Ask A Stupid Question...

THE TORONTO STAR yesterday was all over a new study by Ad Agency Bensimon Byrne that should have nervous nellies all through the Canadian TV biz making dookie in their shorts.  Too bad the thing reads as a shoddy retread that's been pre-debunked.


Among the 'revelations' in Dana Flavelle's article:

People are twittering and on the computer and not paying attention to the ads.

Um, you know. Which is different than, uh...getting up to make a sandwich or take a leak or any one of the number of other things people have been doing to avoid ads since, oh, I don't know...the birth of television.


And advertising, as we all know, in the world of pre-Twitter & the falling sky, was always designed so ads only ever aired once, because it's entirely a new, 21st century, post cell phone and computer phenom that people are distracted during ads and might need to see them several times before the message gets through.


Elsewhere in this crackerjack, methodically bullet-proof study, as re- typed by Flavelle:

Just over half of PVR owners use them to record the majority of the shows they watch and eight in 10 report that they fast-forward through the commercials, the study found.

"report" is the key word here. If you asked me in a survey, I would probably say that I always fast forward through the commercials, too.  So howcum when I played HOUSE back on PVR late Monday night, I saw about 3/4 of the ads?  Because I forgot to FF, or a commercial caught my attention, or ... I just didn't.


Studies that actually look at the DATA collected from Peoplemeters have long since refuted the conventional wisdom.  More than a year ago, one study showed that The Office was one of the least fast-forwarded programs...and that programs that caught a well-heeled audience tended not to be skipped as much.  Then last fall came the news that, based on the actual data, people weren't skipping as much as they thought.  (I'm not going searching for the links here, but both studies were widely reported at the time, and I believe I blogged about these findings, too.)


So why this report now?  Well, maybe  it's the latest hit of the "Canada's two years behind" phenom. 


Or maybe it's just that one dying medium (newspapers) likes to deflect the pain to another "dying" medium (TV) whenever they can.


In a related story, I'm sure that Bensimon's Byrne's next study will reveal that nobody is affected by advertising, they report -- but they totally think everybody else but them totally is. 


Totally.


You think they have a new media advertising department? Oh wait. They do?


Quel Shocker.