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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."
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.
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?
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
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...
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.
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.
Does anyone know if there is a TiVo demographic?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
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.
Just keep it within the confines of your tinfoil hat, and you'll be ok. Take me for example - I wear my tinfoil hat 24/7, and I even go as far as shaving my head inside an aluminum tent.
How does this invade your privacy?
I am a TiVo owner. Are you suggesting that the fact that TiVo tells somebody that, say, 9.2% of TiVo owners watched a particular commercial is an invasion of my privacy?
I support this sort of data gathering. The less crappy, brainless advertising out there the better.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
A smaller percentage of a large number is often more actual people than a large percentage of a small number of people.
In other words, would you rather your ad be seen by 5% of 1,000,000 people, or 75% of 500 people?
To use the numbers from the article, The Practice had 8.9% of viewers, and they watched 30% of the ads. That's 2.67% of viewers. The Weakest Link viewers, being 0.9% of viewers, would have to record commercials and watch them three times each to match that.
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.
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?
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.
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.'"
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.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
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.
I recall reading somewhere that 30-40 years ago, before there were 187 cable/satellite channels, the operators of the New York City water system could tell with a high degree of accuracy how many people were watching which shows by comparing water flow with the timing of commercials. A minute or so after a hit show went to commercial there would be a huge surge in water demand as all the toilets started flushing.
Here's an Everything2 writeup about this joke.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".