DVR will go down in the annals of the post-advertising age as one of the most significant inventions of the era. Once viewers realized that bathroom and fridge breaks weren't the only options when it came to circumventing advertiser messages, they started to DVR and TiVo in droves. Now, the number of people with DVR is on the rise, as is the number of people who have DVR and use it to skip commercials.
But we'd be fooling ourselves at Intergalactic Post Advertising HQ if we believed DVR would solve all the problems of the advertising age. After all, the Internet—and not TV—is the clear market leader when it comes to shoving message down users' throats.
If you have DVR and love it, I recommend that you click here and get Add-Art: the Internet's answer to DVR. And like many Internet-age innovations, Add-Art offers a key upgrade to the ad-skipping power of DVR: Add-Art doesn't just let you skip Internet advertising, it replaces it with curated art from young, contemporary artists. (Note: This is also a form of marketing, but one that strives, I think, to entertain and attract rather than to persuade and push.) Ad-blocking programs have been around for a while, but what I like about this one is that it harnesses the power of the Internet not just to block ads, but to piggy-back on them to give users an interesting and unique experience.
Click-through rates for banner ads on sites are already pitifully low, and if you factor out "bouncy" clicks (clicks that are made by accident and result in the user clicking off the advertiser page within a few seconds), the rate is miniscule. The branding value of plastering NYTimes.com with ads is a bit harder to measure, but however insignificant it is it probably outweighs the traffic-driving value, especially for large, brand-conscious advertisers. With Add-Art, these incremental advertising gains will evolve from irrelevent to non-existent.
Download the program, marketers. Play with it. See if you can find some way around it if you'd like. What I advise is to think about new ways to accomplish your marketing goals; ways that maybe don't involve carpet-bombing eyeballs for a change.
In related news, check out these photos of Sao Paolo during a city-wide experiment in which all billboards were removed.