• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, November 18, 2004

When I read the stories about how TiVo will soon no longer skip past advertising, I was kind of depressed. Like when your iPod battery dies halfway through the flight. But then, when other news stories revealed that from the get-go TiVo was courting advertisers, I felt like I did when my big sister told me there was no Santa Claus.

Perhaps I was naive in thinking that $12.95 a month was the trade off for being able to skip commercials on network TV. I mean, I rationalize my $130 a month cable bill as a trade off for getting uncut R-rated movies without commercials (even though I see all of the good ones in theaters months before they hit cable.)

When "2001: A Space Odyssey" came out back in the day, I remember marveling at the special effects and how real everything looked. What helped make it real was brand names (like Pan Am) plastered everywhere. Surely an overstatement, I thought at the time. Then "Minority Report" appeared with the animated commercials on cereal boxes and I stopped being amazed or amused.

Not a day goes by that somebody doesn't introduce yet another venue for advertising from windows of vacant storefronts to wash-off tattoos to trick mirrors that turns into ads when a patron approaches. Before long, we will all feel like we live in Times Square. But the more we are exposed to, the more we ignore. The more we ignore, the more advertisers feel like they have to turn up the volume to regain our attention. And so we flee to the TiVo's of this world that promise a respite from the onslaught of ad messages.

"TiVo is dependent on a psychology," Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg and author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality" tells the L.A. Times. "It is not just a technology. You don't want people to intrude in your life. That's the whole point of it - to give you control of that mechanism."

Aside from covering nearly every inch of our lives with place-based advertising, network TV is the primary reason people rushed out to get a TiVo. Nearly a third of every primetime hour is now a cacophony of ads and promos with many of them bleeding on to the screen of the shows themselves. Product placement is so obvious that it pisses off viewers. And if no one is buying a certain model of your car, you might as WELL give them away for the publicity.

I have been in and around the media business long enough to understand that it is unreasonable to expect consumers not to pay for content by watching ads. But I think we are dangerously close to (dare I say it) the tipping point where the volume of advertising has overwhelmed consumers and they have begun to simply shut it out. Recent studies show the diminished value consumers put in brands that were built on multi-million (or billion) dollar marketing superstructures. And thanks to advances in the manufacturing process there is little real difference between brands, except in perception.

As Mookie Tenembaum has said in recent interviews, "We must become partners with consumers and treat them as you would want to be treated yourself." This does not mean figuring out new, bigger, bolder, louder, crasser ways to piss off consumers, it means using all this new tracking technology online and increasingly in the cable market to deduce what consumers are in the market for and give them that information.

Does this mean the end of prospecting with ads, of hoping to catch more fish by using a bigger net? Probably. But the trade off will be a reconnection with consumers who right now want little or nothing to do with us.