Youngsters Skip DVR Ads Less Than Seniors

Dekortage writes "Analyzing DVR viewing research, Ad Age has noted something unexpected: older DVR users are more likely to skip ads than younger DVR users. The skew is particularly apparent among men: 50% of seniors skipping all the ads, but only 20% of teens do so. Women of any age group tend to be around 35%. Ad Age hypothesizes that younger viewers 'just pay attention to other media when the ads are on TV or, worse yet, perhaps the TV is just "background music"...' I always thought that ad skipping was a major benefit of DVRs. Do you skip all the ads?"

I skip ads the right way...

.. by not watching at all! This is trite, but I stopped watching TV specifically because of advertising. If I had a DVR, I would most definitely skip them, but from the few shows I've downloaded in the past I can see they're just putting the ads in the show itself now, so... Guess I'll keep not watching TV instead.

I just really hate that everything in our society has to be about selling you something, or pushing something else into your view.

Re:I skip ads the right way...

The last bit in your post made me think...so prepare for a little ramble... Is today's society really any different than in the past? Corporate sponsorship of such things as stadiums is relatively new, but every time I read an old newspaper (I'm talking Wild West to Great Depression) I am fascinated by the blatant advertising for snake oil remedies and get-rich-quick gold rush schemes. It was right out there on the front page, too. Are we really any different today in America than the rowdy Chinese and Indian markets of yesterday? Perhaps the only difference is that these ads come faceless, in print or in video, rather than a hard-up vendor pushing his wares on the market corner.

To that end, why are there so many ads? Well, ads simply *work*. If they didn't, there would be no marketing departments and no billboards, no jingles on the radio, no Super Bowl extravaganza commericials.

I also think ad dollars (and the inevitable ads they pay for) save the average American a lot of money each year. How, you might say? Ad sales finance ventures that may otherwise be unprofitable or unsustainable. When Google became more than just the new kid on the block, and needed to finance a "real" business, they turned to ad sales for revenue. Broadcast TV is free to the public only because advertisers pay for airtime. I cannot imagine a scenario where ABC/NBC/CBS could stay in business broadcasting for free, without the life support of ad sales. Is this a bad thing? I don't think so. Even if 13 minutes of every half hour program is advertising, I get to watch an episode of [your favorite show] for free, courtesy of Tide or Tampax or Ford or whichever ad was on while I was digging in the fridge for some mustard on my sandwich. Unfortunately, those broadcasters (and most cable networks) are now addicted to this revenue and try to find more new places to sell ad space, like in-show interstitials.

Does some advertising go to far? Certainly. There's no need for annoying interstitials during a show, especially when it covers up an important part of the action. Do ad dollars shape the world we see today? Of course. Some of our most American retreats are named for advertising. Wrigley Field for example...possibly the first stadium named for an advertiser. It's a historic name now, but we're all weary of Pac Bell/SBC/AT&T Wireless/Minute Maid Park and the Nokia Sugar Bowl. (That said, I would have hated to see Candlestick Park in San Francisco fade away into the shadows over something simple like the naming rights...my all time favorite ballpark, and I'm not even from California)

Ads can be annoying and overdone, but they are a product of a free capitalistic society. Considering the available societal alternatives (China, Myanmar, and Cuba come to mind), I'll take a few ads and nearly constant product placement. Besides, I didn't buy a Tivo for nothing!

Re:I skip ads the right way...

The last bit in your post made me think...so prepare for a little ramble... Is today's society really any different than in the past? Corporate sponsorship of such things as stadiums is relatively new, but every time I read an old newspaper (I'm talking Wild West to Great Depression) I am fascinated by the blatant advertising for snake oil remedies and get-rich-quick gold rush schemes

You make a really excellent point, and you're exactly right! The poster you replied to just doesn't get it!

I would actually go beyond what you said--you said that for instance, corporate sponsorship of stadiums is a new thing. Maybe corporate, but in years past it would have been an individual. Think of in the US have many buildings (universities, etc) are named after people who gave money to build them--Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.

Going back even farther in history, Pompeii gives countless examples of graffiti that showed politics then was no different than today--slanderous and brutal! Same for advertisements, they were everywhere.

Re:I skip ads the right way...

Yes we're different. Not perhaps, different than a MARKET earlier, the purpose of a market is, afterall, to SELL stuff. But different in the pervasiveness. This has many reasons. One is a large selection of goods that are really quite equivalent to the buyer, where marketing tries to create incentive to select brand A over brand B on reasons other than price alone when really the differences are debatable. Another is the rising distance (physical and otherwise) between producer and consumer. You don't -know- the guy growing your potatoes anymore. And so mass-marketing has taken over from reputation and word-of-mouth. The worst is, though, that it is EVERYWHERE. Walk down a street in Berlin, and the Brandenburger Tor, one of the most famous landmarks there is is under renovation, and covered with a GIGANTIC telecom-banner. Your shopping-cart has advertising on the handlebar. So does the fuel-pistol-thing when you refuel. All the products you buy are packaged in advertising. TV has more comercials than programming, radio ain't much better. The Internet is filled with banner-ads and stupid flash-crap. Things wheren't always like this. And I'm not convinced we're better off for it. I'm not in favour of banning advertising or anything. But I *am* in favour of having a reasoned debate about under just which rules we want it. And I don't think "anything goes" is it. There is such a thing as visual pollution.

Re:I skip ads the right way...

I also think ad dollars (and the inevitable ads they pay for) save the average American a lot of money each year. How, you might say? Ad sales finance ventures that may otherwise be unprofitable or unsustainable.

Then such ventures should fail. I have no problem with that.

Advertising makes products that I do want cost more, simple as that. Without spending money trying to convince people who don't want a product that they need it anyway, companies would have a lower overhead and thus could sell for less. Of course, they would sell less overall, and only companies with legitimately useful products would thrive (with the occasional freak exception, of course), but I don't view either of those as necessarily a "bad" thing.

Look at our society, look at the current economic crisis, look at Bratz dolls, and tell me we don't have an outright disease of buying crap we don't need. We have a problem, and we can thank advertising for hefty chunk of that.


Ads can be annoying and overdone, but they are a product of a free capitalistic society.

Just as you can have dinner without gorging yourself to the point of bursting; Just as you can drink without passing out drunk; You can have capitalism without encouraging people to spend more than they have on crap they don't need.

Re:I skip ads the right way...

You can have capitalism without encouraging people to spend more than they have on crap they don't need.

I think you've hit the nail on the head there.

The problem isn't that people are buying things, it's that they're buying things that are truly unneccesary, and in some cases actually harmful.

Taking the example of Bratz dolls, if I had children, I wouldn't even consider buying them. As far as I can see, they're teaching children that being succesful is the same as being famous. For any reason, no matter how degrading.

It appears that society agrees though. The person named as the most popular role model in the UK for teenage girls recently was Amy Winehouse. Which leads me to think I should probably leave the country, before another generation of kids grow up who believe they're entitled to fame just because they exist, instead of having to work for it. After all, if Amy can do it just by getting wasted in front of cameras now and again, why shouldn't they?

Re:I skip ads the right way...

Of course I'm a mid twenties male, not a teenage girl

We know, this is Slashdot, no need to state the obvious. ;P ;P

Just kidding. Good post!

Re:I skip ads the right way...

To that end, why are there so many ads? Well, ads simply *work*.

Ads work on the majority. On me, they usually have the opposite effect (not going to buy stuff that's advertised in particularly annoying/stupid/psychologically exploitive ways).

Ads can be annoying and overdone, but they are a product of a free capitalistic society.

Ads take away the consumers freedom to chose the better product (yes - ads _work_ that way on many people. There are subconscious effects that are very, very hard to suppress. Most people can't do this at all, which is one of the reasons why ads work so well), shifting the focus on the product that is marketed best. Quite possibly, ads are what turns customers into consumers.

If you came up with a formula for a soda that tastes better than the established alternatives while being healthier, do you think it'd fly off the shelves ? Nope. It's not Coke or Pepsi. You'd first have to fight a marketing battle against companies whose marketing budget is probably a few orders of magnitude larger than what your company is worth. And they'd fight your better product with tooth and claw - not by making their products better, but by stepping up their marketing efforts.

Young children...

... just get captivated by the high-energy movement and noise of commercials. At least that's how my 8yo & 10yo act. I'm constantly yelling (from the next room) "Skip over the commercials!!!".

Re:Young children...

I'm constantly yelling (from the next room) "Skip over the commercials!!!".

They watch the ads as an act of rebellion.

Next they'll install Vista, put all their personal info on facebook and answer Nigerian spam.

Buyers vs non-buyers

I always thought that ad skipping was a major benefit of DVRs. Do you skip all the ads?

If you assume most people who pay for DVRs want to skip ads, one would expect DVR buyers to skip ads.

Their teenage children may not feel as strongly about adverts because children of DVR buyers, unlike DVR buyers themselves, have not self-selected for wanting to skip ads.

Jusy my $0.02.

TiVo

I love the TiVo easter egg for enabling 30-second skip [bigmarv.net]. I don't know how I lived without it before. I've heard of Myth and other software DVRs stripping out commercials altogether, but I enjoy the TiVo service.

Does the research differentiate

between channel surfing and ad skipping?

Just based on personal observation, I notice most young people don't skip ads, but rather start watching another program. Their hyper short-term attention spans drive them to find new content instead of finishing the content they were originally watching. A teen will watch 10 minutes of 5 different shows in an hour, without having to use the skip button on the dvr at all.

Older people, with greater attention spans, want to continue the program they were watching, and thus use the technology to skip the ads in order to watch the entire program.

Re:Does the research differentiate

As a young person who, thankfully, doesn't really watch TV on a regular basis I can tell you the reasoning for this is part of why I don't.

Say you're watching a show and an ad comes on, you've got a good three minutes, at least, before your show comes back. So you find something else good to watch until it goes to commercial. Then you switch back, but wait, show #1 is still on commercial, find show #3. When it goes to commercial #1 is probably back, if not maybe number #2. The way shows repeat themselves over and over again and the increasing length of commercial breaks means you can just about watch two or three shows at a time if you're intent on doing so.

Finding three good shows to skip between, that's the challenge. I can rarely find one, which may explain why catching 50 minutes of one show or 10 minutes of five different ones all comes out about the same in the end.

Call me old fashioned....

Hell, I skip the articles about skipping the ads.

Not surprising

When I first started paying attention to TV, the commercials were between the half hour shows, or one commercial break (a word from our sponsors was the term used) halfway through an hour long show.
Then it went to commercials between the half hour shows, with one commercial halfway through at 15 minutes. An hour show would have the commercials between, and then every 20 minutes.
Then it went from two commercials between shows, and then one ever 15 minutes.
Then two every 15 minutes.
Then two every 10 minutes.
When I finally could not take anymore, and just quit watching TV altogether about 5 years ago, it was 3-4 commercials every 4-5 minutes. I tried recording a 30 minute show-pausing during the commercials, and ended up with 18 minutes of show...the other 12 minutes were commercials...over one third of the 30 minute show was commercials, not the show.

And those insidious 'infomercials'- 30 minute commercials WITH commercials...WTF?!?!?!

Enough already!
So yeah, I enjoyed being able to watch a show with only one or two SHORT commercial breaks, but I cannot enjoy the way it is now where the commercial breaks seem to be longer than the show breaks in between them.

To me it seems to have done a complete 180. It started as a way for advertisers to use a show to get a chance to show an ad or two and provide the entertainment draw to increase the audience to view those couple of ads.
Now the show is only an vehicle to drown you in commercials, the show be damned.

So now, with a DVR (with say a 200GB HDD), you're filling up over 70GB's of it with commercials, and during playback, you end up having to either hold on to the remote, or pick it up every 4 minutes to fast forward through the commercials.

No wonder most kids today have short attention spans, or just do something else and leave the TV playing in the background.

This sounds like a study done back in the early 1990's (given an $86,000 USD grant) to find out if people preferred warm or cold showers, and why. Duh!

Non-DVR owner

I don't have a DVR but I think I can explain this quite simply. I don't buy a TV to watch ads. Myself, being an old fart, just wants to watch the highlighted programs that I know I will like. I no longer want to "try" watching much unless it really grabs my interest. By flooding me with ads, the TV companies have made it almost impossible to get me interested in any new series that I might want to watch. I'm more likely to read about it in a paper/online or pick up on it via word of mouth once it's been established for about two or three series. Thus, I have a tendency to totally skip all ads for anything.

If I was a kid today, I wouldn't see the point in TV at all. It's all just ads. When I was younger, there were a handful of ads that, even back then, I used as a convenient break in my programs to use the bathroom, make a drink etc. But now there's nothing of interest to them, and if they manually skipped them all they'd never get anything done. They are actually doing what the TV companies would fear most - they are learning to completely ignore ads in all media because they are saturated with them from an early age in all media. That's a good skill for them to have, I say. Thus, they can leave them playing and it makes little difference.

Myself and my wife gave up on broadcast TV about five years ago. By that I mean that the TV is now just a display device - we watch DVD's (and even still videos) and we play games on it all the time. But that's pretty much it. We have a satellite subscription on the lowest paid rate because then we get the "old programs" channels and things like Discovery but we're even considering giving that up because it's no longer of much value to us. We watch a "new" program about once a year, if that. But if I stumble across a favourite, I'll watch it if I'm in the mood.

The chances are that we only watch maybe one or two half-hour programs a night now and only about three or four nights a week unless we are working hard. That's WAY down on our previous rates. Most of the programs we do watch are re-runs that we know we are going to enjoy (although they are being slowly ruined by being edited for broadcasting during the day and then repeated with those same edits during the evening - so we "jar" on the gaps because we know the programs well enough to know something "naughty" was cut out, even though it's way past most people's bedtime). We have the remote on hand to mute all the adverts (because of the "let's raise advert volume levels" stupidity) and wait for the channel banner until we turn it back on. In the gap, we read, make phonecalls or prepare food. A lot of the time we just switch the thing off or, if our interest was peaked by a favourite program being on but it being yet another repeat of that episode we've watched a thousand times, what we will do is dig out our "complete set" DVD and choose a better episode of the same series.

Broadcast TV is slowly dying under the weight of the ads, for which the good programming has given way - it has been for years. They are poor quality (especially the ones that seem US-based when broadcast to a UK audience - the Cillit Bang man really needs a volume-reduction operation and the "US advert with dubbed fake UK voices" is just too grating when it's every other advert), uninteresting, not well targetted, over-used, over-frequent, and too forced. And the programs that they are replacing are becoming more like adverts every day. Even the bloody movies are adverts now (the bit in "I Robot" about the trainers really annoyed me in an otherwise very enjoyable film).

I can remember a time when I was younger, when a Saturday night was a non-stop run of fantastic programs, some old, some new and some which even then were 20-year-old repeats but it didn't show that badly - that made you stay in front of the TV all evening. The example that my wife likes to use is Tony Hancock (although we're both far too young to remember it the first time around, that's our sort of humour and type of era/program

Re:Do you skip all the ads?

I also have Adblock

I wouldn't equate skipping ads with a dvr to adblock. With the DVR, it requires forethought and actions on my part whenever an ad comes on. With adblock, I just turn it on and occasionally right-click on an ad to get it to work. I also usually watch TV with my wife, so we can talk and "interact" during the commercials; sometimes we even get so into the interaction that we have to pause the commercials.

Re:Do you skip all the ads?

I wouldn't equate skipping ads with a dvr to adblock. With the DVR, it requires forethought and actions on my part whenever an ad comes on. With

Then you have the wrong dvr.

MythTV automatically marks and skips all commercials , with fairly high accuracy. It's a rare event that I have to manually do anything. Most commercials are just gone.

http://www.mythtv.org/

When you pick a user name, think about the future.

Yes, lowest user ID, but I'll bet you're sad you called yourself "Pestilence".

On topic: I notice that almost every ad I see contains something dishonest or adversarial.

TV ads are a good source of information for me. They tell me what not to buy. If it's on TV, it's over-priced or unnecessary, with few exceptions. Otherwise the advertiser would not be able to pay, or be willing to pay, the huge cost of TV ads.

Re:When you pick a user name, think about the futu

Yeh I bet you get all the girls at the parties.

"Hi, I'm Pestilence the ass-kicker and I have a low user id on Slashdot."

"er, Slash-what?"

"Never mind bend over so I can kick your ass

Re:Do you skip all the ads?

The trouble with claiming to have the lowest user ID in a thread is that someone with one lower will inevitably show up just to post and annoy you. N00b.

Now, as for the topic at hand, MythTV does allow automated commercial skipping, but you have to remember that most DVRs consumers use do not support anything more than a glorified fast-forward like a VCR. My Scientific Atlanta PVR from the cable company is like that and doesn't even offer skip feature. I believe TiVos are the same way unless you use the code to unlock the 30-second skip feature.

Re:Ads?

What about all the ads for other BBC programmes? Trailers, promos, Radio 1 DJ ego-vertising? I sure skip those! I even skip the credits of most BBC shows now that they shrink them down to 1/8 screen size...

Re:Ads?

They are only between programs, so no skipping them when watching something you recorded.

Re:Ads?

I don't have ads on my tech news site [wikipedia.org] ... because they are now so intrusive and annoying.

Why not have Inline Infotainment? I found out InfoTourettes patented scripting system will add tailored product DIET COKE! placements that don't MARLBORO LIGHTS! LO FAT VEGETARIAN SALAD! disrupt the flow of the article TAMPONS! WONDERBRA! and adapt your site's likely audience PONIES! so as not to annoy them or seem intrusive PERSONAL TRAINERS! MANOLO BLAHNIKS!

You probably haven't even noticed, but I'm using it now.