David Shaw, the Los Angeles Times' media critic, recently wrote about his annoyance with the ubiquity of advertising -- no matter how much you try to tune it out, it's still there. "Can't we just have TiVos implanted in our brains?" he asked, and then related a story of a New York friend who stands up in the theater and turns his back in protest when the ads run before motion pictures.
I feel the friend's pain. Before one "major" movie event last year, I was subjected to nearly 30 minutes -- we counted -- of ads and coming attractions. That's a huge amount of time to add if, for instance, one already happened to be settling in for a big movie epic, a la one of the Lord of the Rings films.
Shaw's TiVo (NASDAQ:TIVO) mention was significant, since one of the great attractions of that device, and others like it, is the ability to skip over ads. (Heck, the desire to do just that goes back at least as far as the first VCRs -- or, if you're a stickler, since humans first learned to turn the page, plug their ears, and shut their eyes.) I love the concept, but advertisers don't: They've paid big money to put their message in your face.
You can see a lot of basic supply and demand at work here. Supply: advertisements. Demand: a means to avoid them. Supply: A means to avoid advertisements. Demand: A means to get around the means to avoid them. It's a textbook illustration of why supply is said to meet demand, rather than create it or be created by it: The friction of the meeting causes the heat.
That's why the more options that come about to skirt ads -- things like on-demand content, TiVo, and satellite radio -- the more creative advertisers will become as they work to reach us. (Think mobile-phone spam, and even ads on foreheads and pinup-model cleavage, the latter of which is currently a steal on eBay at $8,500.) Creative or desperate? Your call. But you can bet that the further we try to move away from the advertisers, the more in-your-face they'll become. Step back at your own peril.
Both TiVo and eBay are Motley Fool Stock Advisor recommendations.
Fool contributor Dave Marino-Nachison doesn't own any of the companies in this story.
