell food ? that they love cute undersized doggies in ads ? that they love funny ads ?
In the case of Taco Bell, since their food is mainly about calories per dollar, the answer is pretty clear. But it might not be the case for other products. I can't see that data being very meaningful.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Judging from the way I and many people I know watch television (admittedly not a statistically significant data set), I would guess that a lot of those shows or genres in which people do not skip commercials, or change the channel, result from "ambient" television viewing. That is, people leaving the television on in the background while they do other things, like read Slashdot, or cook dinner.
The shows where people eliminate commercials are those to which they are actually paying attention.
Trust not a man who's rich in flax / His morals may be sadly lax
1. only have a 2-3 minute commercial break every 15 minutes.
2. don't ever show the same commercial twice during the same tv show commercial break (this is what annoys me the most).
that if someone were going to skip over commercials, they'd just blindly skip over all of them, not pick and choose which they wanted to see. You're either in the mood to deal with commercials, or you just skip the lot of them.
Is this not the case?
I made a little tin foil hat for my fast forward button.
Take that ad-execs!
Open source Linux-based PVR's to the rescue!
Thank goodness they still don't know if you went to the bathroom for a break or to the fridge
Unfortunately they'll be able to deduce that you were jerking off when you rewound and replayed that Doritos girl commercial about forty times.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
(1) If the ads are really good. Not even always then. If immediately when the ad section starts, you get a crappy ad, you might not watch the rest. So, alot of it depends on what the first ad is.
(2) Cliffhanger programs, or can't-miss'. If someone really doesn't want to miss anything, they're more likely to put up with ads. This means that the program needs to be that good, and it needs to have left off at the right moment.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Check this out: they say that viewership is inversely proportional to ad watching, and then give an example of how few people watch a boring show like "The Weakest Link", but lots watch "The Practice" (though they skip the commmercials).
What that says is that bored people stay for the commercials. Interested people watch the show, and skip the commercials.
So that says that the TV shows need to be more boring. That's right, you're going to pay $60 per month for satellite TV, and at any time, you can watch such great shows as: Cooking World; Spatula City; Those Darn Mushroom Growers, and so on. 150 channels of it.
And you'll sit there, flipping from ad to ad, just absorbing information and boredom...
My advice? Sell the TV. Sell the TiVo. Buy a farm, it's a lot more exciting watching the hay mold.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
A number of recent articles have discussed advertisers who are moving away from traditional 30-second commercials and instead embedding their products into the shows themselves to avoid ad-skippers. (Think Coke and American Idol) While I love skipping ads with my TiVo, I do wonder if this new trend will only lead to big corporations getting bigger and less competition in the marketplace. Companies like Coke, Microsoft, and McDonalds can afford to spend millions to sponsor shows but upstarts can't and will have a harder time building brand recognition. The cost to effectively market a product on television might someday be raised to the point that it stifles innovation because it is too expensive to promote new products.
When violence rules the world outside / And the headlines make me want to cry / It's not the time to just keep quiet
As many have pointed out.. what's important is not what ads are getting skipped, but why they are.
Here are a few things they have done wrong, that really piss off viewers:
1. Volume. The add should be no louder than the rest of the broadcast material. This should be a standard among all stations - if my tv is set at a specific volume, I should be able to go to any channel at any time and have it be *exactly* the same volume.
2. Timing of product. Tampon/pad commercials during dinner or sport events are probably not very well planned. Similarly, I've seen car/realestate commercials on during saturday morning cartoons...
3. Repeating ad. Ever watch a 30 minute show and see the *same* commercial 4 times (once before, twice during, once after). Or even 2 different commercials for the same product back to back? That gets annoying, and you blank it out.
4. Portrays customer as idiot. This may just be a pet peeve of mine, but it seems to be a fad now in advertising to portray customers as mindless automotons who just consume whatever you give them. For example, the guy in Best Buy staring mindlessly at the new TV, and the salesguy saying "dude, you need these speakers too."
Personally, I am amazed advertising has worked this far at all. We saw how HORRIBLY it failed at supporting websites. What if this (counting ad skips) is effectually the same as counting the lack of clicks on a banner? will advertising firms start to lose money, stop paying content providers for space, causing them to lose money?
no comment
According to Forrester Research, when personal-video-recorder (PVR) technology reaches 30 million households in 2006, 76% of advertisers say they'll cut their TV ad spending -- one quarter of them by more than 41%. Instead of buying TV ads, 65% plan to spend more on program sponsorship, 46% will increase budgets for product placement, and 36% say they'll rechannel their dollars to online advertising.
This quote is exactly what I want to see. A couple years ago, Schindler's List ran uninterrupted except for an intermission on TV and was sponsored by Ford. The only mention of Ford was a brought to you by Ford message and a logo suring the intermission and at the beginning and end. No, I didn't have to look up who sponsored Schindler's List, I actually remembered, thanks Ford. This is similar to what PBS does minus the telethon. I've actually watched who the sponsors are for some of the shows on PBS, simply because they have a relevant product or service that *gasp* I may actually be interested in.
Are you listening big media and advertising?
The inverse relationship between rating and getting to show ads, and the variable stickiness, is no surprise at all if you watch what a Tivo user does. Here is what is happening, and it's so simple: Tivo gets to play the ad, if the user isn't paying attention. Tivo doesn't get to play ads, if the user is intently watching the show.
That's all there is to it. I play The Simpsons and it's some lame episode that I've already seen way too many times, so I get bored and surf Slashdot. Being a stupid monkey, I don't just stop The Simpsons and watch something else, because I like The Simpsons so I think I want to watch it. But nevertheless, since I've seen the episode too many times, I am bored. I just don't realize I'm bored. So I let the episode play. I'm not watching. A commercial break happens. I don't notice for a minute, because I'm in the midst of writing a troll that requires all my concentration. Then somewhere in the back of my head, I hear that someone is selling cars, and I wake up from my TrollTrance and look over at the TV outraged, screaming "Commercial!!! Kill! Kill! Kill!" and fast forward until I see The Simpsons again. Then I go back to writing my troll.
Now suppose I'm watching Futurama, and it's an episode that I somehow missed the first time around. I'm fascinated. Instead of making an ass of myself on the internet, I watch TV. I am paying attention and following along. When a commercial break happens, I automatically skip over it.
Back to the stats:
That's because 70% were actually watching the show while playing it. I've never seen it, but it sounds like it might be a good show; I should give it a try. The other 30% were bored and trolling Slashdot. That's because the bored Tivo user wasn't really watching the show. He's just using the TV to make reassuring background noise in his meaningless life. Tivo thinks he is "watching the ads" but really he is explaining to somebody, the finer points of pouring hot grits. The user is watching. The user is not watching.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
From the plaintiff's filing in Paramount vs. SonicBlue:
So there.
I have never rewound to watch a commercial. Usually what happens is I FF too far (too fast) and have to back up again to get back to the program re-entry point.
Sometimes Tivo's automatic rewind-on-fastforward does it right, but sometimes it doesn't and I end up getting about the last half of the last commercial.
Sounds like a bunch of erroneous data to me.
Further made erroneous by me watching something on Tivo and reading a catalog or magazine at the same time. I get into the magazine, forget about the show, and after about three spots I realize there's a commercial playing, and then I FF to the show again.
This was one of the reasons for a unique kind of power station to be created in Wales (For Americans, that is the little country stuck on the side of England but still part of the UK!).
m
The Dinorwig Pumped-Storage power-station spends most of it's time consuming electricity by pumping the contents of a huge lower resivoir onto two upper resivoirs.
As soon as the tea-break starts, Dinorwig lets rip, and the entire contents of the upper lakes are allowed to flow back down, the energy being converted back into electricial energy.
Despite the fact that Dinorwig is less than 80% efficient, it saves the generating companies millions a year because it can react in an instant to sudden demands for more power.
http://www.darvill.clara.net/altenerg/pumped.ht
" Dinorwig has the fastest "response time" of any pumped storage plant in the world - it can provide 1320 MegaWatts in 12 seconds. That's a lot of cups of tea!"
TiVo could be shooting itself in the foot with this... if they find out that eventually 93% of people who use TiVo are skipping ads, how much you wanna bet the TV industry sues Tivo to get them to stop skipping ads, too? Sort of like DVDs which won't let you skip over previews. That makes me mad as hell.
So maybe we get a commercial Nielsens where they learn what are good ads and what are bad ads, and they'll stop producing long boring ads that people want to skip.
Any appeal to intelligence of marketers and advertisers is dumb, but nevertheless, it is definitely possible to create advertising that people don't have the urge to skip.
Take me for example. I hate ads. If I've taped a show, I'll fast forward. If I'm watching live TV, I mute the TV and ignore the TV until commercials are over. I go months at a time without seeing a single commercial, and when it happens, it's by accident.
But I watch anime fansubs. No one ever cuts out the little bits at the beginning where they say, "this show was brought to you by the following sponosrs," and yet I never fast forward past the advertisement. It's only 5 seconds, and not annoying, so why bother?
You know what that is? It's an advertisement that gets watched, almost every time, by one of the most anti-advertising people around. It's the television version of Google text ads, and if advertisers adopted a strategy like this, watching TV would become a much less of a painful experience.
However, it will not happen. Advertisers will instead try to make ads even more irritating, to try and get people to pay attention out of shock value. I mean, did TV shows get any better when ratings were introduced?
Nova
Frontline
Survivor
Big Brother
Fear Factor
Dog Eat Dog
The Great Race
Frasier (when it's not up against one of the above)
Letterman/Leno when there's something to watch and I'm not so annoyed by the commercials I turn the sumbitch off and open winamp
Now, watch any of those prime time shows (except the ones on PBS) and note carefully all the product placement. Then note the comments in the article about fast forwarding during commercials on these "live" shows. So, not only are the "reality" shows more lucrative for advertisers who buy commercial time, they're also more lucrative for the networks because they also get to sell "ads" right in the show itself (he said, as Brooke Burke tuns everyone's attention to "the Circuit City question board."
Frankly, I'm glad they're finally getting this. I would enjoy Letterman much, much more if it were Dave doing "dumb ads" for product placements. Sell product placements for "Will It Float?" and "What's that Smell?" instead of dumping twenty minutes of commercials into the last half hour of the show and they'd command a LOT more eyeballs. Hell, they could even get these folks to sponsor some new outfits for grinder Girl...
Selling the TV and buying a farm is a great idea, but for those that don't, marketers will adjust to the new ad climate. At the end of the article it says that companies will just spend more money on things like product placement and program sponsorship.
The best thing that could come of this would be TV free of most commercials. Unfortunately, this would probably lead to shows that are unwatchable as they would contain so many "ad-ettes" (pop-up ads ala TLC, product placement, etc). Guess there's always the movies....no, wait...
did i coin a new word?
In the article, it mentions that the 'popular' TV shows have a higher ad-skip ratio. This worries me, as I can easily see companies deciding they want to spend money where the ads will be seen, therefore going to the less popular shows, getting the popular shows canceled (since they don't generate revenue).
Not that they would conciously try to kill the shows people like to watch, just that the economics seem to say those are the shows that won't get funded.
Could this do to TV what the top-40 format has done to radio? (E.G.: Kill all real public intrest?)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
The article discusses how some live events and reality television have a larger percentage of watched ads. I would guess that would be because most people watch those shows when they're actually being broadcast, as opposed to watching them later. It would be more interesting to see statistics of what % of the commercials are watched when it was watched live versus what % people are watching when watching it previously recorded.
For the live/reality events, those are conversation pieces for some people at work the next day (*gasp* Did you see who the Bachelor picked?). I'd bet that those programs are watched live more, and therefore people are unable to skip the commercials.
The "Weakest Link" had 78% because no one was manning the Fast-Forward button anymore! 78% of the viewers had turned off the TV and left the TiVo playing.
I'd rather read, or exercise. I don't need no stinking TV.
Since I gotten my Tivo, I've noticed the rise of one trick that I see as a Tivo busting strategy. About a year ago, I noticed they started moving movie advertisements to the front of blocks of commercials a lot. The idea being, I think, that Tivo users are more likely to go back and watch a movie trailer, and once they are one commercial in, they'll probably just let the rest of the break play out. It worked on me for a little while. I'm curious if this is intentional, or if it is just movie advertising paying big money for preffered placement.
Heck people downloaded the new Honda Accord adds to see them - they actually _paid_ (for the bandwidth and in their time) to get hold of them! There were even a lot of downloads of the making of movie!
l ips/cars/thecog.zip or there is a high quality 48mb TVAD.MOV floating around, or you can even order the DVD direct from Honda for free in the UK at http://www.honda.co.uk/brochure/orderCars.jsp?sour ce=accord)
(Low quality version at http://multimedia.honda-eu.com/multimedia/video/c
If you have adds like that, people will watch them. If not then people will do what they have always done - fast forward them, or if that's turned off, go and make a cup of tea instead.
Beep beep.
This is slightly off topic, but I have my TiVo attached to my DirecTV receiver along with the serial connection for timer-based channel changing.
I really hate the buffer-loss feature of TiVo when one changes channels, and the serial connection to my old Sony DTV receiver makes for even slower channel changing than normal, so I change channels "out from under" the TiVo by using the DirecTV remote.
So as far as my TiVo knows, I am watching ABC right now, having recorded the Jimmy Kimmel show last night, even though my DTV receiver is probably set to HBO or comedy central or something completely different (a manual channel-change sometime after Kimmel was on).
So I'm more than happy to have TiVo corporate store up as much of my bogus data as they like.
If someone can figure out exactly what you want to watch, can this be used by the patriot-ness enforcers, just like they want to do in the libraries?
just wondering... Big Brother is right around the corner.
But "Little PBS." the only thing more insulting; more condescending to its audience; more insulting to the intelligence of its viewers than prime time network TV - is PBS during "pledge week."
What needs to happen is more product placement! Don't believe me? Watch Conan O'Brien. If you're lucky, you might catch Preperation H Raymond! My friends and I have been talking about Prep H Ray for months. Every once in a while, one of us will break out "I heard about your colon, it's big red and swollen. Raymond's here, Raymond's here."
On a more serious note, I think the major risk is a reduction in the quality of television programming. TV is already terrible, but wait until they can't get the same funding. Soon every TV show will be a reality TV show because they're cheap to produce and people love them. Apparently they're also good for advertising (in the article it said people watch ads through reality shows). Think MTV couldn't get any worse? Wait until it's the American Idol channel. As long as execs don't cut Adult Swim and The Daily show, I'll be happy.
Damn, I can't wait until staring at the wall is no longer America's favorite passtime.
Go over to someone's house and they're all staring at the wall going "duhhhhh..". Are tryto have a conversation with someone and all they say is, "Hey, that also reminds me of something I saw on television..."
Nation of fat stupid people who could give a fuck about the world falling around their ears so long as they've got spongebob on the tube and some hydrogenated treat within arms reach.
We're in some kind of ghetto of American history. Jeez where's the fast forward button.
Go see The Matrix Reloaded, it will make you a cooler person.
It's not like menstruation is a degenerate behavior that some obscure minority of the population is involved in.
Maybe when you grow up and have a relationship with a real adult woman other than your mother you'll understand this.
"Thank goodness they still don't know if you went to the bathroom for a break or to the fridge"
Wrong!
If you skipped a commercial, they know which one. If the commercials plays... then they know you left to the bathroom or fridge.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
I hate the little dramas they try to play out as if we're supposed to believe we're seeing real people. I don't care if some damn, whiny bitch isn't feeling "fresh". Welcome to the world of evolution and genetics. You don't feel fresh. I lose my hair at age 40 and my refractory period has hit 2 weeks. Welcome to the Miserable Hearts Club. Now shut up about it.
Or the stupid jingles or the grating voiceovers. Everyone sounds like a used car salesman or a politician. Everybody in ad-land has happy nuclear familes in Whitebreadville, except for the Black targeted ads that are invariably accompanied by some sort of stereotypical blues jingle. I wanna see a Burger King commercial with Menace Klan's "Kill Whitey" in the background. Have a BK Fish, G, and tap some of that ass!
Or any alcohol ad. "You're all losers, so you need to dull your mind even further before you can have fun! May we suggest you consume large quantites of our cheap, watery beer. Oh, and drink responsibly! Wink! Wink!" Jackass, if I wanted to drink responsibly, I'd have a glass of orange juice. Wink wink at my spinchter, assface.
Whatever happened to those goddamned Mentos commercials? Mentos - breath mint of the master race. Christ, I don't even know what that meant! And if anyone actually smiled as wide as they do in toothpaste commercials, their brains would pop out. I guess it's a good thing that these dogfood grade morons with the idiot grins plastered on their botoxed lippage don't have brains in the first place.
And smoker's toothpolish. How dick is that? "Bob! You quit smoking!" says whore. "DID I?" says Bob. "Hmm, no. I guess not," says whore. "I can still smell the fetid stench of your filthy brain damaged habit wafting from your smoke encrusted clothing. Bleah. It's an extra $200 if you expect me to deal with your Marlboro funk."
Argh! Don't get me started on commercials!
--- Ban humanity.
I thought Tivo was already concerned about the entertainment/advertising biz getting teed off about viewers skipping commercials (hence Tivo's lack of a "30-second-skip" button). So now they're going to give them hard data showing exactly how bad it is? Seems like an odd strategy.
You obviously do not know whgat the hell you are talking about. I have friends who still have weekly Survivor parties. The message boards are still busy with people discussing the shows, betting on their outcome, and searching the globe for spoilers. The people who watch shows like Survivor and Big Brother watch the show with rapt attention - and then many of them pay to watch even more over the internet. Everyone (except those who insist on looking down their noses at the genre) knows this. Duh. That's why companies pay for placements on the goddamn show.
Just remember folks.. approx. 16 minutes out of every hour of airtime is dedicated to commercials. And there is round-the-clock research going on to see how they can squeeze in even more. (Such as digital filtering of duplicate or near-duplicate frames.) I know that TV stations rely on advertising as a source of their revenue, but the constant barrage of television advertisements appears to be grating on the public at large. (Particularly when you have to pay ever increasing costs for cable or satellite.)
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin
The free PVR projects (Freevo, MythTV) should start a data collection service that users opt into and sell this information to marketers then disperse the money back to the end users. Tivo should sell a box, not a box that requires a connection to the mothership.
It's more likely that the decent shows will be sponsored instead of saturated with ads. Firefly, brought to you by Preparation H!
When I read this, the idea of firefly presented by a hemmeroids ointment was so ridiculous, it made me laugh. But not, I realized, much more than regular product placement.
Advertising agencies have still got it all wrong. Why doesn't one of the characters on Friends, for instance, have a thing for coke? I know enough people in the real world who are adamantly "addicted" to certain brands and foods that it wouln't even stretch the imagination to see a TV character with that trait.
But instead they do horribly klutzy things like "the doritos picnic" on the original survivor, or the painfully akward Coke placement on American Idol. It's actually disarmingly honest; "hey look, we're a show you like and we're pushing a product, don't you want to BUY it??"
No. No we don't. We're over advertising as a social contract, where we tolerate it with the abiding satisfaction of receiving the accompanying content as a "reward." We no longer feel any obligation to this system. Advertising dollars spent on that very mechanism are terribly wasted, even if it works sometimes. Better to assign the desired buy-craziness to a TV character we can empathize with and desire to emulate. At least this will catch us off guard for a couple of years.
Man 1: Hey, Joe, do you ever have problems with an itcy asshole? ... Just gotta make sure you get a thorough coat on...
Man 2: Well I used to, then my friends turned me on to Preparation H!
Man 1: Really? How's that work?
Man 2: Well lemme just slap a little on for you there, skippy...
Man 1: Oooh.. Oh...
Man 2
Man 1: Hey... that IS better!
Voiceover: Preparation H, for all your itchy asshole needs.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Ok, they're not paying your monthly fee. But as long as TiVo Inc. can keep coming up with cool PVR uses/features for the commercial makers and sponsors, said entities will be much less likely to sue TiVo into oblivion ala ReplayTV. So in a somewhat round-about way, they are paying a portion of your monthly fee, by simply allowing TiVo Inc. to continue to exist. Or perhaps more accurately they're running a protection racket against TiVo Inc., but I'm OK with that compromise for now. Better than shutting down my DTiVo.
ehintz
I have mixed feelings about this news. One hand it proves that smart ('technophiles') with tivos will bypass commercials given a chance, on the other hand the advertisers will develop new ways of annoying watchers. For example - advertisers could use more product placement (usually doesn't bother me unless it is blatant - "I like X; you should buy X; please buy X"), more 'banner' ads (ads placed in lower part of screen - see TNN as example of over-the-top usage of ads of this nature) this should only be used if content is widescreen and letterboxed but you know the fcc could never write a rule like that, and lawsuits to get ad-skip and/or fast-forward/cue buttons removed (those buttons should be a requirement for time-shifting devices).
For me, dvds provide more bang for the buck. I can edit out objectionable material (ads and warnings) and write out to an RW. Watch then erase and go again...
This means I almost always see the first couple of seconds of the first ad, and if it is interesting, I'll watch it.
Same goes for the last ad in the block...I'll see the end of it, and if the end is very interesting, I'll back up and watch.
So, to reach me, the best shot the advertisers have is at the ends of commercial blocks. An ad in the middle only has a chance if it is so interesting that in the time it it takes me to recognize it is not the show as I skip past, I'll be grabbed, or if the ad next to it is interesting enough that I decide to watch that neighbor ad, and while skipping to the start of that, the other ad catches me.
That gives these rules for ads if you want the PVR crowd to see them:
The first ad in the block needs be interesting from the beginning.
The last ad in the block needs to end in a way that will be interesting to people who haven't seen the begining of the ad.
The value of interior spots depends on what is around them.
A clever advertiser could use this to try to get people to skip the following ads, which might make it more likely the consumer will remember their ad. For example, instead of spending all 30 seconds on your product, do a 20 second interesting ad, and a 10 second boring ad or public service announcement or something--the idea is to give people some time to start skipping before some other company's ad can start. If the only ad people see during a break is yours, you've won.
My Tivo skips all ads except Victoria's Secret
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Do you go to sporting event parties? I don't because I despise sports - but I doubt you'll find many people throwing Superbowl parties and watching a recording of the event.
Duh...
---please mod me down for being evil---
If TiVo was smart, they would sell encrypted flags that prevent certain commercials from being skipped. Or it could sell to a company so companies ads would be by default skipped, sota like Gator.
http://www.uktvadverts.com/Media/
I was thinking the same thing about reality shows as you observed, that most people watch them as they are being broadcast with no delay.
They tend to be interesting the day they are broadcast, but loose value soon after... I think perhaps not even so much because you can talk to other people the next day about them (which is true) but because you have to watch that one before the next one or it has no value at all (since watching the next episode automatically tells you who was kicked off/last at the pitstop) so you need to keep on top of watching them or you can forget before the next one.
Reality TV shows have the most linear short-term structure of any kind of programming, and thus most subject to live viewing. I have to admit to watching "The Amazing Race", which I find an interesting character study. We always watch it live if possible, so even if I had a TIVO (waiting for an HDTV capable model or for me to stop being so lazy and build an equivalent) I wouldn't be skipping any ads.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I worry that TiVo is going to lose their focus on making a good PVR that I like to use. If they see themselves as a data-collection company, they're likely to see me less as a feature-hungry tv viewer and more as a data source; their real customer becomes whoever buys the data, at which point it stops being all about me.
A startup company relies on excited customers, so the customer is in charge for a while. If the customers grow into a "customer base" to be used in some manner, that can dominate the company's focus. Then the CEO with the original vision is replaced with a number-cruncher who figures out how to maximize revenue, and nothing is very much fun anymore.
Fortunately, someone else eventually picks up the slack, and the original company no longer matters.
I hope I'm wrong; maybe this won't happen at TiVo...
You may have noticed that a lot of major websites make you watch a couple of commercials before watching a video clip these days. This is essentially the way television is going to work in the future. You'll have a dedicated device or piece of software (Hello, "trusted" computing platforms) which reads and interprets the incoming streams, and requires you to do something interactive in between chunks of a program in order to continue watching it. Hardcore hackers will of course find a way to automate these processes and avoid watching commercials just as they have always circumvented stupidity, but this will keep the vast majority of people on the straight and narrow path, so to speak.
Of course, it's going to be a while before that happens; Content creators and providers who are tied to the current infrastructure and their investments in it -- read: broadcast television outlets and media networks -- will continue to try to legislate rather than innovate. While you can expect them to enjoy some limited success (We have seen some already) ultimately they will have to solve the problem with technology.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
TV watches YOU!
>As long as the information is only used in the aggregate
Well, as of now Tivo data is zipcode specific. It wasn't like this last year? Why? Tivo is hurting for dollars. I wonder how much more specific they'll get as they continue to lose money?
Also, don't overestimate the tivo userbase. Its nothing close to the Neilson system and Tivo simply can't make any money selling this info because Tivo users are far from average. Enough expendable income to own a tivo + cable/satellite and you're a semi-early adopter? This demographic is pretty predicatable already. Tivo has nothing on the Neilsons and the networks agree.
Here's how to opt-out of Tivo information collection.
DirecTivo owners will have to call 1-800-DIRECTV
TiVo's doing this the right way. They're not telling the ad execs who skipped their ad, they're telling the ad execs how many people skipped their ad... 80% of the people watching the show you sponsored over a TiVo think your ad wasn't worth their time.
In contrast, TiVo points out that there almost always are several ads that air during the Super Bowl that actually get people to rewind back to them to see the ad again... wow, an ad that's so good people actually want to see it, what a concept!
TiVo's good at brokering this kind of compromise between the industry and end users, as opposed to Microsoft whose DVR errored in being too pro-industry and ReplayTV whose DVR errored in being too anti-industry. TiVo seems to be able to come up with a product that both expands user's abilities and keeps the industry lawyers away...
"On April 11, 2002, ABC's popular TV drama The Practice drew a TiVo rating of 8.9, meaning 8.9% of TiVo owners watched the show live or recorded it and watched it later. But those viewers watched just 30% of the ads shown. Meanwhile, quiz show The Weakest Link, drew a rating of 0.9, but viewers watched 78% of the commercials. TV news magazine 60 Minutes got only a 2.2 rating, but its viewers sat through 73% of the ads."
Even though the percentage of ads skipped increases with the popularity of the show, the popular shows still get more ads played through overall.
With the 8.9 show above, 30% of that show's viewers played the ads, which means those ads were played through by 30% of 8.9% = 2.67% of viewers. With the 0.9 show, 78% of its viewers played the ads, and 78% of 0.9% = 0.702% overall. So the ads that air with the most popular shows still get the most eyeballs, despite the inverse relationship mentioned in the article.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Why not skip all but the first showing of a commercial?
NT
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
1. Ads I watch on purpose. These are very rare, and usually involve pretty girls in skimpy outfits. Humor can snare me too, but most advertisers are too clueless to do it right.
2. Ads I ignore. This is 90% of the TV ads. If I'm watching live I'll probably see/hear part of it while I go to the bathroom/kitchen/stick my nose in a book. Otherwise, I'll FF past it.
3. Ads I can't stand. Bad sound effects will piss me off everytime. If I'm watching delayed, I'll FF past it. If I'm watching live, I'll "mute" until the show resumes, then pause for 15 minutes to ensure I won't have to suffer through any more commercials! If I didn't have the option of FFing or muteing, I'd go bonkers, destroy the TV with an axe, then go after the advertiser!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Apparently you don't watch survivor so you've never seen all the placements. Three minutes of footage of castaways frolicking on the beach in a shiny new Outback; starving castaways who have been surviving on rice or wheat savoring (in slow motion) a tiny sliver of a Snickers bar. People bidding hundreds of dollars for a glass of Mountain Dew and a bag of Tostitos...
That's the point: it doesn't matter if the viewers "skip" the commercials, because they just watched a commercial during the last "competition." Then, after the series wraps and the merchandise goes on sale, they pay twenty or forty dollars for their very own DVD; they pay to watch those placements again, and again, and again.
Just remember...
The Television/Cable Station is selling - that makes them the seller.
The Marketing Dorks are buying - that makes them the buyer.
The rights to your eyeballs are being transacted - that makes you the product.
Am I the only one pissed that I'm not getting money from the rights to my eyeballs? And that if I have Cable/Satellite, I'm PAYING to have my eyeballs sold (I'm the whore, the TV company is the pimp)?
--AC
Maybe this will clue advertisers in that loud annoying commercials get people to tune out. If you want me to watch, make it entertaining and not headache inducing. Advertising is not necessarily a bad thing and most people here likely make their living due to good marketing. Now if we could only convince the annoying javascript idiots the same thing.
- Find a road (usually in the desert) with zero traffic
- Play some guitar rock music very loudly
- Take one model of the car (must be silver) and get some guy to drive it along the road/off the road very fast
- Use camera trickery to speed it up even more, (like in Knight Rider, but being more careful to make sure the sun isn't seen setting at warp speed behind it) and to make it look like the car can do things it can't really do
- Add engine noise from a louder engine to make a family saloon/sedan sound like a Formula-1 Grand Prix car or Indycar
- Try to out-do your opposition in points for the cheesiest tagline (such as 'zoom-zoom' [Mazda] or 'driven' [Pontiac])
- Try to out-do your opposition in making your commercial identical to every other car commercial
Other tips:If filming in an urban setting, eliminate all traffic. Failing that, use time-lapse night-time photography to show the traffic as streaks of white & red lights. On no account do you ever show the reality of bumper-to-bumper slow-motion traffic.
Don't emphasise the safety features of the car, concentrate on the ability to drive at illegal and dangerous speeds in inappropriate settings.
Humour is prohibited. Be as boring as possible.
Actually, how well does advertising work? Do they do anything at all other than make sure you know a given company is big and well established?
The rare commercial that I pay attention to is usally for some form of entertainment (like a movie or tv show). As someone else pointed out, these are more informative, partly because we don't already know what the new shows/movies will be, or what they'll be like.
Of course, I'm not a brand concious person, and most of the things I'm interested in aren't advertised. Or at least, not in enough detail to be at all informative.
I buy movies/books/music based on my own eccentric tastes. What's popular is not relevant. I buy (mostly) generic foods, and I try to have someone else (with taste) pick out my clothes. I go online and research before buying electronics.
Ads had no impact at all when I was shopping for a home mortgage, and little to no impact when I went car shopping.
I can only imagine two uses for ads.
1) If it's something totally new (which I'll hear about on slashdot if I'm going to be interested).
2) To prove that the company is well established. (Nike versus QuickFoot shoes).
Do they have any other impact on people? Do they really work the way most companies seem to think they do?
Are there really people out there who CARE about the new flavor of hand soap? Do they get excited about Palmolive commercials?
plus-good, double-plus-good
No Text
Tivo has been trying to sell this stuff for *years*. What do you think this article was? They keep releasing this data stuff every so often in the hopes that someone will pay them to gather it. They're not doing well in terms of selling it, but it's getting better, and they are now starting to make some cash off this data.
In other words, stop your bitching. When they can make money off it, they'll do so. But you don't make money by simply having a thing, you have to SELL that thing as well.
just think, a relatively small group of fans can hack the tivo rating system by organizing a tv watch.
it works like this; fans of a particular show, organized via web site or bulletin board, all arrange to set their tivos up to repeat their favorite show all weekend long. even if the fans are at the beach or on vacation, the tivos dutifully play the programs with commercials intact giving the show a skewed rating.
even if the show in question has a low rating, it'll show up as being efficient at getting commercials viewed. in fact, i'd say the scheme would work even better on a low rated show since a larger proportion of its fans could be organized this way.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
While the Tivo demo is slanted towards the young person with money to burn, their percentage of older people is rapidly growing.
And in any case, as other people point out, young people with money is who the advertisers target 90% of the ads at.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Sure it is.
What it is that is so terrible about advertising is that advertisers are intentionally trying to mislead and deceive you into purchasing their product.
They make irrational appeals, they try to affect your emotional state to cause a lapse of judgement, they try to make you feel obligated to purchase their product, and many tell outright lies to you, lies which are protected by our government under the guise of 'advertising'.
Why do we allow Chevorlet to tell us that their pickup truck is "like a rock"? In what significant way is their pickup truck "like a rock"? It is not in any significant way "like a rock". There is no requirement that Chevorlet demonstrate that their pickup truck is more "like a rock" than a competing pickup truck. There is no requirement that Chevorlet provide statistics and accompanying documentation of their methodology of gathering statistics, which support their claim that their pickup truck is "like a rock".
No, all Chevorlet cares about is that you see their pickup truck driving through a patch of mud in a 'rugged-looking' environment, and associate their truck with ruggedness and rocks and things that people who buy pickup trucks put have no practical need for them, have been trained to want to associate with a pickup truck.
They tell you very little about what their product does, but instead prefer to show pictures of 'attractive' or 'smart' people who are pretending to be happy and satisfied either as a result of using, or usually just by the very presence of the product being marketed.
In many cases the commercials even have nothing whatsoever to do with the product, but only with the brand name. You probably already know the sort of widget they are trying to sell, in what circumstances you might have a need to purchase it, which other companies make a similarly functioning widget, and where to get one when you do need it.
Why do they do this? Because probably their brand of widget has at best highly dubious advantages over any other brand of the same sort of widget, but they want to impress their brand name upon you.
They want you, when you are in the store aisle and see a shelf full of widgets, to purchase their brand of widget for no other reason than that you have seen the brand advertised on television, and probably to pay more for it too than an alternative which would have functioned just as well.
We are worse off as a society the more irrational and uninformed purchasing decisions we make, and especially purchasing decisions made as the result of deliberate and systematic deception.
It should be considered a serious breach of ones ethical obligations to intentionally deceive and mislead 'consumers' into making irrational purchasing decisions.
It is NOT "just business". How have we been lead to accept this as an excuse? It is NOT an acceptable thing to do to another person. It is flat out lying and deception, and we should not tolerate it.
In many cases these irrational and uninformed purchasing decisions are devastating to the long term physical and mental health of members of our society.
These advertisers are the sort of people we should be locking up. These are the people that have shown by their actions that they have no intention of doing what is best for society, but only for themselves at the expense of society. These are the sort of people that are dangerous to us.
It is NOT "just business".
It is NOT "just business".
Please mod parent up for being evil...
*grins psychotically*
I think that you've made some incorrect assumptions, there (although I wouldn't put it past the TV execs to make the same assumption). I don't think it means that bored people are more likely to watch commercials. I think what it means is that those shows are more likely to be turned on as background noise while people are doing other things. I find that with my TiVo, if I'm doing something else at the same time, I'm less likely to fast forward through the commercials, because I'm not paying enough attention to notice that the commercials are on (or care). Case in point, as I'm typing this message, there are commercials playing on the TV. As soon as I hit submit, though, I'm going to fast forward through them. ;-)
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
(As long as the collected data is only statistical, etc. - I'd hate to get a "you have been watching too few commercials and we are therefore forced to increase your subscription fee" letter :-)
At any rate, measuring skips will have a positive self-regulating effect on ads. Obviously ads would become more "interesting" and "relevant". But I expect that there will also be fewer ads as a result. IMVHO the amount of ads being broadcasted today is ludicrous - way above any cost-effectiveness.
In Israel we finally caught up with the rest of the civilized world and have zillion of channels, but there are remnants of our pre-hiostoric past - channels that have no ads. Amazingly, the same show is broadcast in several channels, some with and some without ads. Not always, and not the same seasons, but it really drives the point home when you see that on channel A "Buffy" takes only 45 minutes, including a few minutes of promotions between episodes, while on channel B it takes a full hour. I'll watch a few interesting/relevant ads, fine. But watching ads 33% - 25% of my time? They have got to be kidding.
I really don't understand how you people in the USA endure this. When I'm there (one or twice a year) I'm in hotel rooms, so I don't get any ad-free channels (do you even have such things?). If I bother and am lucky I catch a show that I follow in Israel and is a season ahead in the USA, so I watch about one or two hours on average per trip, all the ads are new for me (for the first half-hour, anyway) - and I can still only barely take it. I guess it is true that one gets used to everything... but UGH!
I assume that the way you survive is by simply tuning these ads out, somehow. Which means that they aren't really working, right? Measuring ad-skipping will drive this point home to advertisers so that the percentage will reduce to something more sane. Wouldn't that be great?
Here's an Everything2 writeup about this joke.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
If making an end run around your will wasn't important, then the marketing wouldn't be all that important: the product would sell itself. For example, there isn't a lot of marketing for apple corers.
Don't believe me? Get the book "The Clam-plate Orgy",, and read it, and then start looking for subliminal advertising.
Not all of it is subliminal sex, either. I was looking through National Geographic, and saw an ad for Ford Explorer. It showed a comped photograph [really airbrush] of an Explorer driving from dense city straight into Grand Canyon wilderness. But if you looked at the ground carefully, all of a sudden you would see a pair of keys on a chain.
Or Coca-Cola: look on the boxes that show all those nice, iced coca cola bottles and Coke(tm) in a glass with ice... look carefully, and all of a sudden you'll start to see tons of people playing sports.
[It's normal to get angry when you read this... I did, my Dad did, both times saying "That's NONSENSE!!!"; my brother laughed. But after you're done getting angry, and you get curious and start looking... well... let's just say I decided it isn't nonsense. So did he, and my brother.]
Anyhow, I fully expect the TV execs to respond with more boring programming. Either get used to it, or find a way to convert your TV into a goldfish tank. Or sell it and buy a book.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
At least half of the last 45 minutes of each movie are advertieements. I record just that part and then skip all of the commercials just to help sway the statistics...
That'll learn 'em.
While reading the BW article, I was piqued when they mentioned DoubleClick. I checked with PeerGuardian and sure enough, there was an attempted intrusion by DoubleClick.As the old saying goes, the only two peoplw I trust in this world are you and me and lately I'm not too sure about you.