Oleg Versus Your DVR
Starting today, Fox network will start running short animated clips about a taxi driver named Oleg during its commercial breaks. (Wall Street Journal article here). Will Oleg be entertaining enough to get folks to ease off that DVR button? I doubt it, but I love seeing traditional media starting to work to catch up with the enhanced power that consumers have to tune out advertising.
As we’ve been saying at Jellyfish for some time, you need to give consumers a reason to engage with your advertising, not just figure out new ways to interrupt them. We’ve tried to stand behind that belief with both Smack Shopping (advertising transformed into entertainment) and our main Jellyfish.com search (advertising transformed into cash back savings).
As the WSJ article indicates, this isn’t the first or the last effort by the major networks to get viewers to pay more attention to their advertisements. I think the future success of these efforts will depend on whether the initiative is just a slick way to trick viewers into figuring out what the new content is (unsustainable) versus whether it is content that actually delivers viewers some value. Unfortunately, the Fox effort seems to be more of the former. From the WSJ article, a Fox representative is quoted as saying “It’s something that pops up that is unexpected and the viewer says ‘What the hell is that?’ It may keep them around for a while longer.” Yes, the viewer may stop once and watch, but if Oleg isn’t that funny or entertaining, don’t expect that viewer to stop again (or watch the rest of the commercial break, for that matter).
Oleg, you have a tough job. Good luck being funny enough to get me to put down my Tivo remote.
