PVR - Personal Video Recorder Can Save Our Children

I finally joined the 21st century and I had installed a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) on my TV. I have this service through my satellite hook up with Bell Canada. Let me start with, this device has set me free from commercials or, TV ads. I always knew that during a 2 hour TV movie I would endure a great deal of time on ads. Sometimes I would mute the ads to speak to someone else or do something in another part of the house so not all my time was watching these ads. But what I found with the PVR is I could now calculate how much time I was seeing, watching and/or hearing in a day, a week, a lifetime. It is mind boggling.

In a 2 hour movie it was 25 minutes. In a 30 minute TV series over a 5 day period which includes more commercials at the beginning and/or at the end of the show I found the aggregate time in ads was 40 minutes. Which means 150 minutes of TV watching was really only 110 minutes of what I wanted to watch. I came across a pdf url: tvturnoff that has an abundance of statistics and information on TV ad consumptions in the USA which I'm sure is not too different in Canada and I must admit they are alarming numbers. For example; Number of TV Commercials viewed by American children in a year is 40,000 and brand loyalty can be created in a child as early as 2. These are scary numbers for me because it shows the power these ads have over the minds of our children. Our children don't have built into their brain yet media filters that we have spent a lifetime developing.

The PVR Can Save Our Children. And perhaps change the way businesses advertise forever. How you may ask? Imagine this, a future, not too far away, where the PVR is in most households. And the PVR is used to stop ads from reaching our children through pre-recording and/or pause features that allow the user to fast forward "skip"the commercials. Now, you are a business owner who is spending 100's of thousands of dollars, maybe millions, on TV advertising but your market share continues to be eroded by the competition. The more you advertise or regardless of the ad you run the competition is still growing and your losing money fast. Guess what, your competition is on the internet. They have an online marketing strategy that spends maybe a quarter of what you spend on the TV and they are putting you out of business.

Every once in a while a new technological device comes around that seems harmless in the beginning, for example the TV in the early 1950's, the 386 desktop with windows and of course the internet in the early 1990's and these seemingly harmless introductions then launch an explosive growth that change the way we do business and the way we live our lives. The PVR, in my humble estimation, will change the way businesses advertise and spark a flash point in online internet marketing. In this new PVR world truer words were never spoken when, to paraphrase Bill Gates, prophesied that "there will be two kinds of businesses in the future, those on the internet and those out of business".

The PVR Can Save Our Children and if you are a business owner, let me leave you with a question; are you ready for this flash point in history and put your business online and are now marketing it online with a budget that gets you found and then converts visitors into customers? Just as you would not create a TV commercial by yourself in your basement nor should you create an online marketing presence by yourself from your basement. The PVR is here and it is going to change how we market our business. Remember that you heard it here first.