Knight Rider, ad writer

The latest “Battle for the American Couch Potato” report reiterates in its conclusions the same dire warning that’s been rung out in recent years regarding the future of video advertising: It’s got to get sneakier, it’s got to blur the line between advertising and programming, it’s got to insinuate itself ever more intimately into video content so that we can’t fast-forward through commercials anymore.

This is bad news for anyone who is already annoyed by product placement, or by those little cartoon characters that creep into the bottom corners of your TV screen to promote upcoming shows. (Just as some poor abused little boy in an episode of Law & Order: SVU is finally able to tearfully bare his soul about the horrible ordeal he’s been through, a miniature Kevin James crawls into the scene to announce that “King of Queens” has moved to a new night. Kinda ruins the moment.)

NBC’s comedy 30 Rock has staked out some common ground between advertisers and viewers by including product placement while simultaneously lampooning the practice. But that seems like a short-term fix. You can only tell that joke so many times. Imagine how crazy it would be for me to mention, mid-column, how great ECI Telecom’s new carrier Ethernet 9700 platform is. (Oh, I just did. But is that acceptable because I was pointing out how crazy it was?)

There are all sorts of ways in which advertisers can insert themselves without being distracting. Nobody minds the big cup of Coke sitting in front of Simon Cowell as he berates American Idol contestants. But that unobtrusive approach may not satisfy advertisers, who are out for a deeper emotional connection with the audience. That’s why TV networks are now increasingly inviting advertisers to help develop shows from their inception, such as the recently re-tooled “Knight Rider” pilot (whose star was supplied by the chief advertiser, Ford), which was so horrible that NBC is reportedly picking it up as a regular series. You can see the trend there: The priority is in making advertisers happy, not viewers (whose happiness is harder to achieve, anyway); then, as this treatment makes viewers unhappy, they leave, making advertisers unhappy as well. As a result, I expect we’ll see a lot more shows but with shorter life spans. Suddenly that junk on YouTube doesn’t look so bad.

The best option for advertisers and viewers alike, of course, is for ads themselves to be so entertaining that we want to watch them. And although that will be part of the recipe for video advertisers to survive the digital age, creating consistently appealing ads is easier said than done, so we’ll have to get used to the new sneakier model. In the mean time, check out that 9700 from ECI. It’s really something.

E-mail me at ed.gubbins@penton.com.