Integrated television advertising.

This may not be new to many (I’m not a huge TV-watcher) but tonight, upon flicking through channels I noticed that Big Brother had a strange interlude that forced me to rewind and check it back.

In what looked like TV-advertising 2.0 (not to be confused with TV 2.0), the programme advertised a ‘Best Bits’ segment, which went on to display Big Brother Best Bits in an odd Big Brother-branded picture frame with the Big Brother eye logo in the bottom-right corner. In between each of the clips, an advert was shown, within the same picture frame.

Maintaining the Big Brother branding throughout the advertising slot was quite a clever technique, as it was less intrusive during the viewing experience and in a case like mine, even caused me to engage further than simply watching the advertisements half-heartedly.

Is this going to be the method for television ads to up conversion rates and start the fightback against digital? In my opinion, such tactics will only have a short shelf-life unless they continuously change the methodology; after a while, the audience will simply learn and gain age old ad blindness.

I guess the channels will need to do whatever they can to maintain ad revenues, whilst the rest of the world continues to disappear online.