In his current Harvard Business Review article, Andrew O’Connell discusses the findings of a recent Journal of Advertising Research study that claims households with DVR’s “showed no decrease in recall or in prompted recognition of commercials among DVR users†who had used the fast forward function. This was especially true for ads that had previously been seen at least once at regular speed.
The article goes on to recommend that advertisers should consider airing their spots on live programming (such as news or sports) to ensure viewers will first have a chance to see the ad at regular speed. After that, viewers who hit the FF on their DVR remotes will have their eyes glued to the screen for the first sign that their program has returned and hence see the speeded up ads along the way. Currently many cable stations are airing spots that only display bold text as a VO drones on and on, but at 3 or 4 x speed it’s a quick, silent read. (And yes, just as boring and lame as ever, but they seem to be getting some results.)
Since the JAR study estimated that 68% of DVR owners skip past commercials, it’s a sure thing that DVR makers, such as TiVo, may soon provide options to skip past entire blocks of commercials in an instant – thus creating more headaches for advertisers.
