Fresh ways to interrupt your TV experience

A friend writes:

I saw something REALLY disturbing on TV and immediately thought of you*. Have you seen these TBS ads for the Bill Engval show? He literally walks onto the screen, pauses the show with a remote, tells you to watch his new series, and then restarts it. It’s insanely awful. Made me get up and write to TBS about how bad it is. Found a youtube clip of it. Obviously I’m not the only one bothered by this…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vUtfG9Bkec

Whether you watch the clip or not, a quick scan of the 200+ comments confirms that, yes, TBS viewers are mightily annoyed.

I’ve said before — and particularly a lot lately in interviews about Buying In — the real significance of TiVo and click culture (see the book for more on that) is not that it’s all given great power to the consumer (you know, “the consumer in control”) to zap past ads.

The real significance is that, faced with the possibility of people zapping past ads, etc., the commercial persuasion business has completely rewritten the rules about where and how advertising and marketing can appear. (Thus, “murketing.”) This thing is just a blunt example of one small way they’re doing that.

And it’s worth noting that, even now, less than a quarter of U.S. homes even have a DVR. But every home that gets TBS, DVR-ed or no, experiences this unpleasant stunt.

Maybe this particular style of ruining your viewing experience will fade if the backlash is severe enough, but it’ll just get replaced by more experiments in pitches that are tough to TiVo past. As with the just-noted Vespa street art campaign, I think we can expect more of this sort of thing in the future.

[Thanks, Justin.]

[* Yes, as a matter of fact, friends often think of me when they see “disturbing” things on television.]