• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, June 8, 2009

With ratings erosion still fast and furious -- especially among broadcast networks -- and the number of video platforms still growing, TV marketers need to be even more aggressive in asking viewers for their complete attention to 30-second commercials. What they need is to ask viewers not to watch other commercials.

Take the latest marketing effort for Microsoft's new Bing search product, which has a seemingly impossible mountain to climb over: Google.

One of the pieces of the marketing campaign connects to Hulu, the popular video site from NBC Universal/News Corp. Viewers watching an hour-long telethon-like event called "Bing-a-thon" will get rewards entitling them to watch TV shows or movies commercial-free on Hulu.

Stuart Elliott of the New York Times puts this in its proper prospective: "Yes, you have to watch a commercial to avoid watching other commercials."

But all this got me to thinking: What if this concept were applied to traditional TV? It's working already in a small way, like when big TV national advertisers buy a sponsorship for an episode of a show which is aired "commercial-free" or "with limited commercial interruption."

But this is kind of passive. What if TV marketers were more aggressive? "Watch our commercial tomorrow night at 9 p.m. on NBC, and watch NBC commercial-free for one week. On us." Fore sure, NBC would charge a premium for this effort.

Would that be worth it? Maybe not next year, or the year after -- but at some point getting mass audiences to be exposed to product messages will be drastically harder, if not impossible.

Enticing viewers will only get more complicated. Getting viewers to become engaged with marketing messages on their creative merits alone doesn't seem to be enough.

Watch for TV marketers to take more forceful steps.