To Fast-Forward or Press Play

Who likes to watch their favorite shows without having to sit through those irrelevant advertisements? I do! And so do a lot of other people. It’s great not having to be bored to death by those ads. Especially ones that are played ALL the time. So having DVR sounds like a perfect idea because who would pass up the opportunity to live without television ads? Sure it costs money, but if you watch enough television, it will eventually pay off. I, personally, have not experienced a ton of DVR usage because I do not own one, but when I’m at a friend’s house and we’re catching up on a show, fast-forwarding through the ads gives me a split feeling. Part of me is really glad that I don’t have to suffer through watching ads. But the other part of me wonders what was in those ads and if they were actually interesting. I find that sometimes advertisements can be enticing based on their cleverness or even on the odd stuff that gets put into them. Excellently made advertisements make you feel some kind of positive emotion so that you find them entertaining. It’s what compels the audience (meaning us) to invest in their product. It’s also what the television shows make revenue off of. So if we have our nice DVR which gives us the ability to “play God” and skip the barrage of advertisements, where will the money for the TV shows go? If DVRs become even more common there is a high chance that the advertising industry will notice that their ads are not being viewed and will stop paying for their ads to be placed on television. Sure, they can find other places to weasel in their product placement, but then the revenue for the television companies will go down the drain. An interesting observation made by Rebecca Greenfield in The Atlantic (see link below) is that because of this surge in DVR usage, the advertising industry is teaming up with the television companies to create ads with the various channels’ characters or actors so that the viewers will press that PLAY button and commence watching only to find that they’ve been tricked into watching an ad. It’s genius. Maybe this is the new way to keep advertising in the television industry alive. If you’ve got an audience, use them to your advantage! But the big question here is whether or not the increasing DVR usage will greatly affect advertising revenue on television. I’m not planning on getting a DVR anytime soon, but I have a feeling that if the advertising industry doesn’t start to really work at catching the eye of viewers while they are fast-forwarding through the advertisements, then the advertising industry will have to pick up the slack in some other form of advertising, gravely damaging revenue from television advertising. So it’s up to you whether you should hit that play button, or if you should keep fast-forwarding. The choice is yours. ~emilia blue