Last week the NY times reported that the most popular TV shows have most ads skipped. It was “suggested that people watching hit shows were likelier to skip ads because they were more wrapped up in the show than other viewers. By contrast, people watching television they care less about are “not so focused on it. Some commercials come on, you may be a little distracted, they roll.” See this NY Times article.

Granted, yes the US audience is incredibly different from the UK audience but I wonder whether this revelation translates across the atlantic? Young people today have been conditioned to ‘fast forward’ the bits that they don’t want to engage with, they are able to tailor their environments to entertain themselves on their terms. Sky + is the perfect example (but, by no means the only one – even music downloads allow people to listen to their 10 favourite tracks, rather than committing to an album format).

The youth market is not conditioned to interact with stuff which bores them, because they don’t have to. Is this going to turn the TV ad pricing model on its head? Thinking back to my experiences, I can’t remember the last time my housemates sat through X-Factor’s (our house obsession) TV ads without changing the channel – and we only have Freeview. We always flick over during the ads to find more entertaining sources (well…not always, my male housemate insists on the football but you get the jist). We never flick channels during ‘Cash in the Attic’ though, our entertainment levels are so low anyway that we don’t really care… Last week when I was watching X-Factor at my boyfriend’s house, they had Sky + we watched X Factor on sunday morning and also fast-forwarded through the ads. In fact the only other time we used the control was to rewind and ‘slow motion’ the scene (about 35 times) when Rachel fell over...bless her.

Whether these revelations are true can only really be determined by some more in-depth research, but if my gut feeling is right, maybe Pepsi should start shifting it’s advertising budgets from the Superbowl to shows like ‘Cash in the attic’. Oh hold on, that would be if Pepsi hadn’t cancelled its worldwide advertising budget. (Noooooot).