Remembering Rich Martel

Rich, me and Philip with our friend Jane in front of Tip Top Cafe in Brockton — mid-1980s

The COVID-19 crisis has turned much of America, but especially New York City, into a scared, furtive, grim place, and that conjures up memories of that other virus-fueled trauma — AIDS.  Unlike COVID-19, which has mostly (but not exclusively) targeted the elderly, AIDS was particularly ruthless with people in the prime of their lives.  Over 700,000 Americans have died of AIDS, including my childhood friend Rich Martel, who died 30 years ago this month on June 12, 1990.

We had grown up together in the working class city of Brockton, MA, best friends since first grade in the Ellis Brett elementary school, where he was known as “Richie.”  We were both skinny kids with buzz cuts who shared an interest in politics, history, and geography.  During our various sleepovers, he had introduced me to Superman, Batman, and the “Man From Uncle,” and we spent many hours on our bikes exploring our city’s distant neighborhoods.

He was remarkably creative, with a natural talent for drawing.  When the visiting art teacher came to our elementary school she would smile benignly at our crayon and fingerpaint efforts until she came to Rich’s desk, at which point she’d go “Whoa, what’s this?” and spirit his work away to a city-wide art competition that he’d inevitably win. He kept at it too, producing artwork in high school and college.  All his friends ended up with silkscreens, drawings, and paintings on their walls.  My own most treasured works of art are a series of three photographs of Hollywood actresses, taken with a Polaroid camera, blown up and framed. They hang in my dining room and every day I think how lucky I am to have these beautiful pieces in my house. (And thanks to his friends Amy and Eileen Morgenweck, who gave me the two portraits they inherited, so I could bring them together again.)

Rich was smart too, which came out both in his academics and also in a thirst to launch imaginative projects, such as “Rich Richie’s Almanac,” a neighborhood newspaper he created in the sixth grade.  In junior high school he was placed in the advanced program for gifted students and in high school he was elected President of the National Honor Society. He was even accepted at Harvard but chose to go to Bowdoin instead because at Harvard they’d only admitted him as a commuting student.  His intelligence also manifested itself in humor.  He was one of the funniest people I knew, not only as a great story-teller but also as a trenchant observer of other people’s foilbles.

I was also struck by his kindness and sympathy for underdogs.  In high school he’d be the one to dance with the fat girl that the rest of us averted our eyes to, and when he snuck our friend Carol into his bedroom one night, it was because she had been kicked out of the house by her father and had no place else to stay.

Rich and I shared another best friend from Ellis Brett — Philip Tasho — and we all remained friends until he died.  We ate lunch together every day in the West Junior High School cafeteria and when we graduated from Brockton High, the three of us spent a week at my grandmother’s cottage on Nantucket, exploring the island, trying to cook our own meals, and playing Risk.  After this we all went off to different colleges and then moved to different cities, managing to keep the friendship alive in those pre-Internet days with the occasional long distance phone call, holiday trips back to Brockton, and overnight visits.  And we’d both deliver eulogies at his memorial service back in Massachusetts (which was not allowed to occur in his home parish in Brockton because he’d died of AIDS).

Rich and Philip on Nantucket senior year, the day our friends Jane, Pat and Merri came over for the day

In the 1980s, Philip and I were both working in Washington and Rich was in Manhattan.  Sometimes he’d come down to see us and sometimes we’d drive up to stay with him.  He took us to New York nightclubs, trendy restaurants, and arty movies, but my fondest memory is of the time the time we were riding the downtown subway and somehow we all ended up singing The Fifth Dimension’s cheesy song “The Worst Thing That Could Happen to Me.” We were oblivious to the other passengers and drunk on irony, nostalgia, and shared memories.  And when we got back to his apartment we just tumbled into Rich’s king-size bed — with a history of childhood sleepovers, we had no hang-ups about who slept where.

A few years before this, he had told me he was gay.  The surprise from this conversation wasn’t the orientation but the fact that he was actually interested in sex, because this was a subject that had never come up in any conversation over the previous 20 years.  He’d had a few chaste girlfriends in high school — relationships that lacked any sexual spark — and because he didn’t mention girls at all in college, I had just assumed he was asexual.  I have since learned not to make assumptions about other’s people’s sex lives.

Rich, Philip and me outside Ellis Brett, our elementary school about 20 years after we graduated

But his sexuality wasn’t the most interesting thing about his life in New York.  He was working at BBDO, which was one of the big advertising agencies.  The “Mad Men” days were over, but it was still a glamorous and exciting career, filled with celebrities, location shoots, high-pressured pitches, and internal politics.  He and his partner Al managed the Diet Pepsi and G.E. accounts, and if you were watching television in the 1980s you’d recognize his stylish, funny, and sophisticated work.  (When he died the agency compiled his work into a highlight reel, which appears below).

In would be inaccurate to say that Rich made a life for himself in New York.  In truth, he made a life for himself in Brockton, expanded it when he went to Bowdoin, and expanded it even further when he moved to New York. He suffered no angst, lived no drama.  Life was good and always had been.  He had a huge appetite for friends and his day-to-day existence was one extended stream of people who had been meaningful to him over the years. In the fifth grade we once made a series of lists, ranking our favorite TV shows, movies, and comic books.  One of our lists was “best friends.”  I had put him and Philip as tied for number one, but his list had TEN kids tied as his best friend. The same was true as an adult; there were probably a dozen of us who considered Rich as one of our best friends.  And he was generous to us all.  He wouldn’t just lend you a book or record album that had piqued his enthusiasm — he’d BUY it for you.  His apartment was a veritable hostel for friends, cousins, college acquaintances, and others who wanted a free place to crash in New York.  And he’d be sure to take them on a tour of his favorite haunts.

In 1988, I moved to New York City myself.  By then Rich had a handsome committed boyfriend named Chris Hill, a great apartment on the Upper West Side, a thriving career and a solid group group of fun and loyal friends (like something out of, well, “Friends”) who had survived New York City together.  He found my first apartment and when I moved in discovered a big “Welcome to New York” basket that was filled with New York City tour guides, street and subway maps, local food delicacies from Zabars, hand towels and other Upper West Side treats.

He was immediately enamored with my girlfriend Meg, who fit the mold of his other female friends in New York — smart, unpretentious, opinionated, low-maintenance, and most important of all, “normal.”  She was taken with him too, noting how handsome he was.  What?  Rich Martel handsome?  But when I looked at him with fresh eyes, I noticed that he’d been working out, had a nice haircut, had grown into his face and was no longer the gawky kid I’d grown up with.  Since he got along so well with Meg, he was the only one I confided to when I was thinking about proposing — not because I needed his advice but because I needed his enthusiasm to give me the courage.

If you lived in Manhattan in the 1980s you thought about AIDS all the time.  Even if you were monogamous and weren’t worried about catching it yourself, the death toll among the most creative people in the city was staggering and there was almost certainly someone who you DID worry about.  So of course I was concerned about Rich, but didn’t have the nerve to ask him directly how much danger he was in.  He and Chris seemed to be in great health, so maybe they were the lucky ones who wouldn’t catch it.

But all of a sudden he began to lose weight.  I also started to notice the occasional purple blotch on his arms, which I feared might be Kaposi Sarcoma, the tell-tale sign of a severely compromised immune system.  But since he didn’t say anything I assumed things were still OK.  Then one Sunday night in late August, three weeks before my wedding, he cancelled our plans to go to the movies and asked me to bring him some soup because he was too sick to make dinner. When he opened the door he looked so terrible that I finally asked what the problem was.  In a way he seemed relieved to finally be telling me the truth.  Yes, he did have AIDS and had had it for three-and-a-half years.  He’d been taking AZT, but the benefits were wearing off.  The disease was pretty advanced and Chris, who actually looked healthier, was even sicker than he was.  In fact, Chris was so sick that he wouldn’t be able to come to the wedding.  But he made me promise not to tell anyone, especially Meg, because he didn’t want to spoil our celebration.

The night before I got married, Rich, Philip and my college friend Jim came over to the parents’ house for dinner with my parents, sister and grandmother.  That was my bachelor party.  He looked scarily gaunt and in a little pain but he held his own in the conversation.  And he played his part the next day, reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians during the ceremony.  When it was over, he even drove us to the Boston so we could catch a plane for our honeymoon.

Philip, Rich and me at my wedding, with our high school friend Pat and her future wife Kathi

After this things spiraled down fast. The Martels were a close and amazingly supportive family so Rich’s sister Lisa quit her job and moved into Rich and Chris’s apartment to take care of them, make sure they got fed and went to the doctor. Chris died the next February. Despite his grief and illness Rich soldiered on at work, even flying to Budapest to film one last GE commercial.  That Easter, Lisa and Rich came to our apartment for the holiday dinner and Lisa told one hilarious story after another to distract us from our gloom.  On the end of May he took Lisa and his brother Billy to Paris so they could see France for the first time.  On the night he returned he called and asked me to bring over some grape juice and when Meg and I arrived we found him curled up in a ball on his bed, shivering from a fever.  A week later he went into the hospital, and a week after that he died.  These were the days when visitors were required to leave at a prescribed time but Lisa had fiercely insisted on staying with him the night before he died, and she was there in his final moments.

Through it all Rich was stoic, blaming no one and refusing to rail aganst the universe.  At his densely packed funeral even the priest marveled at his courage and wondered whether he, himself, despite being a man of God, could also be so calm in the face of death.  Rich had asked me to be one of his eulogists and I emphasized his humor, telling the story of how, when he asked me to speak at his funeral I had said he couldn’t die yet because he needed to live long enough to find out who killed Laura Palmer.  His response — “I’m pretty sure they have ‘Twin Peaks’ in heaven … and maybe even in Hell,” brought down the house, which was only appropriate because telling a funny story was one of his greatest pleasures.

It was also in that eulogy (which you can read, along with a second remembrance for he memorial service, here: Martel eulogies) that I uttered the immortal line “He especially loved politics and history — I’m so glad he lived to see the fall of both the Berlin Wall and Donald Trump.”  So there’s that.

When Rich died at age 36 I consoled myself that he’d had a good life.  He’d had a fulfilling career, had found mature love with Chris, and had died in the embrace of a loving family.  It was only with the passage of time that I realized how much he’d been cheated of.  He never met his nephews and nieces, whom he would have adored, or had the chance to reach his full professional potential.  He missed decades of love, the entire “Seinfeld” series, the reboot of “Twin Peaks,” Barack Obama, the second half of the career of Martin Scorsese, and the rebirth of New York City.

Rich wsn’t the last AIDS victim.  Not by a long shot.  His former boyfriend Rick Wiley died.  My dentist, another of his ex-boyfriends, died.  Each death was a separate and unique tragedy but for his friends and especially for his family, Rich’s death was a loss that created an unfillable hole in our lives.  Three decades later he still appears in my dreams and every glance at the art on my walls recalls the loss.  At least once a month something happens in the world that causes Meg and me to say to each other — out loud — Rich would have loved (or hated) this.  We are particuarly grieved that he never met our son and his talented, artistic friends, who remind us so much of him.

If there’s the tiniest sliver of a silver lining from Rich’s death it’s the solace of knowing that death itself is not completely the end.  Thirty years later his memory is as vividly alive to everyone who knew him now as it was then.  Would that the same could be said for all of us after we’re gone.

 

I Just Don’t Get Facebook Advertising

About three scandals and one stock market plunge ago, Facebook launched an advertising campaign to apologize for fake news, privacy breaches, spam, and other social media offenses.  This lovely ad promised that they’d fix these problems and get the platform back to its original purpose.

The ad was very effective and even made me choke up a little.  No surprise there, because I’ve found that the big tech companies produce the most compelling advertising.  I’ve also loved every Google ad.

But here’s the thing.  When Facebook wanted to apologize to a large audience, it ran a TELEVISION ad.  Facebook controls a huge amount of the country’s online advertising inventory but when the chips were down it used the same platform used by Texaco, Norelco, and Frosted Flake in the 1960’s:  the one-minute TV spot.

Facebook undoubtedly knew that limiting its apology ads to the online world would have minimal impact.  Successful advertising requires good storytelling – through words and images – and the online world is generally unsuited for that.

Online advertising can be effective for transactional messages (i.e., “to buy this razor now click on this link”) but not so effective for traditional brand ads.  Google ads I understand because I can see the value in buying prime space during product searches, but Facebook I don’t get.  And yet major ad agencies have twisted themselves inside out to shift their focus to Facebook.  What gives?

I ask this question as a Facebook stockholder myself, albeit a very tiny shareholder.  I certainly do not regret the huge run-up in the Facebook stock price since its IPO.  (What I do regret is that I didn’t buy a hundred times more shares!) But I don’t really understand it.  I admit this as someone outside the ad industry and would welcome feedback from insiders who can produce evidence on the usefulness of Facebook ads.

I am not among those Facebook users who get wigged out by the company sharing my personal data with advertisers.  In fact, I prefer it because I’d rather see ads that are relevant to me.  I’m just not sure if it’s that effective.  When I look at my Facebook page today I see an ad for L.L. Bean.  Fair enough. I’ve been buying apparel from L.L. Bean since the days when you had to fill out a form from their catalog and mail it back to them.  But I am so familiar with L.L. Bean that a Facebook ad will not sway me in the least to purchase again.

The “sponsored posts” in my Facebook news feed seem somewhat more compelling.  I usually just blip over them, but for the sake of this column I just went back and took a close look at what’s there and here are the first four sponsored posts.  Offers from:

• SeaVees, apparently a laceless canvass sneaker. I probably wouldn’t buy one, but it’s not crazy for them to think I might.
• Allbirds.com, another sneaker company.
• The Sundance clothes catalog. Again, I have bought jewelry for my wife from Sundance but am unlikely to do so again until Christmas and I won’t decide that based on a suggested post.
• Vanity Fair magazine, offering a one-year subscription for $8. This is more like it.  I would actually contemplate this offer but already get too many magazines at home so used my willpower to decline.

So at least one of the four suggested ads piqued my interest.  Is that a good rate of return even if there’s not a sale?  I’ll leave that to the analysts to debate.

It’s probably unfair to say Facebook advertising is ineffective based on a handful of ads at one moment in time.  I am rarely moved to go out and buy whatever product is shown on TV either, although I am much more likely to at least see a TV ad, since I usually sit through TV advertising but almost always scroll past those suggested posts on Facebook.

I also wonder how Facebook makes money given how seemingly cheap their ads are.  The company recently reported that the Russians have tried to interfere in the 2018 mid-terms by placing 150 political ads.  The cost of those ads?  $11,000. At that price, you can’t really blame Putin.  Even I, as cheap as I am, would spend $11,000 if I thought I could affect the outcome of the upcoming elections.

Although I’m a skeptic about Facebook effectiveness in promoting big brands I am a big believer in what they can do on behalf of non-profits, nearby cultural programs, and local businesses.  I’m on the board of a small nonprofit and have seen the value of raising awareness through targeting a few thousand potential donors.  I’ve also attended concerts and art shows that I’ve learned about on Facebook.

Unfortunately there’s not much money in promoting non-profits and small local businesses. Still Facebook, has convinced the major brands they need to be on this platform.  Will this hold? Maybe.  It says something about our political climate that Facebook is more in trouble for allegedly helping Donald Trump become president than for not being an effectively advertising vehicle.

How To Make Podcasts Profitable

It’s been about ten years since smartphones, iTunes and the popularity of yakking personalities like Ricky Gervais, Bill Simmons, and Adam Corolla turned podcasting into a mainstream activity.

A decade later and podcasting is still a rising medium.  About 45 million Americans listen weekly and 70 million do so monthly.  That’s higher than movie attendance.  And with 350,000 podcasts to choose from, there’s a podcast for any interest or obsession.

There have been some legitimate break-out stars too.  The first season of “Serial” became a national obsession, with more than 230 million downloads.  Marc Maron’s “WTF” has become a must-have promotional spot for everyone from President Obama to Norm MacDonald. The podcast “Missing Richard Simmons” briefly launched hundreds of news reports about whether the former exercise mogul had been kidnapped by his own housekeeper.

President Obama on Marc Maron’s “WTF”

Advertising on podcasts is also growing fast, albeit from a minuscule to a tiny level.  According to report the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers, podcast ad revenue has grown by 85 percent since last year and is on track to reach more than $220 million in 2017.  But that’s only about one percent of the total ad market, not much penetration for a decade-old medium.  How, then, do we increase the value of those ads and make podcasting more profitable?

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts, which means listening to a lot of podcast ads. There are two phenomena that demonstrate this is still a nascent medium.  First, there’s a remarkable dearth of ads from traditional mainstream advertisers.  I’ve recently noticed that American Express and Gillette have started to dip their toes into podcast advertising but most advertisers are e-commerce companies or low-end brands: Squarespace, Stamps.com, Harry’s.com, Blue Apron, etc.  All great products, I’m sure, but nothing you’d expect to see advertised on a network TV show.

I also can’t help but notice that almost all the ads are either read by the show hosts.  The previously cited IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers study claims that these host-delivered ads are the “most effective,” whatever that means.  I doubt the research is definitive and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that same argument was made back in the 1950s, when TV hosts routinely plugged advertisers themselves.

To me, a medium in which the hosts still read the ads reeks of amateur hour.  And to make matters worse, most of these ads direct listeners to a website where they can plug in a “promo code” to make a purchase and give the podcast credit for the sale.  This is like the early days of the Internet, when pop-ups were judged by their click-through rates.

Podcasts won’t be a mature advertising platform until major brands like Coke, General Motors and Procter and Gamble decide that podcasting is a good space for professionally produced brand-building ads.  And that won’t happen until there is good ad measurement to ensure that people are actually listening to their commercials.

Today no advertiser knows what the audience is for a podcast.  The standard measurement of a podcast’s popularity is downloads but that doesn’t tell you anything about actual consumption.  I subscribe to both “Fresh Air” and “Serial,” two of the most popular podcasts; I listen to about ten percent of the “Fresh Air” interviews but have consumed every second of both “Serial” podcasts.  But that’s me – maybe there are others who dote on Terry Gross’s every word. Only a metric that actually measures listens will tell us.

Podcast ads face another challenge too.  In television and radio you can more or less assume that the ”average audience” for a show (which is the average number of people listening at any time during the entire episode) is more of less the number of people consuming the ad.  That’s because TV viewers and radio listeners are constantly tuning in and dropping off, so consumption is roughly the same throughout the entire length of the show (unless there’s a large amount of DVR playback.)

But hardly anyone will start listening to a podcast half-way through playback.  And in certain genres, like celebrity interviews, the drop-off can be pretty significant.  I’ve almost never made it all the way to the end of a Marc Maron interview, for example, and have no idea whether there are even any ads at the end of his show.

The most obvious company to measure podcast consumption is Apple, which provides the major platform for podcast downloads.  If they could capture podcast playback on iPhones they would have the closest thing to a census-based (as opposed to panel-based) measurement that the media industry has ever had.

The next most obvious candidate to measure podcasts is Nielsen, which has the experience, methodology and technology for the job.

As it turns out, both companies are working on some form of measurement.  Apple has announced it would begin giving creators consumption metrics and Nielsen has begun to offer general insights on the buying habits of podcast listeners, with more detailed numbers reportedly on the way.

If these two companies can come up with reasonably credible metrics then podcasting might finally take off as an advertising medium.  Ironically this might mean fewer podcasts as advertisers flock to the biggest shows and leave the scraps for everyone else.  But more money in the medium can only mean a higher overall standard for all.  Bring it on!

 

 

 

 

 

You Watch More Ads Than You Think

I recently realized that although I never watch live TV and aggressively fast-forward through commercials, I am still surprisingly familiar with a lot of ads: the Tom Brady Foot Locker ad; The Amy Schumer Old Navy commercial; the Ariana Grande T-Mobile spot.  I know about Flo from Progressive, the GEICO lizard and the Toyotathon. How do I know about them if I never watch commercials?

The media would have us believe that no one watches ads. But obviously someone sees a lot of them.  Nielsen’s C3 rating is a measure of ad viewing and even with competition from smartphones and whatnot, those aggregate ratings are remarkably high.  Those of us who “never” watch commercials think it must be all those other dumbbells out there who engage in the retrograde practice of ad watching

Or is it?  How many of us are deluding ourselves?

Speaking for myself, if pressed, I would concede that, yes, I actually do watch some (ok maybe more than some) live TV through sports and news shows.  And even if you only watch one football game a week you are still exposed to a ton of ads.

Scripted programming is also a surprising source of ad viewing, even for those who give their DVR a good workout because people aren’t as disciplined as they think about fast-forwarding through ads.

Ever since Nielsen began measuring commercial viewing it has been a rule of thumb that only about half of viewers fast-forward through commercials. But if everyone believes they’re the ones who zip through the ads there’s going to be a good deal of self-deception.

The reality of those Nielsen numbers is that among DVR users, some skip all ads, some don’t bother to fast-forward at all, and a great many skip some ads but watch others depending on their mood, energy level, or affinity for the ad.

At my house, what usually happens when we’re watching a DVR’d show is that when the commercial pod comes on I’ll watch the first 15 or 20 seconds in a stupor before my wife yells that we’re watching a commercial for cripes sake.  I’ll fast forward, usually stopping half-way through the pod because I think the show is finally coming on, only to discover that what I thought was the resumption of the show was actually another ad.  So after watching another 15 seconds of ads, I’ll continue my fast-forwarding, and land about a minute into the show. Then I’ll have to rewind, arriving this time about a half-minute back into the middle of the commercials. Commercial avoidance is a lot of work.

Am I the only one who thinks the precision of the DVR fast-forward function has degraded over time?  When we had our first DVR I used to be able to zoom through the commercials and land precisely at the second when the show started up again.  Now I can end up half a minute ahead or half a minute behind the resumption of the show because the technology has become so imprecise.  In other words, I watch a lot more ads than I realize because I usually give up trying to avoid them.

The other reason I watch recorded commercials is that sometimes they are so good I actually want to watch them.  The new Amazon ad about the priest and the imam sending each other knee pads for praying is something I’ll always watch it to the end whenever it’s on.  Same with the iPhone 7 ad with balloons floating throughout the city accompanied by a beautiful cover version of “I will follow you.” In fact it’s a huge irony that the best TV ads are now being produced by the same high tech companies (i.e., Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) that have done so much to undermine the television business model.  They, at least, seem to recognize the power of television advertising.

And speaking of digital media, one place I do not enjoy seeing ads is online.  A two-minute commercial pod during a streaming TV show seems so much longer than a two-minute ad on TV.  When you’re watching an ad on TV you can get up and walk into the kitchen for a glass of water or go to the bathroom, but when you’re watching an online commercial you feel compelled to sit in front of your PC or to hold your smartphone in your hand doing a slow burn until the show resumes.

In 1984, the most memorable moment during the Democratic primaries occurred when Walter Mondale confronted Gary Hart during a debate and said that his policies reminded him of the woman in the Wendy’s commercial who asked “Where’s the beef?” It was a devastating put-down because Hart’s proposals seemed Utopian and lacking specifics.  And it was particularly damaging because everyone understood the reference to the ad.

In 2016, there was no similar advertising reference that any politician could cite to undermine a rival because TV ads no longer offer a common cultural connection.  But that doesn’t mean we don’t watch a lot of ads.  In fact, when I’m fast-forwarding through the commercial pod I almost always recognize ads that I’ve already seen dozens of times.  There are more ads than ever before and even the biggest snob who claims never to watch commercials is kidding himself.

 

 

How About A Golden Age of Advertising?

This year’s upfronts produced the usual amount of hand-wringing about the future of television advertising.  Oh, for the days when it was only the DVR that was going to destroy the TV business model!  Now we have to worry about digital devices, cord-averse Millenniums, unreliable online measurement systems, and other end-of-ages issues.

It fell to CBS’s David Poltrack, one of the smartest people in TV, to calm everyone down.  According to Poltrack, more people are watching TV than ever before, Millennials haven’t abandoned television in hordes, and TV advertising is more valuable than ever.

Of course it’s Poltrack’s job to make that very case so advertisers will keep coming back to TV networks, but he backed it up with data instead of anecdotes, which is how most of the rest of us develop our opinions.

Nothing he reported was particularly new.   Nielsen data have shown for years that a huge number of people still watch commercials, that only about half the people who play back DVR’d shows skip through the commercials, and that Millennials are still watching a lot of network TV.  What was great about Poltrack’s presentation was the consolidation of previously known and new data into one easy-to-digest package.

Poltrack also tried to make the case that “people like advertising.”  According to Poltrack, “They’re not craving for a world without advertising.” What audiences don’t like, he said, are “ads that aren’t relevant to them. But they enjoy ads that are relevant to them.”

Well, this is one of those assertions that’s hard to prove, no matter how many surveys you give.  Respondents may respond, but they might only be parroting back what they think they’re “supposed” to say. Or more likely they don’t really know their own minds because they simultaneously hate and love ads depending on their mood or how recently they’ve watched TV..  Probably the only way to know for sure is to hook consumers up to a brain scan for a week to see whether the pleasure-experiencing areas of the brain are stimulated by ads.

Regardless, if advertisers are mad at consumers for fast-forwarding through their commercials, here’s a suggestion: Make better ads.

People will watch ads they like.  Often multiple times. One of the reasons the Super Bowl is the highest-rated broadcast of the year is that even people who don’t like football know they will be seeing the best ads that Madison Avenue has to offer.  The post-mortem for the commercials is almost as intense as the analysis of the game itself.

Obviously the advertising world cannot sustain Super Bowl intensity all year long – or across 500 different channels, no less.  But the reason people skip commercials is that they are annoyed by so many of ads and then get in the fast-forwarding habit.  Isn’t it possible to make them less irritating?

And what’s annoying about the ads?  How about: lack of originality, repetition, unappealing or overexposed spokespeople, repetition, unrealistic situations, shouting, moronic behavior, repetition, cheesy production values (especially in local ads),  confusing messages, outdated formulas, people acting like idiots, repetition.  Then there are erectile dysfunction ads when you are trying to watch baseball with your son, or adult diaper ads when you’re watching the news with your parents.  Awkward.

Familiarity breeds contempt, which is why running ads too many times is such a turn-off.  An ad that was once charming can become odious after 20 or 30 viewings.  I know there’s a science to the number of impressions necessary to imprint a message on a viewer, but certainly there must also be research on how many impressions it takes to make viewers hate the product.

With that in mind, here’s a hint to network executives: Put the best and freshest ad at the beginning of the commercial pod. Especially the show’s first pod.  My personal experience is that if I if like the first ad, I’ll watch more of them until it finally becomes unbearable.  Then I might not watch another ad for the whole show.

I’d also like to see research into whether people who watch alone or in the company of others watch the most ads.  And whether it makes any difference whether the husband, wife or kids control the clicker.

In my home, I usually manage the remote control. It’s my wife’s job to yell if I let too many ads slip through, but I don’t know if that’s a universal condition.  I would guess that the more people watching a show, the more likely it is that someone in the room will give the remote holder a lot of grief for poor fast-forwarding skills.

It’s easy to say “make better ads,” especially when you’re not the one worrying about budgets, production schedules and making clients happy.   But if advertisers really want people to watch their ads, they should up their game.  The Golden Age of Television should be supported by a Golden Age of Advertising.

Trying to Avoid Commercials

Last Saturday, I went out to the driveway, picked up my home-delivered copy of The New York Times, removed half an inch of inserts and catalogues, and deposited them in the recycling bin before I even returned to the house. I felt slightly bad about all those advertisers who’d paid the Times for access to my mind space, but I just couldn’t bear the thought of sorting through all that paper on the off chance that I might find a useful $5 coupon.

Several hours later, I drove to our local mall. When an ad came on the car radio, I hit the change button and switched to a different channel.

Later that afternoon I watched a YouTube video with an ad that counted down the seconds to the moment when I could proceed directly to the Web site. At the very instant the countdown reached zero, I clicked on the “proceed to your content” link and got out of that ad.

In other words, modern life is turning into one long attempt at commercial avoidance.  And no wonder, since the prevalence of ad-supported media is increasing — while the ability of advertisers to develop interesting ads is not.

A lot of the discussion about commercial avoidance tends to focus on television — but it’s a lot worse in other media (and here I’m going to speak anecdotally rather than rely on self-reported studies that may or may not be accurate).

I can’t remember the last time I noticed a newspaper or Web site banner ad.  Occasionally I’ll notice a magazine placement with a particularly unlikely celebrity endorser (like Tom Brady and that watch), but usually I just page through to the next article.  On podcasts, I fast-forward through the commercial endorsements if they’re more than 15 seconds long.

Meanwhile, the online world, the supposed medium of the future, has turned into one long game of digital whack-a-mole.  You’ll be reading an article and an ad will suddenly pop up.  How fast do you click that off?  Pretty fast. Or you’re trying to click through to content you actually want to see, but  the cursor lingers too long on a particular part of the page, which results in another pop-up that you’ll immediately click off.  In all cases, the website will get credit for delivering an ad view even though you only looked at it long enough to find the “X” that will get out of it. And yet The New York Times reports that digital ad spending is expected to surpass TV advertising soon.

Sometimes, of course, online ad avoidance is impossible. Several months ago I purchased razor blades from Harrys.com.  The blades are fine, and I will buy some more when I run out of that supply. But Harrys.com can’t wait that long.  Harrys’ ads stalk me everywhere I go online. I understand the concept of online targeting but am not impressed that the collective power of Facebook, Google, Twitter, the Drudge Report, and Slate.com have teamed up to harass me about a product I’ll buy when I’m good and ready.

Television, which was once thought to be the most vulnerable to commercial avoidance, has actually survived the best. In the old days, commercial avoidance was called “going to the bathroom,” but today it’s called “timeshifting.” There was a time when the television industry clutched its chest in collective fear at the introduction of TiVo. Then it turned out that viewers were not as fast on the trigger finger as everyone thought they’d be. We all swear that we fast-forward through all the commercials all the time, but Nielsen’s numbers have consistently shown that someone out there is watching recorded commercials, particularly in playback that happens on the same day the show is recorded. (This is classic example of why you can’t ASK people what they do — you have to SEE what they do.)

The current fear is that viewing will transfer from the traditional television to a mobile device.  If that were to happen, it would probably spell the end of ad-supported video content, because people cannot stand to sit through a lot of commercial video on smartphones and tablets.

There is no way the enormous cost of producing scripted television could be borne by the handful of ads that can appear in a show that is primarily played back on a smartphone.  (I have a theory, supported by no research other than my anecdotal personal experience, that the bigger the screen, the more commercial video people can tolerate:  I can happily sit through a two-minute Coke commercial in the movie theater, but start going crazy when even a 30-second cut of that same ad appears on my iPhone.)

Fortunately, the era when most television will be shown via apps is still far in the future, despite all the media hype. Nielsen’s recent Comparable Metrics Report shows that the average American still only watches 16 minutes of video per week on a smartphone. This compares to more than 32 hours of regular television per week.  And according to Nielsen’s Total Audience Report, the vast majority of TV viewing is live. That’s a lot of TV commercials that people are failing to avoid.

The TV commercial might not last forever, but it’s taking a long time to kill.  The Internet has been around since the 1990s, TiVo was introduced in 1999, the iPhone debuted in 2007 — and yet still we watch a lot of TV commercials.  Like every other Baby Boomer, I’ve spent my entire life trying to avoid them — but I just can’t.

One Cheer for Commercials

If we were all sane and rational people we’d appreciate television commercials a lot more than we do.  They subsidize the shows we watch.  They provide us information on products we might want to buy.  They occasionally entertain us.  During a long show they give us a few minutes to go to the bathroom, check our email or otherwise zone out.  Sometimes they exert the necessary discipline on languorous producers who, without the need to take regular breaks, would let the story-telling drag on.

Yet despite these benefits, we all generally despise commercials – or say we do.  Actually, maybe we don’t hate them as much as we say we do.  Nielsen research has consistently shown that viewers who play back recorded programming typically watch about half the commercials that they could fast-forward through.  And if people truly loathed commercials they wouldn’t march out and buy the products being advertised.  After all, advertisers spend more than $80 billion a year on TV commercials precisely because ads convince us to part with our hard-earned cash.

Like most red-blooded Americans, I have a long history of disdain for commercials.  But several things happened this summer to make me question if I truly hate them deep in my heart.  First, I started watching the news-parody show, “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” which, because it is on HBO, is commercial-free. The show is only 30-minutes long but it’s crying out for commercial breaks.  The show has a lot of segments, each with their own humorous (or not) climax. You need a break after these climaxes. On most shows, the commercial provides the necessary down time to let the viewer emotionally transition to a new segment.  But with no commercials, Oliver has to create his own down time, with brief pre-recorded mildly amusing bits showing different reporters all using the same phrase.   This is fine, but I would actually prefer an outright commercial.

Also this summer, my father-in-law came to visit.  He’s a guy who really likes the Yankees and really hates commercials, so whenever we watch those games, he insists on muting the TV when the ads are on.  As far as I’m concerned, this is the exact opposite of what we should be doing (which would be to mute the Yankee announcers and play the commercials).  In any event, I was surprised at how much I missed the commercials – even the local car dealership ads – and how antsy I became when there was only silence between the innings.

But the real epiphany came when I showed up early for a movie last month and happily sat through 15 minutes of big-screen commercials, which were a big upgrade from the usual assortment of on-screen quizzes, anagrams, and popcorn promotions that used to run before a movie.  And even though I’d seen some of these ads on TV, they seemed so much more palatable in a movie theatre.  Which leads to my theory, which I am grandiosely calling “Holmes’ Theorem”: the bigger the screen the more tolerable the commercials.  An ad that’s enjoyable on a movie screen is acceptable on a TV, barely tolerable on a computer screen and outright obnoxious on a mobile device.

Even the most ardent commercial-hater has to concede there are many good ads. For my money the most recent Google and Apple ads are some of the best TV spots ever done. And is there a TV viewer with a heart so cold that he doesn’t have a soft spot for some favorite ads from childhood?

The Google and Apple ads are an example of another theory of mine: that the better the ad the less a company actually needs to advertise.  I’m thinking of those old GE and IBM ads from the 80s, which were classy and brand-building at the highest macro level.  They didn’t seem to be selling actual products at all.

Which leads the real problem with commercials. They suffer from a “tragedy of the commons” phenomenon.  The ads we most enjoy are not necessarily the ones that are most effective at moving product off the shelves.  And even the most entertaining commercials become loathsome after you’ve seen them three or four dozen times.  All the good intentions and high-toned qualities we could potentially enjoy about TV advertising are eventually degraded by the intense competition for mindshare.

That’s why I say only one cheer for commercials.  As a “tax” on TV viewing, they provide the necessary funding to keep television on the air, but they do so in a way that drives everyone crazy.  If we would all sign a pact only to buy products from the most entertaining, truthful and life-affirming advertisers, we might get a better class of ads.  But that would never happen. We have only ourselves to blame for the state of modern advertising.