Watching TV commercials is like paying a highway toll. By giving your attention to the ads, you subsidize the fine programmatic content that you have chosen to watch. You are doing your part to keep television free, as well as learning invaluable information that will help you make informed consumer decisions for the betterment of our market economy as a whole. Salute!
But surely we wouldn’t choose to sit through the commercial breaks if DVR technology allowed us to bypass it. After all, Americans are busy busy busy. Too busy to exercise. Too busy to read. Too busy to cook. Too busy to eat food that can’t be grasped in one hand and gnawed upon while driving. Since we spend an average 4 hours a day watching television, DVR has a potential time savings of one hour a day. A whole hour to spend watching more television!
Yes, DVR scared the crap out of advertisers, who pressured Nielsen to change the way that they report ratings. Traditionally, Nielsen measured the viewership of entire programs, but starting last week, a new metric was provided to advertisers called the ‘Average Commercial Minute,’ and includes minutes for both real-time and playback viewers.
Nielsen’s first report revealed that 70% of people with DVR are still watching the commercials, compared to 94% of those watching real-time TV. I would like to blame this on American laziness or a need to parcel off television viewing to allow for intermissions, but I suspect it’s more insidious: We like the commercials, a perfect marriage of brainless brainwashing. We’d miss them if they were gone. We feel ‘out of the loop’ if we haven’t seen the latest Coke and Pepsi commercials. If there was a channel that showed only commercials, we would watch it.
