Welcome to Advertise on TV

We are dedicated to teaching you the art of television advertising. Whether you are interested in small business advertising, corporate video, TV commercials, or large corporate commercial production we provide information that will help you.

We constantly update our articles to give you the heads up on what is new in the industry and what to loo for when you are placing an ad. We offer commercial production tips and suggestions to get you on the right trac to a more successful commercial.

We provide the advice of those with experience to help you learn the dos and don'ts as well as good places to start and some preferred video production companies for those on any budget. If you want to know how to find TV advertising you've come to the right place.

(For more on PVRs changing TV read about poor-man's video on demand.)

We had a Tivo, and like all other people who have one, or any other PVR (Personal Video Recorder or Hard-Dis Recorder), We love it and am bothered if We have to watch TV without it. which is better and provides automatic commercial elimination to boot.

While it's not the core function of the box, one big reason people love these boxes is that they get to watch TV without commercials. You watch all TV recorded from the hard dis , and you rarely watch it live, so you can quickly skip over commercials with the 30 second skip button or the very fast "Fast Forward" scan.

This is a bit of a free lunch. I watch the program for free and don't see the advertising. Exposing me to the advertising is how the broadcaster pays for the program, and if I don't get exposed, there's no reason for them to broadcast it. But almost all PVR owners do it, and most people want to do it. (Though in a surprising reversal, I Tivo-recorded the superbowl and watched the ads and fast-forwarded through the football.)

We want it in part because for most of us, TV advertising is a terrible financial deal. The TV networ charges the advertiser only around a penny for each viewer, sometimes less. That means a penny for 30 seconds of my attention, or $1.20 for an hour of it. Of course, even without the Tivo we don't watch all the commercials in a show, and that is factored into the price. For example it's expected we'll leave the room for a snac or other purposes some of the time, and today it's even expected we might watch some portion of our shows on VCRs where we commercial skip (though still get minimal exposure.)

Still, if the average person misses half the ads, that's just $2.40 an hour for my time. Less than half of minimum wage. If, like me, you're a professional who gets many times that figure as a wage, the disparity is even greater.

For a typical hour of TV with 15 minutes of advertising, I would much rather pay them the 30 cents than give them my time to watch 30 commercials. But that choice is not available. One can buy pay TV but it's not the same set of shows. So I skip the ads, and so do many others. Oh, sometimes I see them but today it's rare.

Commercial elimination will get better too. The new Replay box offers automatic commercial elimination, as have many VCRs for several years. Replay was sued over this and went bankrupt. MythTV has the feature today. It's not perfect, but it's possible to make it perfect in a war the networks can't win, even with lawsuits.