An Untapped Marketing Goldmine

T.V. commercials are a dying industry. Not in the sense that they will be eliminated altogether any time in the near future, but they are certainly not the focus of any good companies marketing strategy. The T.V. commercial is being overtaken by online marketing. This is due to things like TIVO, On Demand, DVR, and other programs that make it easy for customers to simply skip the commercials and go straight to the program they are watching. There are also many websites that offer T.V. shows for free, straight on your computer, which even though they contain commercials, have much less of them, and I would personally consider it a web commercial anyways.

However, commercials do not have to be something that people want to avoid like the plague. There is one time of year that many people watch a show solely for the commercials, and that is the Superbowl.  This is because Superbowl commercials have a reputation of being really good. I have found this to only be somewhat true, as a lot of companies launch new ad campaigns for the Superbowl, which can be hit or miss. The important aspect to this is the fact that people actually want to watch commercials. This is the only instance I know of where this is true. For me, this is a marketing goldmine; however, it also leaves some questions. Why is this the only time that people want to watch commercials?

Most people view commercials as a hindrance. This includes ads, billboards, etc, but I think commercials have the worst reputation of all because they actually pause programming. In the case of the Superbowl, some people are actually watching for that pause in programming. I can only assume most of those people are hoping for a chance to laugh or to be entertained. This is not a new discovery, and this is not a new concept. Funny or entertaining commercials are the best ones, people point them out to other people, they watch them on YouTube, and people are told to quiet down when they are on. This should be the goal of every commercial.

Obviously not all commercials are going to be funny and/or entertaining. If they were, then all stand-up comedians would be funny, and all sitcoms would be as good as Seinfeld. The problem is, though many people can collectively find something funny, it is much harder to produce the thing that everyone finds funny, because people tend to overestimate their own work, and be much more critical of others work.

My proposal is this: A show or network becomes extremely selective in the ads they select to air. They could even charge more for ads to appear during that show or on that network. Only those they deem worthy would appear, and therefore people would watch the show or network specifically for the commercials, just like the Superbowl. The best ones could notoriously be in the middle of the show to optimize viewers. All they would have to do is a press release to advertise, because new marketing techniques are reported on pretty heavily. This would utilize the newspapers, and news sits, and blogs, to do all the promotion they need.

There is no reason for commercials to be viewed in such a negative light. We know for a fact that people will want watch commercials if they are good, so we just need to provide a way for them to do that. I think a show would be better, because a network has a lot of commercials play every day, and I don’t think enough good commercials are made in a year that can fill a day’s quota. But a popular show could definitely do it, and it would surely increase ratings, and therefore more companies will start developing commercials specifically for that show’s audience. A marketing goldmine.

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