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TiVo Lets You Respond to Ads
WalletBoy writes "TiVo is implementing a new feature in their Series 2 recorders where viewers can choose to have their personal-contact information sent to advertisers when certain commercials air using just their remote control." This is actually exactly how I think advertising should work. If I want more information, I can press thumbs up and have my email address sent to the advertiser. It's opt-in. I'm sure it will work because they use the same concept for letting you record a show by pressing thumbs up when a commercial for it is airing. If only every commercial supported these functions. Now if only MTV would use the same thing to email me song info for videos I like instead of covering the screen in tacky text.
Don't like it. Too much potential for abuse.
Just imagine someone getting ahold of your remote and the 'fun' they could have with this feature at your expense.
surely the point of PVRs / Tivo etc is to miss the adds. Or am I new here ?
Two wrongs may not make a right, but three
That's news to me.
...
When I was resting up before flying back home from LSM I was at a hotel [Kyriad rocks btw] with MTV.de and I'd say most of the daytime shows were "pimp my ride" and "newly weds" [genre].
They played some music here and there and showed constantly repetitive SMS ads [e.g. order this ring tone, get this logo, etc].
It's like they forgot that the M stands for Music
Also if I was a parent I'd buy my kids music on the condition they didn't watch that brainwashing bullshit that is "kids oriented television".
Frankly I'd rather a kid watched a porno then the "chocobot powerhour" that is kids programming...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Probably not. A good portion of advertising isn't there so that you have an immediate desire to go out and buy something. When Dunkin Donuts runs ads for their new random beverage, they don't figure that the thousands of people watching the game will go run out and buy a drink *that instant*.
But if you've got to choose between Dunkin Donuts and some place you've never heard of before, being familiar with the "variety" and "quality" of Dunkin Donuts products from their commercials, even if you're not a regular Dunkin customer, you may decide to walk in and grab a coffee there instead of the place across the street.
I mean, Beer ads don't really make me want beer, car ads don't make me want a car... almost any ad I've ever watched hardly makes me want anything (except sex, which seems to be the cardinal rule of good advertising - lots of sex appeal). I'd shut them all off if I could. I never have any intention of buying anything I don't "want". But who knows how the ads influence my purchasing decisions?
[on that note, yeah, it is excessive for tampon commercials to be piped into a house with 3 20-something guys as the only residents.]
There is no way I'm logging into my DVR when I watch TV, but not sure how they would work the demographics without 'switching' roles. What my bride, child, and I watch are quite different. That said, can't think why I would ever actually watch a commercial just to rate it. Bad enough I can only 'fast forward' rather than jump ahead on my DirectTV DVR.
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I respond to everything that Tivo has been doing that's pro-advertising and anti-customer by calling them and speaking to a supervisor.
Yeah, the CSRs and their supervisors probably don't care (and in fact, the last time I called to complain about them putting ads in when I fast foward was met with "tough, it's not of question of if, it's a matter of when.") but I still call to let them know.
Luckily, I was recently blessed with a free DirecTivo and a year of free receiver payments because DirecTV's new screensaver functionality pushed down w/their most recent firmware updates gets recorded by my Tivo and cannot be disabled...
I will be cancelling my Tivo subscription this week (now that I am satisfied with my DirecTivo's performance and price) and letting them know that I am not just canceling due to DirecTivo, I'm cancelling due to their pro-advertising and anti- customer stance.
you give the thumbs up to one marketer, and they just sell your information to tons of other ones?
what guarantee do they provide that this is safe?
In the same vein, I'd like a button that tells them "This is the dumbest commercial I've ever seen...I will never buy this product and you need to fire your Ad agency."
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We all want to see ads for products which appeal to us and the advertising industry spends billions each year trying to create ads for products which appeal to us. Yet, for some reason, the majority of ads just annoy us. Even ignoring those aimed at a different target, that's still a pretty hit-and-miss affair for something which should be an exact science by now.
I'm all for anything which would improve the system and more direct feedback seems like a good idea.
Advertising: The necessary, but evil grease which keep capitalism moving.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
When I got DirecTV some 4 or 5 years ago, it had this same function. When watching a commercial an graphic "I" would appear to mean that it's interactive. If you pressed the "I" button on the remote it would ask if you wanted more information mailed to you.
Not every commercial had this mind you. In fact only one I know of, some SUV commercial did this.
DirecTV has since got rid of it. They had a number of interactive features they since gotten rid of. I used to be able to enter a zip code and get weather. It would also store my favorite cities. One channel, Bloomberg maybe, let me store stock tickers, and it would display the current stock price. So much for interactive TV.
What I really want is a way to vote on commercials. If I give it a thumbs down I don't want to see it again. Or better yet, let me subscribe to a show, for a small fee, and let me watch it commercial free. Stop rehashing the same bad ideas please.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Lois, this isn't my Batman glass. - Peter
Until you get that phone call from the wife/girlfriend - "Oh, honey, on your way [home|over] would you be a dear and stop by and pick up some tampons for me..."
At which point you will probably grab whatever has a brand name on it you recognize and get the heck out of hte store as quick as you can.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
You miss the point.
Advertisers don't care if their ads are good. They just want their products name in your head when you need something of that class of item. All else being equal, you'll probably buy the brand thats in your head when you go out to buy that class of item.
Advertisers would absolutely love that feedback as well. Old Navy comes to mind...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
Entertaining for a moment the fiction that, in some parallel universe, I might actually want TV advertisers to have my contact details, I can still see some major problems with this.
The Yahoo! article speaks about sending your 'contact details' to an advertiser: the Slashdot poster interprets this as meaning 'email address'. The question is, "which email address?". I currently only use tagged disposable addresses (of the kind supported by SneakEmail, for instance) for communication with companies. This allows me to dump them if the company sells them on or won't take 'unsubscribe' for an answer. It also fingers the culprit if the address does get abused. So I'd like my hypothetical TiVo to let me specify the address that I want to send to each advertiser.
But if I can do that, then that opens the door to all kinds of abuse. Think of the fun I could have by entering the address of the person who last flamed me on Usenet and then spending the evening clicking through ads on the crappiest channel I can find. So my guess is that if TiVo supports sending email addresses, it will only send the user's address as registered with TiVo, making it impossible to figure out exactly which piece of sneaking mainsleaze scum sold that address to every mailing list company on the planet (and meaning that when I'm eventually forced to abandon that address, I lose contact with all the advertisers I did want to hear from).
This is part of a larger question: which information will it send to advertisers. My guess is that it would send a complete 'packet', including phone, physical address and email. What if I want an advertiser to email me, but not to phone me? Or if I want them to send their brochures to my house (at some measurable cost to them) but not spam my inbox (at negligible cost) four times a week? I'd hope there'd be some way of releasing information selectively, but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't.
If I owned a TiVo the first thing I'd do would be to disable this feature, and the second thing I'd do would be to enter garbage data in all the fields I could, just in case.