During 2004 the annual conference of the 4As (American Association of Advertising Agencies), J. Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich, a leading market research firm, told the assembled throngs that people dislike, or, at best, are ambivalent towards advertising.
James R. Rosenfield, who wrote the article "Why Americans hate advertising" had this to day, "No news there. That's how people have always felt. But advertising's cumulative power, which is to create the consumer society, is unaffected by attitude. Advertising remains devastatingly effective in making you sick, then selling you the cure, as Marshall McLuhan observed."
Read more: http://www.jrosenfield.com/articles/WhyAmericansHateAdvertising.htm
As we move to a digital culture and apps become a normal medium for content distribution, the developers and designers of these app are clearly not helping to change how the viewing public feels about commercials.
There are clearly both good and bad ways to advertise. The streaming apps seem to use them all.
The Xfinity app and the newly updated ABC app (that now requires a cable subscriptions to view the content) are the example of how not to do commercials.
These Xfinity app and the ABC app both have commercials with the volume of the commercials much higher than the show volumes, they have longer commercial viewing times (2 1/2 to 3 minutes), extremely repetitive commercials (often in the same exact order each break) and they break at points that are disruptive to the viewing of the shows. As if having 2-3 minutes commercial breaks wasn't bad enough, they break more often as well.
When you add all of these attributes up, the commercial viewing experience can get pretty annoying very quickly. It is evident that they are breaking more often and for much longer periods than other apps. It is also apparent that these two apps have the same source for steaming their commercials.
Another annoying thing that bad streaming apps do is not allow proper pausing and rewinding or fast forwarding of the content.
For example, some apps do not allow you to pause the commercials. There are times when you have to take a break that is longer than the allotted commercial break and you want to pause the commercials so that the program doesn't get started without you. Some of these streaming app developers have a lot to learn.
Some app are intuitively made to allow you to rewind or faster forward to a point and not repeat a commercial because of the move. Others blindly cue commercials every time you reposition the stream. For example, I nodded off while watching "the Oscars". When I woke up, I tried to rewind to a particular point in the stream. Every time I skipped a few seconds in the show, it would rebroadcast the same five commercials. I finally just gave up on seeing the portion I missed.
And the content providers wonder why people just download the shows; commercial free - I wonder why!
Have you ever had a "what did he say?" moment? We all have. What we are able to do after that moment is different on many of the streaming apps.
Smart developers make their apps so that you can skip around and only display commercials when appropriate. If I just watched a set of commercials, and then I skip forward or back, the app should recognize this and not replay the commercial.
Not all app developers have gotten it wrong. Hulu Plus, the $7.99 monthly subscription app, gets some things right when it comes to playing commercials.
While some people still feel that if they are paying a monthly subscription, that they shouldn't have to put up with commercials (even though cable boardcast television has had this model for years).
The volume of the commercials on Hulu Plus actually is lower than the volume level of the shows they interrupt.
Hulu Plus shows just two 30 second commercials per break, which isn't bad compared to other apps it even some broadcast stations.
Another thing that helps with commercials is timing. When the commercials break where the shows makers' intended for them to break, it makes for smoother transitions.
If you want an ugly example of commercial breaks in a streaming app, just open up the free movie streaming app called Crackle. Their commercials barge in while actors are in the middle of a sentence. This is by far the worst I've seen.
What are streaming apps do you enjoy? Does commercial use influence your viewing habits on these apps?
On Mar 10, 2014, at 6:14 AM, "David B." wrote:
How else do you think your shows get made, if not with the money earned from selling commercials? Those actors don't work for free and neither do the writers, composers, tech crews, etc. I'm glad you have it worked out that you can enjoy the shows for free.
