TV Ads are broken
Today I was watching some sitcom on TV, with lots of boring ads every 10 mins. While watching the ads I noticed that almost all ads tell you their website and ask you to visit it to buy their product.
That had me thinking — how in this world will people remember some vendors website. I spend atleast 12 hours a day on my computer, still dont end up remembering the websites these ads suggest, even if I like their product. Well, it could be because I didn’t like their product so much, or may be because I could just google it (or bing it). But how do you expect a average internet user to remember these sites?
There’s something missing here. Whenever you expect a lot from the user of a system, it almost always fails. Of course unless you are offering a big incentive, like, in this case, giving something free on your website.
Can a TV be more intelligent, and remember these links for me? Probably not all, but some that I ask it to remember with the press of a button on my remote. It could later email them to me. Or it could publish it to some repository which I can lookup by going to http://my.tv… or something. This would help both the users and the advertisers. The system could publish metrics of how many links/ads I ask my TV to remember, which at an aggregate level, would be a very good metric for a TV ad.
Some food for thought…