Here's an interesting factoid: 46% of people who record TV shows don't fast forward through the commercials.
Now, I'm a natural skeptic when it comes to studies like this. I always wonder how the question was asked, the specifics, is the respondent lying or over/understating something, etc, but I often find myself not fast forwarding through ads because I'm doing something else at the time (writing an episode review, for example). How about you?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-02-2009 @ 6:51PM
Claire said...
More often than not I forget that I'm watching something recorded and just sit through the commercials like real-time programs.
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11-03-2009 @ 7:12AM
wulfn1 said...
you are not alone. Too many times my husband will remind me to fast forward. Though some times I end up seeing commercials because I am no where near the remote.
rarely , a commercial comes on that I like enough to actually watch without fast forwarding. (I call those commercials shows... as in "I like that show". They are few and far between but amuse me.)
11-02-2009 @ 7:31PM
Wayne said...
Remember that 28% of statistics are made up.
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11-02-2009 @ 7:34PM
Paul said...
They probably just did what you are doing right now...post it on a blog and asked people to leave a comment. :)
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11-02-2009 @ 9:26PM
John said...
I like to read while i watch TV, so I'll let the commercials run through so i get to read my book. Also I'll let some tivo'd programs run to stay currant with real tme.
As a creature of habit I hit the sack at 11 pm. it upsets my timing to finish a program at 10:20, not enough time to start a new show, and I'll have to watch the local news till 11 pm.
I know I could start a program and stop it and comeback to it the next day, but...
Did I mention i watch Monk, alot.
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11-02-2009 @ 9:36PM
bruce said...
Sure I forward through them, though every now and then I'll forget I'm watching it on DVR and forget that I can skip through the commercials. After 1 or 2 commercials, I suddenly have a wave of shock and horror spread over my body, from my head to my toes, as I realize I'm watching commercials unnecessarily and reach for my remote.
I'll tell you one commercial that I will NEVER forget to skip - the one pictured in the title of this thread. No commercials are as annoying, evil, misleading, unethical, irritating, and uncreative (not that I care about creative ads) than those horrendous freecreditreport* dot com commercials (* free with perpetual, unstoppable $20 monthly billing!).
It should be a federal crime to use the word "free" in an advertisement when there is any small print modifying the word 'free' - if you have to pay even one penny it's not free.
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11-03-2009 @ 3:44AM
Steve B said...
The only time I find myself not skipping TV commercials is when watching live sports. As a world series watcher, I can probably list at least a dozen ads off the top of my head that I've seen over and over again over the past week. It's scary the way some of the products have starting creeping into my conversations and thinking too (I have the droid, blackberry, and american express ad songs stuck in my head). At least during the rest of my tv watching and internet surfing I get to skip or block ads, except for the whole product placement thing, which I always notice and get slightly mad about. But I guess that's the price you gotta pay for avoiding traditional advertising.
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11-03-2009 @ 7:16AM
wulfn1 said...
re: the product placement ads.
Actually I would rather have those than the interruptions in the show. I can ignore that the character is using a product with the label showing because I know that I will see one less commercial break.
11-03-2009 @ 9:19AM
Jeff Goebel said...
I'd also like to say that PVR people WATCH commercials as they fast forward. We see all the commercials, often in fast forward, but we still see them all. I watch a lot of TV and even if I FF, I still see the commercials, and stop on weird ones or otherwise interesting ones.
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11-03-2009 @ 1:02PM
jffm said...
It's purely a whim with me. When I do, it's not because I hate commercials, they can be interesting cultural artifacts, some are well done and amusing, some very few actually informative, I skip commercials primarily because I just want to get back to my show that much quicker.
Product placements are a far bigger blight in my opinion. Too often they are laboriously shoehorned into the story, which is very distracting, and the basic premise of placements is inane and pretty insulting. They're not showing me any supposed benefits of the product, not even any attempt at wit or cleverness, just fictional characters in a contrived setting flashing a label or mouthing some product name. And for the love of Pete, please tell me I'm not supposed to care even in the slightest that Lisbon from The Mentalist thinks Poly Mega Corp's teeth whitening strips are just the best thing ever.
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11-03-2009 @ 3:58PM
Leroy said...
I usually fast forward (when I remember). Other times, I treat the commercials the same way I do during an original broadcast: I do other things like go the restroom, make a snack, read and write e-mail, surf the web, discuss the show with my partner, etc.
I think advertisers would be appalled if they had a clue about how little attention is paid to their propaganda.
A friend of mine was once asked to do a survey about web page design. When they asked her about the differences in her reactions to two web pages, she became confused because she couldn't see any difference in the content. When the moderator pointed her to the difference in the ads, she reacted by saying, "Oh, that's in the ignore zone. Don't you realize no one ever looks at the ads?" She says the expression on his face was priceless.
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