Commentary

Skipping Commercials Is Bad News For Advertisers -- Says One Who Pushed It To Consumers

TV advertising medical alert: The 30-second commercial spot business indeed may be in critical condition, according to Tom Rogers, CEO of TiVo.

TV marketers do have an alternative: buy into TiVo for its helpful marketing and/or research tools. "In the next two to three years, the television industry is going to face a crisis more severe for it than our current financial crisis," Rogers reportedly said during the recent Association of National Advertisers conference last week.

The biggest irony doesn't need much explaining here. TiVo has been the poster child of the business that has put TV marketers into this quandary in the first place -- with its industry-shaking fast-forwarding technology that lets viewers skip past commercial messages.

To TiVo's credit, the company isn't Replay TV, which had the technology in its DVR machines allowing for automatic skipping of 30-second commercials. TV networks and studios were quick to put a kibosh on that.

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Rogers says DVRs will get into 50 million or 60 million homes in three years -- and that alarm bells should be ringing.

CBS Executive Vice President-Research And Planning David Poltrack says all this needs to be brought down a notch. Sure, there are about 28 million homes out there currently with DVRs. But the growth rate is slowing. Not only that, but how can consumers pay for all this technology stuff when the recession is just around the corner?

TiVo has some of the finest DVR software out there -- but, as we all know, bigger media companies have their own DVR services and agendas.

Hitting marketers for a hard sell at the ANA isn't the way to get business -- not in this economic environment. In a recession, marketers tend to pull back, get more conservative, and buy even more traditional media like TV and 30-second commercials -- or at least devote a greater percentage of what little media money they have to traditional media.

In the broader TV scheme of things, TiVo still plays both sides. It sells media agencies and networks second-by-second viewership data and new marketing platforms for their commercial messages, while still giving consumers the power to skip through traditional TV commercials.

TV networks may understand the technological DVR cat is out of the bag, but they would prefer not to be reminded of it --- as well as paying for it. Twice.

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