The remote control and VCR broke advertising’s assumption that viewers could not avoid commercials.

Evidence

The profusion of channels and ubiquity of the remote control, followed up by the VCR and its fast-forward function, also meant that, for the first time, television commercials were well and truly avoidable by means easier than the old expedient of getting up and going to the kitchen. As New York magazine announced: “1985 is the age of zapping—channel switching on remote controls or fast-forwarding through commercials.” For advertisers, this provoked a minor crisis, as their business and rates had long hinged on the fundamental precept of unavoidability. “Conventional wisdom in the advertising industry holds that a certain amount of irritation helps make advertising effective,” wrote Rena Bartos of the J. Walter Thompson agency in 1981. “But the erosion of advertising credibility,” she warned, may “be undermining consumers’ trust in brand name advertised products.” Consequently, over the 1980s, the major advertising firms (after introducing fifteen-second commercials) began to suggest, not for the first or last time, that advertising would henceforth need to be more entertaining and engaging—something that people wanted to watch. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 629

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in attention industries and how technological shifts force attention merchants to adapt their methods. — connects to: The remote control, DVR, and streaming shifted ad-viewing control to viewers — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1104
• ADDENDUM: Ties into the pattern in ‘Grafting & Growth’ of infrastructure enabling adaptations; here the remote control is the infrastructure that disrupts advertising’s unavoidability model.

Broader Connections

• The remote control, DVR, and streaming shifted ad-viewing control to viewers #expands (0.90) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1104