New York Times on the Future of Commercials
The New York Times reports that ABC is considering a change in the way it leads into its commercials. This pretty much confirms what I have feared for a while – instead of the annoying, but easily ignored commercials we see now, we will get a more deceptive kind of add, where a large part of the audience doesn’t even realize it is watching a sponsored message:
“We want to bring the audiences right to the commercial so they don’t feel they’ve gone into the commercial,” Mr. Shaw said after a panel discussion at an industry conference yesterday.
“The more commercials are being seen,” he added, “the more value you are to advertisers.”
That opinion was echoed by a major national advertiser. “Anything that engages and holds the audience will benefit everybody,” said Perianne Grignon, vice president for media services at the Sears Holdings Corporation, which owns Kmart and Sears.
“It’s not about labeling a ‘good’ commercial or a ‘bad’ commercial,” Ms. Grignon said. “It’s about engagement.”
I will never figure out who these people are, but do marketers really believe that anybody wants to engage with their crap? The age of commercial pitches as we know it is over – especially now that the AppleTV is shipping and we can just buy the show we want without being bombarded by commercial.
Okay – here is somebody:
From my childhood, I remember a delightfully engaging series of Taster’s Choice commercials starring Anthony Stewart Head (who would later soar to fame as Rupert Giles on TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer). I’m all for bringing back serialized creativity to help the consumer cause — I just can’t guarantee it will keep my husband away from the fast-forward button.
Give me a break. “Delightfully engaging” – that has to be irony. Does nobody in the country teach people critical thinking anymore? Do Americans really just want to be influenced instead of making up their own mind? What is the ‘consumer cause’ this is going to help? Buying more useless crap? To keep me sane, I will assume this person was being ironic…
tags: advertising, tv, marketing, abc, bs
No Comments Yet