Most advertising doesn’t interrupt your attention. Think of what you do when you read a magazine, for instance. You either read the editorial, or flip through the pages looking for something that interests you. If you happen to spot an interesting ad on the way, you stop and look at it. But the ad doesn’t interrupt you without your consent.
Same with a poster. You’re walking along the street, or driving through it, and the billboards just pass you by – again, you only focus on them if there is some image or word on them that triggers your attention. But even when they’ve caught your attention, you’re free to move your focus elsewhere.
The key in both cases is that you can actually continue doing something else (reading, walking or driving) if you want to – rather than look at the ad, that is.
Pop-up ads on the Internet might appear to be a counter-example to this. But while they are doubtless irritating, you can (or should) always be able to close them with a single click – the equivalent of just walking on. And advertisers are realizing they’re decreasingly effective, anyway, precisely because of their irritation factor.
Radio advertising might, perhaps, appear to undermine the case I’m making. I’m listening to a newscast or a music track, and up comes the ad. There’s nothing I can do about it. But listening to the radio is, typically, something that doesn’t take up 100% of someone’s attention. Listeners can be doing pretty much anything else, in fact, and generally do: they listen while working, driving, cooking, cleaning, reading the paper - even making love. Very few people, I would guess, actually turn the radio on, sit down in a chair next to it, and just listen without doing anything else. So a radio ad really isn’t that interruptive.
That’s what different about TV. Traditionally, it has been a very focussed, engaging activity – as anyone knows who’s been shushed when a family is viewing a favourite soap together. The only thing most people can do when an ad comes on, and they don’t want to watch it, is get up and go out of the room. Otherwise, you’re forced to put up with the interruption.
The extent to which TV hijacks our attention during commercials is illustrated by the large amount of ad-skipping that goes on in households equipped with the technology to do it - such as personal video recorders (PVRs) or a ‘video-on-demand’ (VOD) enabled set-top box. The fact is, television is such a compelling experience that no-one likes it being interrupted. A PVR simply allows you to do with the TV what you’ve always done with magazines, which is to flick through what doesn’t interest you.
On this basis, you could look upon the new, ‘on-demand’ paradigm of television viewing as evidence of the advertising world simply returning to its proper role – if you like, as servant rather than master.
Interestingly, all of the evidence about teenage viewing habits is that teens – unlike their elders – don’t watch television in the same focused way. A typical teen will be chatting on MSN, listening to their iPod, and texting on their mobile – often all three together – when the TV’s under their ostensible control. As they mature, that mode of viewing will become the norm. Television won’t even be able to interrupt if it tries, being treated rather as radio is today.
The medium will, meanwhile, find other ways to fund itself. We may be prepared to sell our personal profiles in exchange for receiving only those ads that are personally targeted at us – or pay (as people already do with subscription VOD services) to watch TV without any ads at all. Either way, the classic, undifferentiated, 30-second interruptive spot is, in the long run, as dead as a dodo. It’s a wonder people ever accepted them in the first place!
