My wife and I tend to watch current TV shows on our computer, using the "full episodes" feature available on the networks' sites. No cable, no TiVo, all free, so long as we're watching the recent episodes (and older episodes are available cheaply for download, or via NetFlix if they're from a previous season). Some people don't like watching TV on their computers, but it works just fine for us.
Here's one puzzle, though: Though there aren't as many commercials as there are on live TV, the commercials tend to be all the same. We see a commercial at the start, then we see the same commercial ten minutes, then the same commercial ten minutes after that. It's not a huge annoyance, since they're just 15 to 30 seconds long. But I don't get it -- why would the advertisers want to bore us, even alienate us, by throwing the same commercial at us again and again? Even if we're paying attention the first time, we won't be the rest of the times. Why not give us a random mix of commercials, so that each one will be at least a little fresh?
I realize that people tend to ignore commercials, and that it may take several viewings for the viewer to absorb what's being said. But I'd think that it would be less annoying, and thus more effective, to have the several viewing be spread over several different episodes, rather than trying to get the viewer to like the product by giving him exactly the same pitch several times within an hour. I suppose I must be wrong, given that lots of smart people pay lots of money to play commercials this way. Still, if anyone has a more detailed explanation of the plan, I'd love to hear it.
It seems quite stupid to me. I guess some Madison Avenue type has sold the companies on this. I hope it ends soon as I can't stand it and I don't watch them at all.
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.
Repetition?
Yes, repetition. Nothing helps you remember things like repetition does.
Repetition sounds great. I wish I had some repetition right now.
Remember: repetition helps you remember.
That or commercials for their own shows. I was just watching The Mentalist on NBC.com and saw three commercials for . . . The Mentalist.
Second, I think there are fewer companies advertising online, for whatever reasons (new medium, questionable market, etc) so the same ads get shown over and over. Insofar as it gets repetitive, they see this as a good thing (see first point, above).
What amazed me was that you could get too conservative for Idaho. :)
PSAs are free. Most every subject matter PSA is recorded as several spots in various forms or styles, and even 10, 20, 30 and 60 second versions of the same spot. Broadcasters get CDs of PSAs by the boatload in the mail. The Advertising Council gives them away free on the web as well. So do other sources.
The only reason for a broadcaster to air the same PSA repetitively is laziness, or some peculiar desire to hammer the same message in the same form until listeners' ears are numb.
Emotional reactions highlight things to tell our brain they're important to remember for some reason.
So you remember the freakin' talking cookie that wants to ask you questions about the show you're watching because it's so freakin' annoying.
Is there anyone in America who hasn't heard of "Head On"? Or know where to apply it directly?
(Small voice) yes. Me. I don't watch much TV.
I heard somewhere that chain restaurants, like Starbucks, will put several stores in the same area. Now, you would think that they would be better off spreading them out a bit - after all, why do you need three places to get caramel macchiatos on the same block? - but, apparently, people see something once, think about it, see it again, get more intrigued, and, upon the third (or fourth or whatever) sighting, decide to go in.
Perhaps advertisers are working under the same theory, although it's hard to imagine people running off in the middle of Boston Legal for some super-absorbent paper towels.
Wow. Powerful stuff.
Google is our friend:
google search on repeated advertising within the same show
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/447322.html
Actually, the answer above is interesting, while not exactly on this question. I bet for 10 bucks, you could get "scribe" to do a little lit search and give you the answer on exaclty the quesiton of intrest (repeated advertising within a show, perhaps repeated ads within webcast shows, where there is little overall ad content.)
Would think that y'all that are law profs and have all kind of free journals to hand, have Lexis, Nexis could search this quickly.
A phone call to Ogilvy would work too. Or even to NBC ad selling department.
Don't say watch ESPN. During the day, they run Sportscenter over and over again. I prefer watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch to that.
If you note the running times of television shows as recent as the mid-70's, you would see they were 50 minutes of show counting credits. We're down to something like 42 now. A network program is almost 2 minutes of show for every one minute of commercials. A show like The West Wing if you cut off the credits and 'the recently on the West wing' I'd make a bet you'd have about 40:30 of show.
TNT had a new show a legal drama called Raising the Bar. They'd run promos every commercial break, at least once if not twice. While shows were running, they'd have promos pop up on the bottom of the screen.
Then there was AMC(American Movie Classics) which did the same except for their show Mad Men. I also got inundated with Outback Steakhouse commercials and coming attractions for the yet to be released movie Lakeview Terrace.
None of this compares to when I was stationed in the Philippines while in the Navy and went to meet my future wife's family. Tacloban, a city of 200,000 people, has one television. Back in the late 80's they ran exactly two commercials.
Cheers,
Bill
To EV's question, I too find it curious -- even a commercial I like in the first play will grate on me by the end of the show. Indeed, the catchier/more memorable the commercial, the more likely it is to be obnoxious after a few repetitions. I have noticed that Hulu is increasingly mixing up the commercials, however.
What bugs me are the screaming commercials on cable and over the air broadcasts and all the stations spamming every show by insisting on displaying their station icons in the lower right corner of each show which sometimes interferes with captioning at the bottom of the shows, which is sometimes shown on Discovery Channel as well as many other stations.
While tivo and mythtv have the ability to skip or strip commercials from the recorded programs, broadcasters are wising up and continually trying new tricks to prevent the commercial skipping. So if you try to strip a program of commercials, you may end up stripping out some of the program as well. Along with this, the broadcasters are starting/ending shows some seconds or even a minute or more earlier or later than the official start time, which is another one of their attempts to mess up tivo/time shifting.
What I find more amazing is how there are suburbs that are dense enough to support two of the giant Wal-Mart stores within a mile and a half of each other.
(Small voice) yes, me.
I never heard of it either. Very small voice, too.
Bad,
Best explanation I've heard. However, when they get really obnoxious, I do remember and won't buy the product. I'll NEVER buy from 1-800-PetMeds and I have three dogs. That commercial has gotten under my skin.
A what?
I would think this would be particularly useful for political advertising, which seems to consist of an amazingly large number of different commercial spots these days.
I work in one of the media companies that put our TV shows online. My team creates the video and metadata used to publish to the web.
Yes, there is repetition of commercials. There are several reasons for this.
First, the market for online video advertising is relatively immature compared to television. The dollars involved and difference in desire for advertisers for prime online eyeballs creates a market that favors a sole advertiser buying out all the spots. With tremendous supply of online eyeballs, the advertisers have their choice of shows, and currently they are choosing to lightly advertise and to 'own' a show for advrtising purposes.
Second, repetition works. When you read "Like a Rock" you will likely be reminded of automobiles and hear a musical refrain in your head. When you are watching a popular show like Lost, and we show you the sames ads repeatedly, you will begin to associate the ad with the show. Every bit of marketing research shows that repetition works and works well, not matter how much people hate it.
Third, the future is going to be very different for online video advertising. All major television networks are working toward targeted video ads that utilize web cookies, registration info, and other deep CRM data to paint an accurate demographic description of individuals to serve up a targeted ad. What this means is that in the near future, during the same episode of a show, an online visitor from Minnesota would be shown an ad for snow tires, while a visitor from San Francisco would be shown an ad for rain tires.
As the market matures, more of this demographic segmentation and targeting will occur and everyone will start to get different ads.
The segmentation of viewers into specific targeted slices that advertisers can target is startling. With companies like Axciom around, advertisers can often identify directly to specific households and individuals. Buy a lot of baby items on your credit card? It's fairly straightforward for a CRM-based advertising systems to tie your online identity to your purchasing behavior and start showing you ads for diapers.
I hope this helps answer your questions.
"Every bit of marketing research shows that repetition works and works well, not matter how much people hate it"
Whatever your research thinks, keep using tactics that results in people hating what you produce. That will only help motivate hackers to write the applications or extensions that will help to "fingerprint" your ads so that current (mythtv, tivo, other computer based dvrs) and future time shifting applications and hardware will easily delete your annoying garbage and assist in making programs watchable again.
Dolby has already announced a new feature that "normalizes" sound levels to defeat the screaming commercials, another tactic that I'm sure your marketing research says works. That's a commercial company responding to what they perceive as a feature that their customers want. It will take less than a day for hackers to duplicate this feature into mythtv, tivo and other time shifting applications.
DVRs, or time shifting applications, and watching "television" is all going to be happening on computers, or with dvr hardware controlled by hackable operating systems (tivo is linux, mythtv is linux, ATI is open sourcing their video card firmware, everything else, including even some of Microsoft is moving to open source making all the software hackable now or in the very near future). While mythtv currently does not have the ability to "fingerprint" ads because the project simply skips them automatically instead, it is only a matter of time for the project to gain the "fingerprinting" ability because of broadcasters adopting tactics to attempt to prevent ad skipping and to disrupt time shifting (starting and ending programs seconds/minutes before or after the official start/end times. Once the software has the ability to "fingerprint" ads and store the "fingerprints" in the dvr application's database, then it will be extremely easy for the dvr software to either remove ads on the fly, or not record them altogether.
The next battle will be product placement in the shows themselves, and hackers creating the ability to automatically blank out advertised brands or overlay the advertised brands with a different brand or with other wording, or with some attractive designs created by the dvr owner or collected by a community of developers and downloaded to the dvr application by the dvr owner. This will be simple for product placement that doesn't move, a database of objects will need to be created (soda cans, coffee pots, laptops, hats, etc.), along with a database of images to overlay the objects with a large variety of sizes to cover all the different object sizes. Blanking out or overlaying product placement objects that move will be a bigger challenge, but the tougher the challenge the more hackers willing to try. I give a beta version of blanking out or overlaying moving objects about a week to creation, with a production version (1.0+) a few weeks later.
Cookies? Firefox usage is growing in the US and even larger internationally. So are the extensions that block/enable javascript, cookies, flash, ads, and other browser functions. And IE itself is now playing catch up to Firefox abilities, so it's only a matter of time for when they automatically delete cookies every time the browser session ends (I believe they announced this capability with the version that is forthcoming that also has tabs?).
Just require cookies, you say? There are ways around this. Or lose the eyeballs. Require an interstitial ad prior to being able to view content, you say? Those who have tried have watched their visitor/user base plummet. Your site isn't the only site for the content you are plugging with ads. And if the tactics become even more annoying, there will always be individuals somewhere on the internet willing to put in the time to download your content (regardless of whatever drm or other tactics you try to prevent recording), transcode the content to remove the ads and then make that commercial-free show/movie/whatever available for others to consume.
Screaming commercials? Repetitive commercials? Reliance on cookies? Registration requirements to view content? Pay careful attention to what price the RIAA, MPAA and news organizations are paying for their stubbornness and their failure to innovate. That's your future.
I don't disagree that there are many ways around the current advertising systems. I'm a technologist and sue many of them myself. There will always be ways around 'the system' and honestly we are't trying to stop a determined hacker (it costs too much).
Product placement is here and it will continue. I don't think automated placement (or blanking) of products will occur. It's just too damn hard. Human vision is extremely good and it is difficult to fool it at the cost levels required to make it practical for television. You can drop a million dollars on a scene in a motion picture, but not on a soda pop can in a tv show.
But for most viewers of television and online shows, they don't go to extraordinary lengths to avoid commercials. There will always be those that prefer to d/l torrents of their shows without commercials rather than go to web site.
We are not after those people. we are after people that missed the show when it aired and want a simple and easy way to watch it. We attempt to give our fans their shows, when they want them, where they want them.
Like it or not, advertising works. Repetition works. Jingles work. Loud ads work. Celebrity endorsements work. It is a wonderful revenue stream that pays for most of the programming that people watch. E-sell-through (iTunes, Amazon, etc.) is rising, but the dominant way television is paid for is via advertising.
The fact is that it costs quite a bit to make television programming and currently advertising is the best way to pay for it.
We are engaging in multiple distribution methods and business models now and with more on the way. Believe me, those inside media companies are not ignorant of the headache things like DRM or registration create, but we are for-profit companies and need to make money. It's a difficult balance, but as with most things, the marketplace will decide what is the best method.
Spam works. It pays to do it, or people wouldn't waste their time doing it.
What people in this thread have been saying is that they dislike it, some with great intensity. People like us avoid brands that have annoyed us; no bad jingle goes unpunished.
Thus what you're saying is that people unlike us pay for the programming, and we should be grateful that you've found a scheme that works in such a way. We understand that, but that doesn't make up for it. My response is: I'd rather pay a (very) small amount to view a show once without interruptions, but that is never an option. I mostly end up changing channels or going away from the TV without coming back... I've missed a lot of ends of shows that way, and it ultimately doesn't matter much.
In other words, such marketing as has been described is pricing the show beyond our means (of tolerance).
Tell them what you are going to tell them.
Tell them.
Tell them what you just told them.
Review.