If ever there were an analog to our 13 years of experience, it appears in this NYT article entitled, "Who’s on Line? Even the Referees Don’t Know."  The article outlines the transformation of a local high school team known for academic excellence by superb thinking.   Here's a quote from the article, about the new "A-11 Offense". 

To its proponents, the A-11 represents the logical and inevitable evolution of a game that is becoming faster and more spread out at all levels... And, coaches say, it reduces injury because it involves glancing blows more than smash-mouth collisions.

TV is dead. Or it will be dead unless it evolves drastically. I came to this conclusion sometime in 2002-2003. That was the point when I was abruptly weened off religiously watching television. Since then, only a few shows have caught my attention enough to actually turn my TV into a TV, and not just the screen for my XBOX(/DVD player). However, I have seen a new direction for TV, and it came from NBC of all people. Their great show last season got me hooked into a new way to watch TV shows. Online viewing. And boy am I hooked. No cable service to buy, no expensive equipment to buy or lease, no endless commercials. Its just great. I can watch when I want, pretty much anywhere I want to and the commercials are minimal. I like it so much I even got my technologically-limited mom to start watching this way and its amazing how quickly she caught on.

Commercials are the real thing I wanted to blog about though. While watching Heroes online, I did get some commercials, but strangely, it seemed to be the same commercial every 10 minutes. But it was only one commercial every 10 minutes it seemed like so I could deal with it. Yet I found myself wanting more commercials, or at least more relevant commercials. This was a strange feeling for me, having always changed the channel or went and did something else while commercials were on.

Being online so much, I am always looking for more to do, more to see. I usually have at least 4 different programs running, some with 2 or more viewable things each. Call me ADHD if you will, but only call me that because the Internet made me that way. So when I said I wanted to see commercials, I was serious. I wanted something to focus my attention and keep me on that one screen. While watching Heroes, I would switch it to take over my whole monitor, one of them anyway, and I wanted something to fill the space the inevitable commercial would take up. I don't think I am alone in this feeling either.

TV execs, if you are reading this, take note. Give me options. Give me choices. You already do it by giving me the choice of which TV show to watch, so why not extend that to commercials. Here's a simple way to do it online that benefits you twofold and is very simple thing to do. Give me categories of commercials to choose from such as movies, cars, technology, food, etc. This benefits you because then I would be interested in the commercials and would probably watch them. It also benefits you because then you would know what I wanted to see and you can tell your advertisers: "See? He wants to see your content. Give us more money and we pretty much guarantee your ad will get the placement you are aiming for." After all, isn't that what advertisers want to hear, guaranteed product placement?

O.M. Strategy recently published an article entitled "Why Do Marketers Buy Banner Ads?" and it makes some valid points to dispell the notion of display advertising being annoying and ineffective as a medium. Though it covers off on the primary points, I think the article misses an important reason that banners should be included in your media mix: the causal relationship between banners and search. Though someone may not initially purchase via a banner, the presence of that placement is likely to increase search volume on your product down the road. AdWeek (via an Atlas study) put some numbers around this relationship in an article last year, "The Atlas Institute, part of Internet ad company aQuantive, found users exposed to search and display advertising convert 22 percent more than those who only see search ads". In closing, whether they are being clicked on or not, banners provide visual cues that inform purchase decisions.