Hasta La Creative!

You might have already seen Clay Shirky’s now famous speech about cognitive surplus given at Web2Expo and the dramatic comparison of the time spent watching TV (200B hours a year in the US) and building Wikipedia (100M hours total).

He mentioned another number I thought was interesting: “In the US, we spend 100 million hours a weekend watching just the ads” (fast-forward to 5:52, or read the transcript). The order of magnitude seems right but I can’t figure out how he arrived at his estimate. Here are the inputs I’m working with.

– Number of hours spent by men watching TV on weekends: 6.98hrs (less for women, but I’m keeping the math simple). I don’t know if the number is an average across the entire population or only accounts for those who watch TV.
– Number of ad minutes per hour of TV programming: 16 (wiki), which means 3.72 hours of ads total for a two-day weekend (16*6.98/60*2).

Now, to arrive at the 100M hours number, we need to assume an active audience of 26,881,720 (100M/3.72hrs) viewers on each of the two days. How accurate is this number? I’ll try to check with our media folks next week, but drop a comment if you have ideas.

Of course, this little calculation assumes that Shirky’s remark was not a mere rhetorical device (hey, if we just stopped watching ads we could build a wikipedia in a weekend) and that people do watch all of the ads throughout the entire 7-hour TV binge instead of doing laundry or zoning out.

Related:
Dissecting Advertising Clutter
The Ad Zapper in Your Brains

This year’s ad prank is Trust Banners that gain “consumer trust through high frequency (90fps) banner adverts which stimulate specific regions of the visual cortex (Visual area V5/MT) producing instant effects on consumers.”

Turning black and white TVs into color sets by wrapping them in nylon stockings must be the best media-related April 1 hoax ever (Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds was on Halloween so it doesn’t qualify). Above is the original broadcast on the Swedish TV back from April 1, 1962.

Among the pranks that would actually make sense to implement for real is last year’s announcement by XM radio that it is launching a new channel entirely powered by podcasts.

The always adorable Google added a new function to Docs this year that creates a blank document with an outline of a paper airplane.

Also:
Remote Control Jammer Chip Activated By Commercials

Imagine this. You send out a bunch of promo stuff: schwag, catalogs, merchandise. Every item is equipped with a small chip. Next, you create a TV commercial and insert an “inaudible 200MHz molecular vibration sound mat”. When you run the spot on TV, the inaudible signal activates the chip, which in turn jams the signal from your remote control blocking people from switching channels. When your commercial stops playing, the remote goes back to normal.

Welcome The XV2083 Remote Control Jammer. The video is below.

Too bad it ain’t a real product, but a campaign by a communications agency. Very convincing, though. The next version of the chip should also emit signals that block microwave ovens and suppress bathroom urges.

It’s not entirely science fiction, though. Here’s a video of a working TV remote jammer and instructions for building one, and a diagram:

Quick intro: Firebrand is a one-hour 11pm weeknights TV show on ION that has nothing but commercials. The show has a website. The idea is that “viewers will gladly watch commercials” if they are entertaining and non-intrusive.

AdRants did a post on Firebrand a few days ago, saying, “We’re pretty sure the only people watching Firebrand this week or any week will be people working in advertising, hardly an audience large enough to support the company’s grandiose vision of becoming some sort of popular destination. “

Shari Leventhal, Firebrand’s CEO, responded (fourth comment after the post on AdRants): “We’ve had over 2.5 million viewers watching Firebrand on average each week.”

Curious, I checked the numbers:

• Number of people watching Firebrand TV show on ION (11 pm weeknights): 106,000*
• Number of people employed in advertising agencies in the US: 188,100**

Am I doing the math wrong? Is Nielsen off?

Below is the website traffic estimate (uniques) from Compete.com:

* Nielsen’s ratings for Jan 1-31 2008 for Firebrand: 0.09 HH (106,000 average nightly viewers), 0.06 AD2554 (75,000 adult viewers 25-54)

** US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Nov 2007 estimate, full chart pulled from this page.

Last November, I spent some time poking around and trying to figure out where the “an average American is exposed to 5000 ad messages” number had come from (see the original post). President of Yankelovich J. Walker Smith, whom I cited as one of the sources, offered his explanation in a comment to the post on Hill Holliday blog:

“Still, it’s interesting to know how these ad exposure estimates are calculated. The oldest such estimate is the one cited by David Shenk in Data Smog. His figure comes from a figure cited in Alvin Toffler’s 1971 book Future Shock. Toffler’s figure came from a conference speech that cited a number calculated by Bill Moran for use in that speech (delivered by his boss) when he was running the research function at Y&R. I know this because I am a friend of Bill’s and he has related this story to me. Bill made a simple calculation. He simply conducted a thought exercise and went through the typical day for a typical person in a typical American big city in the 1960s. How many times would such a person be exposed to some sort of ad, logo or promotion? He came to around 500. It’s that simple, and that’s where this early figure comes from.

Note what is being calculated here. Not the number of ads people pay attention to, but the number of ads that people might pay attention to. It’s exposure opportunities. Obviously, we live lives nowadays in which ever more of the white space around us is crowded with ads. Thus, we have many more opportunities for ad exposure.”

Earlier:
Dissecting Advertising Clutter, Part I
Advertising Clutter in 1759