I Brake for Beer Commercials

AdAge reports that a P&G study finds Tivo Less of a Threat? - apparently people who fast forward through ads with PVRs “still recall those ads at roughly the same rates as people who see them at normal speed in real time.”

I’m not sure if this is more a commentary about the remote control trigger-fingers of those surveyed, or the inattention of those who watch “unaided” TV.

I was an early Tivo adopter, and for the past two and a half years, I’ve considered it one of the slickest pieces of personal technology to hit the shelf—suddenly I watch the TV I want to watch, when I want to watch it. I don’t watch much more or less than I ever did, but I’m at least watching stuff I want to watch when I do plop my butt into the recliner.

But c’mon. One of the first symptoms of the Tivo effect is you quit watching live TV. I’ll pause a program and go do something else for 20 minutes just to get enough buffered up that I can fast forward through the commercials.

Now, as a healthy happily divorced male with normal testosterone levels, I am reasonably adept at spotting beer commercials with great looking women and action movie clips, even at 60x fast foward, and I do stop and watch a reasonable number of them. (This month’s winner—the Killians commercial with “The New Bartender”), but that’s about it. On those few occasions when through lack of planning or watching a less geeky friend’s TV I actually see the rest of the commericals, it’s almost fun, because I haven’t seen most of them before.

Therefore, I’ve got to believe that any reasonable survey would find me blissfully ignorant on the current advertising state of tampons, fast food, or any number of other products.

Which begs the question, just who did they survey? People who don’t know the Tivo button shuffle? (hit fast forward three times at the start of the commercial, and then hit “instant replay” as soon as you see the program come back on; with a little practice, this reliably puts you at the start of that section of content). People too arthritic to hit the buttons? Or was their control group just viewers who have the retention of fruit-flies and don’t remember any more than I do when I see a 30 second antacid commerical fly by in 500 milliseconds?