Boring Commercial Tax
As far as I know, you pay a network a set amount of money per second to air a given commercial in a given timeslot.
That doesn’t strike me as economically optimal, though.
People zap away during commercials, but I doubt people zap away during a funny or catchy commercial that they haven’t seen before. If it’s funny enough, they won’t zap away at all.
A very annoying commercial, like this one (turn your speakers off - some screaming zombielike thing pops up midway - people with a weak heart should probably not watch it at all) will immediatly get people diving for the remote to turn the volume down. And once you’re holding the remote, zapping is that much easier.
On the other hand, anytime an ‘apeldoorn’ advertisement (like this one) comes along, I’ll keep watching, even if I’ve seen them before.
Thus I’d argue the cost to run an ad on a tv network should be not just a function of duration and timeslot, but also of how long its been running (how boring it has become, basically), and how ‘funny’ it is, though how you’d rate that I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.
Even without the networks creating incentives for companies to make funny or intriguing advertisements, the internet’s always a help: interesting ads tend to see lots of free publicity once the youtube video gets posted.
For example, I thought this mini pie catapult was so funny, I just had to write an article about it. Talk about viral!
Cristiano Betta http://www.ibbydibby.com/
May 6th, 2007Somehow I heard recently that there is a problem with this reasoning. The main point is that people don’t tend to remember what product the commercial was about when it was a funny one.
Martijn Pillich http://martijnpillich.nl
May 7th, 2007Let’s take this one step further: why should there be commercials in the first place? If content and commercial can be merged into one attractive package, there’s no need for annoying interuptions anymore. That’s pretty much what happens on the web already - ads have become the main dish in many viral campaigns.
alper http://alper.nl
May 7th, 2007Keep dreaming guys.
Anyway about the boringness, Google already penalizes poor textads in favour of better ones. They will probably do the same when they go into video advertising.