DVR ad-skipping drove advertisers to blur commerce into content itself

Evidence

The impetus for these promercials, the executive explained, is advertisers who, fearing that DVR-using consumers will skip their commercials entirely, ask him “to enhance the prospect that people will see our commercial message.” His solution is to “wrap the commercial message in content that people would like to watch … [so that] it doesn’t look like a commercial so much anymore. They stop and go ‘Oh, that’s 30 Rock, what is that?’” The dual effect of advertising and content promotion facilitates this arrangement: “We’re promoting the show, we’re saying watch it weeknights, but we’re also promoting the sandwich. We’re promoting the show promoting the sandwich.” — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 394

Categorization

• XREF: Direct support for the reader’s finance-to-form causal test: technology (DVR) changes advertising, which changes how commercial messages merge with text.