More Confessions of a PVR User
Last November I wrote a post for this blog (Confessions of a PVR User) about how my television consumption habits had changed since I'd gotten a PVR.
Six months later, based on my 'focus group' of two (me and my wife), I'm even further convinced that the PVR is not the dire threat to the television advertising industry some thought it would be. Not if the industry learns how to leverage this platform better, that is.
Here's why...
I'm watching more television, not less, because I have the ability to time-shift programming. Watching more television means advertisers, at least in theory, have more opportunities to reach me. (More on that later.)
The programming I am watching is more relevant to me because I am not confined to a choice of what is on live. Let's say I was into Egyptology. If a show about pyramids was on at 3 AM during the week, I'd hardly stay up to watch it. But with my PVR I can record it for playback at a time that is convenient for me. Once again, another win for advertisers who normally wouldn't have been able to reach me through this show.
I used to "skip" forward through commercials 30 seconds at a time, however I found this visually disorienting and acoustically jarring. So now, I fast forward through them at 15-times speed, which turns 30-second spots into 2-second Max Headroom-like "Blipverts". I find this allows me to get a sense of what the commercial is about, yet still navigate quickly through it should I not be interested.
If I am interested, I skip back and watch the commercial in its entirety. In a sense, I am scanning the commercials for relevance, then choosing to watch the ones that are relevant to me (or that my wife insists we watch, such as every single ad for Apple and Telus.)
Even the commercials I am not watching I'm still seeing in their entirety (although at 15-times speed). You can't tell me that some of the original messaging isn't getting through to me, even if only on a subliminal level.
While I'm probably watching fewer commercials than my pre-PVR days, I am giving the ones I choose to watch my undivided attention. Once again, another win for advertisers.
The most unusual thing that's occurred over the last few months has been what I call program sharing. You see, with a PVR it's easier to 'share' programming with another person. My wife, if she's watching TV alone, will sometimes find herself watching a show or commercial that she thinks I would enjoy. So she simply rewinds the live signal, hits record, then shares the recorded segment with me at a later date. Yet another win for advertisers.
Does the advertising industry need to wean itself, and its clients, away from the dependence on the 30-second TV spot? Yes, it does.
Do we need to develop a better understanding of how to effectively use some of the many new media channels (like the PVR) now at our disposal? Yes, we do.
Will the PVR kill advertising on television? No it won't.
