With the growth in DVR usage and commercial skipping, marketers and advertisers have increasingly turned to alternatives to the 30-second spot, with product placement being a common option. Now Nielsen is reporting that product placement dropped a cumulative 15% in the first half of the year while showing a distinct shift - broadcast network placements were up 12%, but cable placements were down 20%.

I found the report interesting reading just from the data on the numbers of actual product placements. I was surprised by just how many placements there are. For example, in the first half of 2008 American Idol alone had 4,636 product placements, followed by Biggest Loser with 4,364. Coca-Cola was the top brand, with 2,990 placements. The market was bombarded with 204,919 product placements in just the first half of 2008. So if you thought there were a lot of products slipped into your shows, you’re right.

Not surprisingly, reality programing has the most product placements as its easier to work products in than it is in a scripted show. But with the deluge of reality shows clogging up the airwaves, there may be too many programs to go around. Audiences can only take so much, and with more shows on the air advertisers may not get as much of a concentration of viewers.

Personally I abhor most reality shows and do everything I can not to watch them. I guess I few shows I watch, like Iron Chef America, technically fall into the category though. But even avoiding the big reality shows, I’ve noticed a growing amount of product placement. One of the shows I enjoyed last season, The Big Bang Theory, had a lot of product placement worked into the program. Characters made very obvious use of Dell laptops, and one character works at The Cheesecake Factory, as is mentioned repeatedly. This season of Eureka is partly sponsored by Degree antiperspirant, which includes fairly intrusive, annoying product placement in the program itself. It is so clumsily handled that it’d be better if the characters just stopped and pitched the product for 30 seconds. It is annoying enough to make me want to never use the product.

I wonder if the increasing ‘in your face’ aspect of product placements is a symptom of the same saturation effect. It reminds me very much of web-based advertising, and how ads became increasingly aggressive with pop-ups, pop-unders, sound, animation, etc. Desperately trying to attract consumers, while in reality it was increasingly driving them away. Unfortunately I don’t expect an ad-blocker for product placements any time soon.

Spotted through Silicon Valley Insider.

A TV ad for TiVo Australia:

Picked up from TiVo Blog.

TiVo put out a press release Wednesday with the headline TiVo Launches Power||Watch™ Ratings Service, Teams With Starcom to Release Initial Findings, which struck me as odd since they already announced the launch of Power||Watch last November with a release entitled TiVo Launches Power||Watch™ Consumer Panel with Starcom Partnership.

From the release it just sounds like they’re releasing the first results from the Power||Watch service, which they started putting together last November. Power||Watch consists of a panel of 20,000 TiVo users who have opted in to having personal information gathered. This allows TiVo to associate the viewing data from the TiVo with the known demographic data from the household to provide more valuable data than the anonymous information provided by their Stop||Watch service.

May 2008 Power||Watch(TM) Ratings Service Highlights

– The Power||Watch(TM) ratings service research indicated that, contrary to popular perception, subscribers who have used the TiVo(R) service for more than three years, the “early adopters,” are no more likely to avoid commercials than those who have only been TiVo subscribers for one to three years. Essentially, there is no meaningful difference in the amount of Timeshifted viewing or fast-forwarding between these subscriber groups.

– All demographic segments Timeshift and fast-forward commercials at a high rate, although the specific commercials viewers choose to skip varies. For example, there are significant variances in the amount of time households with children under 12 spent watching commercials for certain product categories during Timeshifted viewing compared to households with adults over 50.

The full press release has more data and more of a breakdown of the initial Power||Watch results.

A brief announcement today via an SEC filing from TiVo:

On March 31, 2008, Comcast accepted the initial version of the TiVo Interactive Advertising Management System for future deployment on Comcast platforms. This acceptance occurred by the mutually agreed deadline of March 31, 2008.

While most of the focus has been on TiVo’s OCAP/Tru2Way software, another part of their partnership is advertising across Comcast’s step top boxes.

Adweek has an article on the advertising industry debate over whether advertising is an art or a science. And, unsurprisingly, TiVo gets roped into the discussion as the best know market disrupter today.

“How do you make a TiVo-proof commercial? Everybody wants to know the answer,” says Todd Juenger, vp, general manager of research and measurement at TiVo, which introduced its Stop Watch measurement tool that gives clients access to second-by-second ratings of commercials and programming. Instead of a traditional focus group, the system pools information from the viewing habits of TiVo’s 4 million subscribers.

TiVo studies have shown that the context in which a commercial is surrounded plays a critical role in whether it will be skipped. “It’s like a restaurant,” he says. “Even if you have the world’s finest restaurant, if you are in a crappy location, you’re still not going to get the customers you would get in a good location.”

In some dayparts, direct response does well, in others automotive ads. “It comes back to the environment and the target audience,” he stresses. “It can sometimes be more important than how creative the ad is to begin with. If they are in the market for a home gym, they’ll watch that commercial, even if it’s not what is traditionally thought of as a creative ad.”

I thought the article was interesting overall, as a look into an industry (advertising) I’m only peripherally aware of.

According to Advertising Age the results of over three years of research by Information Resources Inc. into DVR and non-DVR households shows that DVR households purchase new packaged goods products 5% less often than non-DVR households amongst IRI’s ‘Pacesetting’ brands and that roughly 20% of all brands showed a statistically significant reduction in volume. A handful of brands actually saw a slight sales increase in DVR households, but it wasn’t statistically significant. But it is an indication that not all brands will necessarily suffer from DVR ad-skipping.

The research also shows that moving ad money away from TV can help mitigate the impact of DVRs. The brands that spend 20% of more of their media budgets outside of TV showed no significant drop in DVR households. The study also provided some insight into DVR users’ habits:

Overall, IRI panelists watched 42% of the programming on CBS time-shifted, compared to only 10% on the Food Network and 18% on Lifetime. While 34% of programming originally airing on Fridays was time-shifted, only 15% of Sunday shows were.

As network executives have suspected, the study showed people were far less likely to fast-forward through network promos than ads– indicating that creative appeal does make a difference. More than 60% of viewers, for example, watched network promos in the first pod position at normal speed vs. fewer than 45% who watched other ads.

There is some more interesting information in the article.

Another media company, Omnicom Media Group, has jumped on Stop||Watch:

TiVo Inc.(NASDAQ: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in advertising solutions and television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), today announced that Omnicom Media Group has purchased a subscription to TiVo’s Stop||Watch™ ratings service. The Group’s full service media companies, OMD, PHD, and Prometheus Media Services, will use the comprehensive, second-by-second DVR audience behavioral data to help their clients better understand Live and Timeshifted audience viewing habits and the effectiveness of ad campaigns.

The press release certainly not coincidentally timed to lead into TiVo’s quarterly financial conference call this afternoon. See the full release for more.