I got to thinking about television commercials lately and I realized how hard it must be on the advertisers now that technology (in the traditional sense of the word) is slowly seeping into television. By this I am talking about things like high definition and specifically DVRs (TiVo to you lay people out there). In addition to this, you've got such a breadth of shows and probably some nonsensical television viewing patterns for young people. Take our household for instance - between me and Erin, our weekly shows that we routinely watch consist of:

• Sunday - The Simpsons, Charmed, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy
• Monday - Las Vegas
• Tuesday - Scrubs, The Office
• Wednesday - Smallville, Alias, The West Wing
• Thursday - Joey, Will & Grace
• Friday - JAG, Numb3rs

Now throw into this mix three variables:

• Disconnect between perceived self and actual self - I don't really consider myself much of a drama watcher, but apparently that's almost all I watch. In my head I prefer comedies.
• Inconsistent viewing habits - On any given night we'll haphazardly throw shows into the mix out of either boredom or laziness.
• The DVR effect - We DVR every single one of these shows (set to record the entire season of new shows only). So on any given night we may or may not actually be watching the shows live, since we know they're being recorded for us. Some shows conflict with other shows, like The West Wing and Alias, so we always watch The West Wing on DVR - never live - which means we NEVER see the commercials for The West Wing because we always fast forward through them. On any given week we'll watch half the shows live and half recorded - meaning we only see about half the commercials we're supposed to see, but rarely is it the same shows each week (say for example we decided to go out one night and missed all the shows).

Now I know it's early on in the adopter life cycle for DVRs, but I think networks will have an increasingly tougher sell and advertisers will have increasingly more headaches when they realize the viewing patterns for shows are all messed up - and I'd consider myself a mild example of how this could be.

I'm sure there will be some interesting things going on in both television and advertising in the next few years to counter this effect and it will be interesting to see how it all pans out. I, for one, am glad I've yet to be employed with a company that does television advertising. Score one for the small b2b's!