I attended a presentation at the Manitoba chapter of the Canadian Marketing Association luncheon last week and the presenter was a marketing executive from Canwest Global. He was discussing the important elements they use in their marketing strategy:
- work outside your comfort zone
- concentrate your advertising at times (ie taking over all advertising on a website etc)
- be consistent with your message
- surprise your audience
One of the questions that came up was how does he think that PVRs will affect TV advertising. His response was that the PVR and the DVD came out around the same time back in 1999 or so. My thought on that was it seemed to me these two products were on a different acceptance curves, for instance I got my first DVD in 2001 and my first PVR in 2007. I think PVRs are still in their infancy stage and full adoption has not begun. Once it does it I think it will further erode the value of TV advertising. However the presenter said one thing that interested me, he said that viewers have been avoiding advertisements for a long time. Leaving the room, talking on the phone during commercials etc. He said that with PVRs viewers may pay more attention to the ads while they are fast forwarding them than they would otherwise. I know a lot of PVR users use the skip but I still fast forward and I thought I wonder if the adverisers are concentrating on having their logo pop up (while the watcher is fast forwarding the commercial) on all ads with more frequency to increase the chances of seeing their brand. When I got home that night I fast forwarded through some ads and sure enough I saw a lot of logos and branding. I guess we will wait and see but thought the ad firms may want to concentrate on this if they want to keep their value proposition in tv advertising.
