TakeAway: With the proliferation of DVRs such as TiVo, building awareness for products and services through TV commercials is more challenging than it used to be.
To get viewers to stop skipping through the commercials, advertisers are starting to make commercials look like the shows they interrupt.
It’s tricky but effective.
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Excerpted from NPR, “‘Podbuster’ Ads, Calculated To Make You Hit Pause,” by Neda Ulabe, January 12, 2011
Call it smart advertising — or bad boundaries. You may have noticed a spike in the number of TV commercials designed to look and feel like whatever show you’re watching. They’re called podbusters, DVR busters or interstitial ads, and they’re designed to remove viewers’ fingers from the fast-forward button during blocks — or “pods” — of ads.
The advent of TiVo and similar devices can be thanked for the rise of the podbusters. About 40 percent of households have DVRs — meaning 40 percent of households can easily zip past commercials. Think of podbusters as speed bumps for ads.
Media consultant Dan Portnoy got caught while watching … the AMC drama Mad Men. That evening, he was speeding through the commercials as usual when he saw guys in ’60s fashions in a familiar-looking office, and he thought the program had started again. So he stopped fast-forwarding. What he saw looked like Mad Men. It sounded like Mad Men. But it was an ad for shampoo. …
He’d been caught by one kind of podbuster: a commercial that looks like the show. Bravo’s Top Chef employs a different variety: brief, vacuous outtakes from the real show, slotted in between commercials to make you think the program has started up again. …
There are other kinds of podbusters, too. Both Glee and 30 Rock are punctuated by commercials featuring actors from the shows. When you see Tina Fey in an American Express ad as it whizzes by on fast-forward, it’s easy to mistake it for 30 Rock — and so you stop to watch. …
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