Picture this for me will you? You had a long day at work, you took a hot shower, grabbed a steamy cup of tea and settled onto your couch to watch your favorite television show. Whether it be Game of Thrones or Keeping Up With the Kardashians, the brain detox at the end of the day is a necessity for the human mind to function, and so many Americans turn to TV to do this.
Now, you're immersed in your show, hanging on every word of the cute male lead when abruptly, out of nowhere, your show is interrupted by a bright screen and cheesy music, attempting to convince you to buy something that you don't really care about.
Commercials: the bane of every TV-watchers existence.
As you sit there in misery, your patience declining quickly as you wait for your show to return, you have an epiphany, and recall a beautiful thing: you have DVR, provided by your cable company.
As you happily fast-forward through those lame commercials, eager to return to your show, advertisers and marketers are screaming in their office cubicles. According to a study conducted by Gary Levin of USA Today, commercial viewings on highly-watched networks like NBC, ABC and USA have plummeted by a startling 37% since 2012. DVR has impacted the viewing of commercials through two key problems: viewer displacement and the fast-forwarding function.
Viewer displacement refers to the fact that hardly any shows are watched at the time they are originally aired. According to Levin, nearly half of the television shows aired on regular cable channels like ABC and NBC are now watched at a later time due to recordings. Since people are DVR-ing pretty much everything they watch, the fast-forward function has been seriously utilized.
According to Concordia Martino, a Commercial Advertising Analyst for American Eagle, television advertising is now very much a hit-or-miss task.
"American Eagle advertises often, especially around the holiday season. Since the creation of DVR, the company has piled our advertising efforts into things like social media, email blasts, and mail-in offers like coupons." Says Martino.
As someone who is entering the public relations industry, I became intrigued by the words of Levin and Martino. Therefore, I asked 20 Kean University students between the ages of 19 and 22 about their television watching habits. Out of the 20, 14 of them said that they DVR their shows to view them at a later date, of those 14, 12 of them always fast-forward through the commercials.
"Honestly, I'll only ever not fast-forward when I'm viewing the [coming attractions] for the next show or if I see a commercial for another show that looks interesting." Says Cayla Brahman, junior, Biology major.
According to a study conducted by CNN in 2012, 90% of television shows were still being watched live at that time. This would imply that viewers were watching the commercials, mostly. The startling decline of live television viewings over the last four years is spelling trouble for companies that are primarily advertising via television commercials.
This data is only further proof that the social media revolution is the key to keeping clientele engaged. The future of successful television and social media advertising lies in the hands of the millennial professionals in the industry. But unfortunately for people like Ms. Martino, television commercials may become moot, therefore so will those jobs.
To DVR or not to DVR? To fast-forward or not to fast-forward? That is the question.
