A status report on DVR users vs. advertisers

Monday, December 04, 2006

There is an interesting article on Forbes about all the solution advertisers have come up with to show their ads to DVR users. The article, wrote by Rachel Rosmarin, is a good status report on the ongoing “battle” between the two worlds: customers and advertisers.

The first group seemed to have the edge over the latter because with a single click the users would just skip all the advertisements. Because of the adoption rate of DVR however this is becoming a real problem for the advertisers. So they started to think about ways to circumvent this limitation (on their side) to still promote their products and messages.

Some of them chose a wise approach. As wrote by the Forbes’ Technology Reporter “Coca-Cola, KFC, and General Electric have all featured hidden messages designed especially to entice DVR owners”. This is the right way to treat the situation because gives the customers a reason to actually watch the commercial.

There may be a lot of intransigent viewer that just do not want to see an ad but some of us skip the ads just because they are boring and repetitive (read no reason to watch them). Instead by adding a good mini-story or giving us some small gifts (like KFC’s coupons) the advertisers do not have to trick the viewer.

This brings us to the wrong approach used by other advertisers that just want to thrust down our throat the commercials. So they use 30-second still images or they even disable, on some machines, the fast-forwarding. As the reporter says these are “tricks” and in the end they could do more harm than good to the product or the brand.

So finally there must some way to better treat the customers and a possible solution is the one introduced recently by TiVo: ask the viewer if he wants to see the commercial before deleting a recording. It may not be perfect but at least we are not forced to see.

Another solution, a better one, would be to actually improve the commercials themselves adding storylines or awarding prices to those who watch the ads. It would certainly cost less than invest a lot of cash to find ways to disable fast-forwarding. And it would also improve the relationship between the brand and the customer.