Sleepy giants awake.
Sometimes when I’m in a Shel Silverstein mood, I think of the big television networks as big sleepy hairy giants who just finished a feast of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, full and sticky and unable to adapt and keep up. Well today, I think the giants are beginning to stir. Disney-ABC has announced that they will offer full-length episodes of four of their biggest shows online at abc.com. Don’t toss out the TV yet. This is a two month trial which will include interactive video ads for 10 advertisers. Check out Television Week’s report.
The idea is a good one don’t get me wrong, but the success of this all depends on those interactive video ads. For example, I was on the Associated Press website watching some video. In return for their free service they require you to sit and first watch a TV commcercial. Well after clicking on the 5th video news segment and watching the same exact ad for Tide each and every time I was starting to quote verbatim and loath the spot, no seriously it was pissing me off. I mean hello this is the 21st century, you have people who are willing to sit through your ad, change it up a bit for crying out loud! It like trying to stick something the size of a square into something the size of a circle…people, if you’re going to pay thousands in advertising make sure it works with the media platform.
There’s no excuse, soon companies will be spending millions on internet advertising, and pissing off millions of people who see it more then once in one sitting. So why are we using old-fashioned styles of advertising and making them non-skippable? Soon you are going to have people boycotting companies and products because of the fact that we are forced to watch a branding spot over and over in a matter of minutes. I personally blame Tide for that torture the other day.
And really this is a new media platform, and the best we got are putting tv commercials on the websites…doesn’t smell very fresh to me.
Remember, programming is coming to the internet, it’s unavoidable, but make sure the advertising can keep up.
