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Royal Philips Electronics has filed a patent, not yet approved, that would prevent viewers from switching channels during advertisements and viewers of pre-recorded shows from fast forwarding through ads, AdAge reports. News of the application had bloggers and TV watchers up in arms, and Philips quickly issued a statement which pointed out the fact that the system would allow the viewer to choose, at the beginning of a movie, to either watch the movie without ads or watch it with ads. “It is up to the viewer to take this decision, and up to the broadcaster to offer the various services,” the company said in a statement.
The patent suggests that the system could offer viewers the chance to pay a fee in order to go back to skipping commercials, an article in New Scientist Tech points out.
The Engadget blog calls the system “Orwellian controls” and points out that advertisers would surely be delighted while viewers would surely be enraged.
Steve Hall at Adrants wrote that he was originally planning to ignore the story “because it’s just so stupid.” He added that, “After all, if this thing actually took hold, people, as they use to do, would just get up during the commercial break and go to the kitchen or to the bathroom. And, to boot, since research is getting better at knowing when people actually see a commercial versus knowing it was simply broadcast to an empty room, marketers will bail out on this before it goes anywhere.”
Read the full patent here.
Though off-air online and experiential advertising grew modestly as a part of the overall radio revenue pie, and election-related political ads increased in Q3, total radio ad revenues were down 9% to $4.97 billion for Q3 and down 10% for…
Glamour magazine is running its photo of Britney Spears not only on the cover of the U.S. edition, but on the covers in seven other countries, as well.
Britney will grace Russia, Sweden and Greece’s editions of Glamour, among others.…
Titan Worldwide has signed a five-year deal with the Delaware River Port Authority to manage out-of-home advertising for the Port Authority Transit corp.
The contract covers advertising on PATCO’s rail service and stations between Southern New Jersey and Philadelphia, writes Mediaweek.…
Publicis has acquired full-service agency W&K Communications, continuing its Asia expansion that began several years ago.
W&K will be pulled under the umbrella of Publicis’s Burnett agency network, and will be renamed Leo Burnett Beijing Advertising, writes Adweek.
Other recent Publicis…
With only four weeks separating Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, Cyber Monday One (December 1) and Cyber Monday Two (December 
may command a greater share of online sales than they have in years past - thus increasing the importance…
Top American non-luxury auto brands received higher ratings and less negative comments from online consumers than competing Japanese brands, according to an analysis of consumer opinions collected from automotive review websites by Biz360, MarketingCharts reports.
The research, which aggregated a year’s…
