J. Walker Smith recently discovered a word that summed up consumers’ resistance to inappropriate or inopportune advertising. That word is TiVo. For the uninitiated, TiVo is a computer hard drive that attaches to a television, allowing viewers to record programs, skip forward and backward within the shows, and jump over commercial breaks.
To avoid conflict-of-interest accusations, I’ll mention that Smith is a columnist for Direct, as well as president of Yankelovich Inc. Yankelovich and Direct just released a second annual survey of direct marketing customers. Smith teased the study during a keynote speech at last week’s National Center for Database Marketing conference in Long Beach, CA. Craig Wood, president of Yankelovich’s Monitor Mindbase unit and I presented a sample of the results during a breakout session.
To further avoid conflict-of-interest finger pointing, I won’t mention Smith again in this column. But I will talk about TiVo and the allure of control.
My sister Amy has 1) a TiVo unit and 2) a crippling fear of insects. During New York City’s rainy season (approximately Jan. 1, 2003 to present), her house was overrun by water bugs. That is, she saw three, two of which were caught in glue traps in her basement. Amy named the two casualties Uday and Qusay before flushing them.
But the one uncaptured marauder sent Amy fleeing to my apartment. I don’t have TiVo, and Amy managed to last for six hours without being able to watch "ER" at her whim before breaking and heading back to her place to confront her phobia -- and wallow in endless loops of Anthony Edwards shots.
Most TiVo customers offer a similar sentiment: You can take their TiVo remote when you pry it from their cold, dead hands.
But TiVo will not be the death of direct response television, or any other form of television advertising. Instead, it will require that marketers focus on message relevance. For instance, Amy saved a Sprint commercial for me – the one featuring a rancher who received 200 dachshunds instead of the 200 oxen he had requested. Dachshunds, a childhood pet, have special relevance.
That said, in light of her recent water bug travails, she no longer finds the spot’s signature moment – dozens of scurrying dachshunds accompanied by cries of "Stampede!" -- funny.
Since Yankelovich and Direct first identified the desire for control among direct marketing customers in last year’s study, roughly 30 million people have validated our research by signing up for the new national do-not-call list. That’s a hell of a sample size, even if it wasn’t necessarily the way we would have wanted our research affirmed.
As for Amy, she’s retaken control of her apartment by sending in the local bug extermination Special Forces, and will retake control of her viewing habits as soon as I return her TiVo remote, which I nicked before heading off to Long Beach last week.
To respond to the opinions in this column, please contact rlevey@primediabusiness.com
