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Youngsters Skip DVR Ads Less Than Seniors
Dekortage writes "Analyzing DVR viewing research, Ad Age has noted something unexpected: older DVR users are more likely to skip ads than younger DVR users. The skew is particularly apparent among men: 50% of seniors skipping all the ads, but only 20% of teens do so. Women of any age group tend to be around 35%. Ad Age hypothesizes that younger viewers 'just pay attention to other media when the ads are on TV or, worse yet, perhaps the TV is just 'background music'... I always thought that ad skipping was a major benefit of DVRs. Do you skip all the ads?"
I've wondered if music, despite our need for it, is just a passive enjoyment source. What I mean is that it takes no energy at all to simply have background music play while we are actively engaged in something else. Through this, the value of music is diminished to the point of zero because in the end anything will do.
Contrast this with TV or movies which require a much more concentrated effort to enjoy. While there are certainly some TV shows which you can tune out for half an hour and not miss anything, in general watching the boobtube means imposing a restriction on your activities for that time period. Because of this, the value of TV and visual media is perceived higher than music.
With the advent of on-demand television/movies, the value of TV and movies drops considerably lower. While still higher than zero due to the inability to produce shows of any quality immediately (as would be possible with music throughhumming to yourself or singing in the shower), the value is lower due to the loss of time restriction. Whereas you would have to assign a timeslot to watch TV, now you can pick it up any time, even to the extent that video playback was just background noise.
What's more, once viewers stop paying attention to anything they aren't really interested in, advertisers are going to start clamoring for both more technical restrictions built into the device and more in-line advertising (through advertisement bars and in-show placements).
The future is going to suck for TV.
As a young person who, thankfully, doesn't really watch TV on a regular basis I can tell you the reasoning for this is part of why I don't.
Say you're watching a show and an ad comes on, you've got a good three minutes, at least, before your show comes back. So you find something else good to watch until it goes to commercial. Then you switch back, but wait, show #1 is still on commercial, find show #3. When it goes to commercial #1 is probably back, if not maybe number #2. The way shows repeat themselves over and over again and the increasing length of commercial breaks means you can just about watch two or three shows at a time if you're intent on doing so.
Finding three good shows to skip between, that's the challenge. I can rarely find one, which may explain why catching 50 minutes of one show or 10 minutes of five different ones all comes out about the same in the end.
I would actually go beyond what you said--you said that for instance, corporate sponsorship of stadiums is a new thing. Maybe corporate, but in years past it would have been an individual. Think of in the US have many buildings (universities, etc) are named after people who gave money to build them--Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.
Going back even farther in history, Pompeii gives countless examples of graffiti that showed politics then was no different than today--slanderous and brutal! Same for advertisements, they were everywhere.
I don't have a DVR but I think I can explain this quite simply. I don't buy a TV to watch ads. Myself, being an old fart, just wants to watch the highlighted programs that I know I will like. I no longer want to "try" watching much unless it really grabs my interest. By flooding me with ads, the TV companies have made it almost impossible to get me interested in any new series that I might want to watch. I'm more likely to read about it in a paper/online or pick up on it via word of mouth once it's been established for about two or three series. Thus, I have a tendency to totally skip all ads for anything.
If I was a kid today, I wouldn't see the point in TV at all. It's all just ads. When I was younger, there were a handful of ads that, even back then, I used as a convenient break in my programs to use the bathroom, make a drink etc. But now there's nothing of interest to them, and if they manually skipped them all they'd never get anything done. They are actually doing what the TV companies would fear most - they are learning to completely ignore ads in all media because they are saturated with them from an early age in all media. That's a good skill for them to have, I say. Thus, they can leave them playing and it makes little difference.
Myself and my wife gave up on broadcast TV about five years ago. By that I mean that the TV is now just a display device - we watch DVD's (and even still videos) and we play games on it all the time. But that's pretty much it. We have a satellite subscription on the lowest paid rate because then we get the "old programs" channels and things like Discovery but we're even considering giving that up because it's no longer of much value to us. We watch a "new" program about once a year, if that. But if I stumble across a favourite, I'll watch it if I'm in the mood.
The chances are that we only watch maybe one or two half-hour programs a night now and only about three or four nights a week unless we are working hard. That's WAY down on our previous rates. Most of the programs we do watch are re-runs that we know we are going to enjoy (although they are being slowly ruined by being edited for broadcasting during the day and then repeated with those same edits during the evening - so we "jar" on the gaps because we know the programs well enough to know something "naughty" was cut out, even though it's way past most people's bedtime). We have the remote on hand to mute all the adverts (because of the "let's raise advert volume levels" stupidity) and wait for the channel banner until we turn it back on. In the gap, we read, make phonecalls or prepare food. A lot of the time we just switch the thing off or, if our interest was peaked by a favourite program being on but it being yet another repeat of that episode we've watched a thousand times, what we will do is dig out our "complete set" DVD and choose a better episode of the same series.
Broadcast TV is slowly dying under the weight of the ads, for which the good programming has given way - it has been for years. They are poor quality (especially the ones that seem US-based when broadcast to a UK audience - the Cillit Bang man really needs a volume-reduction operation and the "US advert with dubbed fake UK voices" is just too grating when it's every other advert), uninteresting, not well targetted, over-used, over-frequent, and too forced. And the programs that they are replacing are becoming more like adverts every day. Even the bloody movies are adverts now (the bit in "I Robot" about the trainers really annoyed me in an otherwise very enjoyable film).
I can remember a time when I was younger, when a Saturday night was a non-stop run of fantastic programs, some old, some new and some which even then were 20-year-old repeats but it didn't show that badly - that made you stay in front of the TV all evening. The example that my wife likes to use is Tony Hancock (although we're both far too young to remember it the first time around, that's our sort of humour and type of era/program
Ads work on the majority. On me, they usually have the opposite effect (not going to buy stuff that's advertised in particularly annoying/stupid/psychologically exploitive ways).
Ads can be annoying and overdone, but they are a product of a free capitalistic society.
Ads take away the consumers freedom to chose the better product (yes - ads _work_ that way on many people. There are subconscious effects that are very, very hard to suppress. Most people can't do this at all, which is one of the reasons why ads work so well), shifting the focus on the product that is marketed best. Quite possibly, ads are what turns customers into consumers.
If you came up with a formula for a soda that tastes better than the established alternatives while being healthier, do you think it'd fly off the shelves ? Nope. It's not Coke or Pepsi. You'd first have to fight a marketing battle against companies whose marketing budget is probably a few orders of magnitude larger than what your company is worth. And they'd fight your better product with tooth and claw - not by making their products better, but by stepping up their marketing efforts.
"Ads can be annoying and overdone, but they are a product of a free capitalistic society. Considering the available societal alternatives (China, Myanmar, and Cuba come to mind), I'll take a few ads and nearly constant product placement. Besides, I didn't buy a Tivo for nothing!"
It's not an either/or situation. It's totally feasible to have a free capitalistic society without unregulated advertising. In fact, unregulated advertising hurts capitalism.
A central pillar of capitalism (from Adam Smith's original work) is that people buy things they need or desire. If people are tricked into buying things they don't need or desire (whether via deception, lies, force or just clever advertising), then classical capitalist theory breaks down and the efficiency which makes capitalism great, goes out the window!
I just use BitTorrent. I have a client that broadcatches my favorite shows from RSS feeds. They are always in matroska format 720p (half hour shows run about 500 MB, hour longs about 1 GB). I have a cron job that runs every 15 minutes detecting if a torrent has finished downloading and I am seeding. If it has, then the file is unrared, extracted from it's mkv format container, audio gets converted from AC3 -> 6 channel PCM -> 6 channel AAC, video is kept as is (H.264), then it is remuxed into mp4 format and served up to my media server (uShare). Then the file automatically shows up in my media server when I turn on the PS3 (I have a Perl script for all this). This whole process takes from 20 mins to 2 hours for the torrent download, then 10-15 minutes for the file conversion. The result is ad-free beautiful 720p shows that I can watch anytime. I thought this was the Slashdot way! Who needs a DVR? All you need are seeders... Seed plz!
It's interesting that this came up, because I've been thinking about this subject quite a bit in the last week or so. Interesting enough, in fact, that I'll undo my mods to reply in the affirmative.
Manners demand that I preface the following by saying that I am not trying to brag, I am trying to provide some bona fides. I'm a smart guy with a strong engineer's mind. I read a newspaper, watch a television news program, and browse dozens of web feeds every day. My library contains more than a thousand volumes. I spend more time than the average person on introspection and self-analysis. Additionally, I'm extremely stubborn. The surest way to get me to not do something is to try to browbeat me into doing it.
Like many of you, I didn't think advertising worked on me. Yet a couple of weeks ago I inexplicably found myself spending half an hour at marines.com looking into enlistment. That the Marines are heavily advertised during adult swim, which I often have on while coding, can't be a coincidence.
World-class advertisers are very good at what they do. They literally have it down to a science. Even if you can use your intellect to protect yourself from the overt message, there's still the more subtle psychological cues and even sheer repetition if nothing else works. It wasn't that long ago the Marines couldn't get enough recruits. The AP reported this week that they've met 142% of their recruiting goal for April. That's not likely to be a coincidence either.