Stephen Broadwell thinks that Neilson’s decision to start rating television ads might mean the end of bad commercials. I think the advertisers are going to have to wade through the five stages of grief, but Neilson is definitely poised to be the undertaker with this latest move.
A while back I blogged about new media models, and linked to an idea from Mark Cuban about bringing the eyeballs back to commercials. I think Cuban’s idea will seem even more obvious after Neilson starts releasing this kind of data.
From my previous post: “The only way that the effectiveness of commercials is going to go up is if the networks make them interesting. If it’s compelling, timely, in-context with the show I’m watching, or funny, then I might pay attention. Otherwise, you might as well let me skip it because I’m not paying attention anyway.”
And for the curious, the five stages of grief are:
- Denial and isolation: “The numbers must be wrong. We’ll hire consultants to prove the numbers wrong.”
- Anger: “How dare you do this to me?! It’s the Tivo’s fault!”
- Bargaining: “Ok, we’ll just adjust our rates and it’ll be ok.”
- Depression: “How are we going to maintain our business?”
- Acceptance: “How can we leverage what we now now?”
(from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief)
Just watch how advertisers react and see if it follows the pattern…
