• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, May 3, 2007

To listen to Don Imus and his attorneys, he broke no rules and should be given his job back. To listen to TiVo launch its new marketing campaign, viewers should break as many rules as possible.

Imus believes his CBS Radio contract pushes him to do edgy skits -- it's his First Amendment right, after all. Imus says he didn't break any strict Federal Communication Commission rules -- no profanity to speak of, unless the bigoted remarks of the Imus radio character were in fact profane.

Concerning the rules for TiVo, the DVR service company would like it if viewers broke a few.  You know, the one that gave TiVo one of its claims to fame, the rule that you always fast-forward through commercials. Why? Because TiVo is starting up a new advertising campaign to help kick-start the TiVo service, which has been increasingly pushed to the side by cable and satellite TV services with their own unbranded digital video recorders.

When it comes to the FCC, however, rules are not to be broken -- not since the commission severely increased the penalties for stations that break FCC profanity rules. Imus says he's a good boy in this specific regard -- though he did apologize for his remarks. He believes CBS owes him $40 million for wrongly firing him.

Imus got a lot of publicity -- virtually all negative. TiVo is looking for something else, anything to grow its anemic growth subscriber rate, less than 2% from Jan. 31 over over a year ago.

So a number of goofy, college-humor commercials -- complete with TiVo's cartoon antenna logo on top of people's heads, including that of NBC's "Today" critic, Gene Shalit -- will make their way to TV screens, showing consumers the positive points about the time-shifted TV service and hardware.

Imus could use some marketing as well -- telling the world that he is in fact a funny, introspective, smart-on-politics, guy who is looking for a new gig. The commercial should rip him up  -- humorously, of course. Hairstyle? That would be his choice.

It's a commercial you wouldn't skip over.