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Tivo Plans Commercials On Demand
MCSqrd writes "News.com reports that Tivo will soon feature interactive ads that apparently link from ordinary television commercials. Viewers can activate the link and view extended, interactive content about the product being advertised.
Tivo hopes to 'tune in' to a way to keep advertisers on their side since the idea of TV commercials being made obsolete because of PVRs has made them an enemy to marketing departments everywhere.
Is anyone else reminded of the blipverts from the Max Headroom series?"
This is not a new TiVo feature, it's an underused one at this point. There are a few car company ads that are presently use it.
The way it works is that the sponsors purchase a TiVo Showcase package, which is an advertising section that has always been part of TiVo. The Showcases can be filled with video content that is spliced out of the "Teleworld Infomercial"... a quasi-weekly program that TiVo purchases during the early morning hours on the Discovery Channel that all TiVos are programmed to return.
The sponsors then purchase a typical campaign's worth standard 30-second TV spots, and they encode in the VBI (the same place where Closed Captioning hides) a signals that all TiVos understand. This signal tells the TiVo that whenever this spot is encountered, to display a "Press Thumbs Up For More Information" icon while it is playing. If the user gives the confirming thumbs up signal on their remote, they're transported directly to the Showcase section for that sponsor. Whenever the user chooses to leave the Showcase, they'll be returned to exactly where they were in whatever program they were viewing.
You might be surprised to know that TiVo is recording this Teleworld Infomercial program, because it's never directly displayed in the user interface. You also might think that TiVo is kidnapping some of your diskspace... but in fact they're saving the ad content to the "reserved section" of TiVo's funky Linux-based OS. You never had access to that disk volume, and they already subtracted this space from the advertised hour-wise capacity of a unit. If you upgrade your TiVo's HD size, all of the additional space created goes to user recordings, the reserved space stays the same size.
Gotta give TiVo credit, they're finding a revenue model that actually issues a challenge to advertisers... come up with some ad content that makes people want to watch it.
Is anyone else reminded of the blipverts from the Max Headroom series?"
No, because this is the inverse of a blipvert. A blipvert was a split-second commerical inserted into Network XXIII programs, which had the unfortunate side effect of causing overweight viewers to explode.
This feature actually requires user input (a confirming click of the green Thumbs Up key during the conventional 30-second ad) in order to jump to a 3-minute presentation that has been stored on the TiVo harddrive. The user can bail out of the 3-minute presentation at any time and return to their "live" stream whenever they want. TiVo will do the favor of pausing the program at exactly the point they left it, where the user can fast-forward to catch up as much as they want.
TiVo actually has research to prove that people will actually rewatch a Pepsi comercial if Britney Spears is performing a dance routine while singing the soda company's jingle.
So it's not fair to say that nobody watches comercials with a TiVo... it's just that the ad sponsors have to come up with comercials people will want to watch when given the ability to "gong" them off the stage with a fast forward button.
"The system doesn't work."
Are you saying that banner ads don't work? (Or are you referring to TiVo? Not sure I understand the phrasing of your sentence here. If I misread your point I'm sorry.)
Banner ads do work. That's why Slashdot's still here. If people are genuinely interested in the product being advertised, they go click the link. What doesn't work is that you can only get so much from them. Putting a Tampax banner on Slashdot isn't going to generate a lot of hits. Putting a ThinkGeek banner on Slashdot, however, generates a lot of views from interested people.
There are ways to make advertising work on the web. The first step, however, is not to get your hopes up high about how many people will come. The second is to target your audience. The third is to make your banner provide information that they're interested in. A whoopdeedoo flashy banner won't work as well as saying "This item is cool, here's why."
So could the TiVo think work? Potentially, yes. Start small. The R2D2 toy comes to mind. Show an ad for that during Enterprise. How many people watching that show would click the button? How many of those are genuinely interesting advertising hits? Think about it.
"Derp de derp."
Is this not like the "red button" programmes and adverts on Sky Digital?
A red circle appears at the top of the screen and if you want to know more, hit red and it takes you into a whole "interactive" section?