I know it sounds crazy, but I think this is an idea who will catch on. Anyone with a background in business, marketing, advertising, economics, communications - and maybe even politics, should pay close attention. TiVo has introduced a new service.
No big deal, you say - they came out with lots of new services in the past six months. Well, that is true, they have. I must admit that. But this one is revolutionary. It fills a niche in the potential that is an inherent part of the TiVo. The new service is
TiVo Product Watch. The service is simple - it does just what the name implies. It grabs the TiVo servers by the nose and says, "Look, I am shopping for such-and-such a sort of product, and I want you go go out and hunt me up some commercials for those". Some advertising people are probably cringing right about now. Some marketing people are probably drooling. Some business people probably have dollar signs in their eyes.
This is the new future of advertising. Forget spam. Spam is the cancer born of a hundred year old antiquated notion that as advertising got cheaper, you just bombarded consumers with a greater volume of advertising. The problem with spam is that it has gone asymptotic - easy to send, impossible to like. Today, with spam, you just keep consumers from paying attention to
any advertising. Their blood pressure goes up when they see it. They trust it less, and they dislike advertisers and marketers more. Worse, they cannot reliably get their email anymore because it is glutted with ads from advertisers. Worse yet, word has come out that in fact some big name, supposedly respectable companies are behind spam. They are funding the companies that do it, furnishing them with ads, or doing it themselves. Not most big name companies, of course. But a few.
Well, this is the
cool way to get ads. The one that makes sense for the modernized technology we all have these days in our dens, living rooms, and bedrooms. The idea is simply this: don't bombard me with every ad from every company that wants to sell me anything - give me ads for stuff that I actually want, and I will tell you what that is.
If you got your degree in one of those subjects I just mentioned, you might find yourself having a "everything they told us was wrong" epiphany later this year. The great thing about this idea is that its implications do not end with what this new service is delivering. Think about TV. You are on a television web site, and you have been watching TV your whole life. Ten minutes of every half hour - twenty minutes of every hour, and about thirty to forty of every minutes is is made up of commercials. They are television broadcast ads. Is that bad? No, that is potential. And potential is very good karma for somebody! Just think if those minutes of mostly wasted broadcast time was spent showing you something you could buy that you actually wanted to own or use. Just think if it contained information you actually wanted to learn. That is a bubble-bursting, rocket-flying, butt-kicking idea! Know what? We are probably all going to live to see it. Probably will not be that far off.
Television has already gone digital, podcasts are listened to in many homes and cars - and now video blogging is growing too. How you get the commercials you actually want is immaterial. The
fact that you
are going to get them is inevitable. The next few years and probably quarters, there is going to be quite a lot of scrambling as people figure out what the best way to get you the ads or whatever you most want to see.
Know what? A lot of the work has already been done. Companies like Google and Yahoo have spent a lot of thinking, time, and money to bring you that on the web. Google has made billions showing people the ads for stuff they want to buy unobtrusively on web pages, so they can spot them out of the corner of their eye. If they are interested, they click the ad. If not, they ignore it. Those ads are carefully targeted - and they pay off big for Google, the advertisers, and really - if you think about it - the consumer too. They are part of the transaction too. That will be the next phase of this revolution in advertising.
I have an uncle in the direct-marketing advertising sector and I pushed this idea on him years ago. He was none to keen on the idea because it didn't fit the way the advertising industry liked to do things - which was the way they had always done things. But consumers did not like that way, and they would like this way, I argued, to no avail. I wrote to TiVo a long time ago and told them they should make it easier for consumers to get ads for products they actually want to get. If I could not convince my own uncle there was no way I was going to convince them. I mentioned the same belief in this to other people, and they all thought I was wrong too.
I am as sure now as I ever was that this is right, and that the same technology which initially tipped the value scale one way - to bring us spam - is going to tip it the other way to give us gourmet-quality advertising. Advertising, whatever it is that goes in those little 10 minute gaps during shows, is what makes television
go. Just as important as the electricity is to your TV set, is the revenue from advertising that goes from advertisers - to TV stations - to TV/movie studios.
Over a dozen years ago, I had another crazy idea which I posted on AOL. I proposed that "in the future", when faster communications than the 14.4K modems we had arrived, people would be able to preview audio clips of some songs on an album, and decide if they liked them. If they did, they would purchase the album and could walk away while the album downloaded. Know what that service is called today? It is called iTunes, and it is a billion-dollar business for Apple, the same company who made that computer that I typed that message into and posted it so other people around the world could look at it. Was that a good "idea"? No, that was inevitable - like gravity. Things were already headed in that direction. When communications speeds got faster, that business was inevitable. The economics and technology of television viewing have changed a lot in the past few years. The habits and practices of the advertising industry, not all but an obsequious minority, have run amuck. And those two things are on a collision course. TiVo's solution to the challenge of providing gourmet-quality advertising is simple. You do it just like you do your shopping. When you buy goods, you roll down the aisle at the supermarket, flip through a catalog, or make a shopping list. Then you buy the stuff you want. So with TiVo's new system, you give it your shopping list of things you need to see some choices to mull over which to buy - and it does the leg work. It hunts them up while you are off doing something else. Then, when you have time - you lean back and play the custom show it has put together for you. Only, the show is not a sitcom or a ball game - it is the polished research project it has put together for you, just to help you make your decision on which product you want to buy in that category. The process winds up being the same as you use to watch shows on TiVo. You tell it what you want to see, and TiVo fetches it for you when it is on. Then, you play it back when you have the time - on your schedule - not on a network programming air time schedule. If you have a TiVo series 2 system, you can sign up for the new service now on their website. Within three days, you will have access to it. http://www.tivo.com/1.2.20.asp
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