DVR ad-skipping drove advertisers to disguise commercials as show content

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?’” — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 394

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The promercial’s blurring of promotion and content echoes the grafted, hybrid forms discussed in the trees-as-infrastructure article.
• XREF: connects to: The remote control, DVR, and streaming shifted ad-viewing control to viewers — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1104; Nearly perfect callback rates do not translate into booked commercials — Dolores DeLuce, Blow Jobs: A Guide to Making It in Show…, 287