ads of the future watch themselves
On the basis of this news, which is hardly anything new, how will advertisers force their content on people?
Perhaps they’ll make ads that also make sense when fast-forwarded through, or that have in one corner a static or slow-moving image of the brand.
Or if ads just get skipped, then advertisers will try to circumvent the skipping by embedding fake index marks in their ad, fooling the skip mechanism into skipping over too little time, or by renting 34-second ads and cramming a functional 4-second ad into the zone after a 30-second skip.
Or ads will no longer be separated in time from the shows, but will occupy a portion of the image like the channel logos. I remember when those channel logos showed up, and they bugged me a lot. I felt like I was looking at the shows through a windshield. Then I got used to it like everyone else, even when I watched stuff on tape. And in response, ad blocking technology will blank out that corner of the image. Then advertisers will pick a new area of the image for their ads after each scene to defeat the blanking.
Or advertisers will periodically overlay a 25% white logo of their product, like so:
This is all stuff advertisers have all thought of already, I’m sure. Anyway, I’m glad people are getting enough control over their non-Internet media that the arms race between advertisers and viewers can seriously begin to take place, say, in the television system. It’s about time that capitalist economy was driven by something other than advertising anyway.
