We're Not Who You Think We Are
by Jim Connelly
OK, this seems weird: TiVo, which has long helped its users escape watching commercials, has rolled out a service that will allow its users to instead find commercials.
It’s not a full 360 — they aren’t forcing anybody to watch commercials, like Time-Warners’s “Start Over” service, or that evil TV & DVR idea patented by Philips which skips commercials only for those who pay an extra fee — but it still initially seems counterintuitive.
But maybe not.
by Jim Connelly
Is there anything on TV more infuriating than the political ad? If you agree with the candidate or issue, then you really don’t need to see it, and if you disagree, then you end up tallying all of the distortions of your reality that you see in the spot.
Each time an election draws near, I often wish that the fast-forward could go a little bit faster, or that I didn’t watch things like the World Series in real time, as I get pounded over and over with shoddily-produced, unhumorous ads that all look and sound alike.
However, as is often the case, what pisses off the consumers is seen as good news for the executives, so it is that Cable ad executives are looking forward to the plethora of spots that will plague the rest of us.
It’s no secret that Google is virtually printing money with its contextual advertising business. If you’ve read The Search you know that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally adamantly opposed to selling advertising alongside Google’s search results. It was only after Google developed a way to deliver advertising that was relevant to the context of a user’s search that Brin and Page embraced advertising as a business model.
With this in mind it’s kind of strange to notice that Google is currently running ads promoting the Da Vinci code on literally every results page, regardless of what is being searched for. Take a look at the bottom of the page, right below links to the ‘next results’.