Just mention TiVo and it invariably sets off a tic in TV people. It's the bogeyman of this technological age, threatening to destroy or powerfully damage the entire structure of TV advertising as we know it by allowing viewers to fast forward through ads on shows recorded on TiVos or other digital video recorder devices.
With the television upfront just weeks away, the TiVo threat looms even more ominously, as buyers meet sellers to price out next year's ad inventory on broadcast, cable and syndication. The question they all ask: How much ad-zapping really goes on, and how much worse will it get as more households get such devices?
But to Kenneth Wilbur, the whole TiVo issue is way overblown.
Wilbur makes a simple argument: The very act of fast-forwarding requires that the viewer pay attention to the ad in order to know when the programming resumes.
And that's better than the alternatives: viewers getting up to go to the fridge or the bathroom or turning away to the computer or to talk to someone else in the room or flipping the remote around the channels.
"There’s a pretty good basis for thinking that the active attention required to fast-forward could reinforce brand awareness," says Wilbur, who's an associate professor of marketing at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. "There can be a real effect on purchasing behavior due to the attention required."
Wilbur is publishing a paper later this year on DVR fast-forwarding in the Journal of Advertising.
Rather than panicking over DVRs, he believes advertisers should be figuring ways to take advantage of the attention fast-forwarding requires.
"You could see extensive changes coming to creative formats and a great deal of research into how creative can best be adapted to fast-forwarding," says Wilbur.
"The best place for the industry to address this problem is in the ad creative itself and how to reduce viewers’ motivations to fast-forward. There could be large [financial] rewards for agencies that can figure out how to do this."
Citing various research studies, Wilbur says DVR users say they fast-forward through perhaps three-fourths of all commercials, a figure he says is probably high and reflects how hardcore early adopters of DVRs use the devices.
Still, fast-forwarding is widely believed to be significant and becoming more commonplace.
DVR penetration was only 12 percent when Wilbur worked on the bulk of his research last year. It’s now 17.2 percent, according to Nielsen Media Research, and forecasters think it’ll surpass 50 percent by the end of the decade.
Wilbur says advertisers can use information gathered from DVRs to figure out how to combat fast-forwarding, noting that TiVo’s Stop||Watch service is tracking second-by-second viewing among 20,000 DVR users.
He says three main reasons viewers don’t watch commercials is because they aren’t interested in the creative execution, they’ve seen the commercial too many times, or the advertised product isn’t relevant to them.
Media buyers and sellers are still struggling to figure out how to place a value on viewers who fast-forward through commercials, with buyers leaning toward not paying anything.
But Wilbur says it’s inevitable that networks will ultimately begin charging for this viewing because DVR users are paying attention to the content.
He also says the networks will adapt to fast-forwarded commercials by further integrating products into programming and by tricking viewers by changing the length of commercials or commercial pods. But he says that may annoy viewers and suggests a better option is to evaluate second-by-second ratings to determine which elements in commercials keep viewers interested.
"I don’t think this challenge is so difficult that it’s insurmountable for the industry to take on," he says. "In fact, the challenges are small relative to the potential gains from the insights you can learn from more research."