(Image via Guy van der Walt, www.plasticboy.co.uk)

There's a lengthy piece in the New York Times about digital video recorders like TiVo, and the units you can rent from your cable provider. The scope is basically that the devices may not be hurting programs as much as was once believed — in fact, folks may just be watching those ads and "forgetting" to fast forward through them. Other interesting hypotheses regarding the uptick: commercials are being made "better". Right.

So the debate about DVRs is that people don't watch commercials because when they've recorded a show, they can simply skip over them. The fear that sprang up then, and still exists today: people will never watch commercials again followed by implosion. Well, that's not happening, exactly:

— "The reason is not simply that more households own DVRs — 33 percent compared with 28 percent at this point in 2008 — helping some marginal shows become hits. It is also that more people seem content to sit through the commercials than networks once thought."

— "Individual shows have gained substantially."

— "Almost across the board, the gains for playback are growing."

It goes on like this, using anecdotal hypotheses and some data showing that — in the least — people sometimes don't fast forward through ads. What's interesting is that the article basically states that everything is fine with regards to DVRs, and a smaller-than-assumed chunk of dough has been lost.

What's amazing is that TV ad space sales-folk will now use information like this to sell space to your clients, and you'll let them, even though things like this are said without even trying to hide: "The most basic reason, according to Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm, is that the behavior that has underpinned television since its invention still persists to a larger degree than expected.

"'It's still a passive activity,' he said."

So TV viewers still like to get up and go to the bathroom during commercials. The TV plays on while they drain, or get some soda. Who knows what's happening, really, most definitely a confluence of things. There's a psychological aspect to TV viewing that should probably be mentioned, based in the fact that most "watching" is a guilty pleasure that takes away from other activities. Watching something live bumps the guilty pleasure up a notch or two on the priority list, because you don't want to miss it. So, when the same show is recorded, the only way to make it feel "live" and therefore OK to watch instead of doing laundry/taxes/whatever, is to let it play.

Seem nuanced? It is, because it's only one observation about how we watch. And that's what gets me — you can't track why people do what they do, and maybe they don't even know how they rationalize their habits. Nonetheless, brands spend tons on ad space based on assumptions that don't come close to covering the field, meaning there's a gap between perception and reality so broad that "commercials" really shouldn't exist as we know them. Lucky for the business, there's enough alcohol and account executives to sell 30 seconds spots from here until David Ogilvy rises from the dead.

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