I love to see it happening: commercials are slowly dying. Once I got my PVR, I stopped watching them for the most part. I’ll see a handful during a game, but other than that, my tv consumption is done in a time-shifted manner. Statistics show that most of America is following this trend, albeit not as quickly as I dove into it.
Within the past few months, TV networks have been scrambling to put their TV shows on the internet. ABC scored big by being the first, but not the others have joined the fun. For a couple bucks, you can download the entire show sans commercials. Or you can watch the show with the same commercials online, but I would suspect that more people download than endure the commercials.
I see this as the beginning of the end of traditional TV. For the first time ever, it’s feasible to buy only what you want to watch. I could reasonable buy a subscription to Lost and Scrubs and cancel my cable. I no longer have to pay for all of the crap that’s out there. And that’s wonderful.
But I started wondering how you could put advertising back into television unobtrusively. Think of it as commercial advertising in the style of Google adwords.
What if you could pause a tv show, and everything in that scene could be purchasable. You like the shirt, so you click on the shirt and it takes you to Amazon to buy it. Amazon already knows your size and has your credit card info, so all you have to do is click the remote a few times and you have it. Or maybe you see some Lays chips that you want to buy, you click on them and they are automatically added to your grocery list.
Like adwords, this would be perfect, because the consumer would be in charge of the situation. Advertisers would pay for product placement in shows and reap the rewards of one-click buying. And for the rest of us that don’t like commercials (and don’t feel like they hold a lot of sway over our buying habits), we could breeze through shows knowing that we don’t have to sit through 17 minutes of ads per 1 hour show.
I think it’s coming; I just wonder who will be the first to introduce it.