The Huffington Post is running a column by Jack Myers entitled The TiVo Imperative: Educate and Entice Viewers to “Want to Watch” Commercials and New TV Series. It is about the erosion of ad viewing as DVR use increases, and the urgent need for TV executives and marketers to address this looming crisis through new and creative marketing efforts. And the focus is, unsurprisingly, on TiVo, including a strong push to use TiVo’s unique advertising offerings:

In this context, I am urging marketers and TV executives to adopt The TiVo Imperative. For marketers, commit a small percentage of your TV advertising budgets, and for TV programmers, commit a small percentage of your promotional budgets with TiVo to engage DVR-users and educate them to want to click their remote to watch advertising and to test-view new TV series. The multiple options and research capabilities that have been developed and implemented by TiVo make it the most viable option available for marketers and networks to begin addressing the imminent crisis facing the industry.

And for TiVo owners there was an interesting piece quoting TiVo CEO Tom Rogers:

Rogers believes “there are many ways to catch the viewer’s eye to entice them to click into an ad. There are many ways to engage the fast forwarding viewer: with tags, with full screen billboards, with entry off the user interface, with insertions when a viewer is asked if he wants to delete a show when he is finished watching… any of which can lead to incredibly effective advertising. There are many more forms of inventory to come, including making product placement immediately actionable right off the remote control.”

I’m especially interested in that last sentence:There are many more forms of inventory to come, including making product placement immediately actionable right off the remote control. That sounds like what I’ve been saying TiVo should do for a long time, most recently when they announced the ‘Product Purchase’ feature with Amazon. I think it should be something the user can enable and disable at will, but I think it would be interesting to be able to get more information on products that appear in a program and purchase them if wanted. The example usually cited is to be able to buy outfits worn by the characters – but I’m a typical geek. I own several nigh-identical pair of black Timberland hiking boots, several pair of nigh-identical black denim pants, and an assortment of T-shits and polo shirts. A GQ model I’m not.

Personally I’d be more interested in the music I hear in shows. I love music, and I often hear songs in shows and ads and wish it was easier to track down the artist and check out more. Even when shows include the “Music in this episode by” tag at the end I admit I rarely manage to jot down the info and then track it down later. But I’m a sucker for impulse buying, they’d definitely get me with a link to iTunes or maybe the Amazon music store to download. (CD’s are just an inefficient transport mechanism to get the music into iTunes for me.)

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, read the entire article.