Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection

It’s no secret that newspapers have been challenged by the rise of the internet. Whether it’s pesky bloggers like myself giving content away for free or social networks redefining what a hot news story actually is, things have gotten incredibly competitive for traditional news organizations. As a result, we’ve seen everything from pleas for government assistance to blaming Google for directing massive amounts of traffic their way. While I’m sympathetic to anyone who is being displaced by innovation, as a consumer I’m also glad to have a ton more options for finding content.

I may have less brand loyalty to any one particular publication, but thanks to the magic of Google, it’s a lot easier to find a diverse set of opinions on topics that I care about. For the most part, I think that Google is the best thing since sliced bread, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t improve their product.

As the media landscape has gotten more competitive, I’ve noticed that publications are becoming increasingly aggressive at trying to monetize the eyeballs that they do get. This really started with the pop-up ad, but after the web browsers figured out how to turn this control over to the users, news companies seem to have switched tactics.

The latest trend is to insert an interstitial ad between you and the content. Usually, there’s some tiny link where you can bypass it or it auto-forwards after 30 seconds, but anytime I’m forced to watch an ad before knowing how good or bad the content actually is, it creates a lot of frustration with my web experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually a strong supporter of smart and innovative ways that advertisers can bring their messages to the public and I’m happier than most to support newspapers who are creating great content, but with so much bad content out there, I don’t feel that consumers should be forced to roll the dice, when there’s no payoff on the other end.

I could probably list a dozen major companies who are offenders, but my biggest beef is actually with Google. If I know that someone uses this type of aggressive advertising, it’s easy to quit visiting their site, but because Google is indexing billions of web pages, there’s no way to know which link is going to take me to real content and which link will take me to an ad.

As an example, if you search for the phrase “hardware spec for Microsoft’s pink phone” the first result is a story by ZDnet showing the first line of the blog post, but if you actually click on that link, it takes you to a page that is missing the content and only displays an ad instead. If you wait long enough you will be forwarded to the right destination, but isn’t this false advertising on behalf of Google?

If they know that someone’s browser is going to be hijacked, then why are they taking you to a different page instead. It’d be one thing if Google was trying to actively stop the process, but they’re actually helping publishers create more of these roadblocks on the web.

While Google is free to advertise (or link to anyone) that that they see fit, they should realize that this harms their own user experience while benefiting no one but spammy news publications. If a company like Bing or Ask.com were to come out with an interstitial ban, it would take me about a half a second to change my default search engine. It may be that this isn’t seen as a big enough annoyance to do anything about or it could be too late and is considered an industry standard now, but to show one search result and then take a user to an entirely different page (albeit temporarily) feels an awful lot like a bait and switch tactic to me. What do you think, would Google be better off banning these ads from their search results or is content from newspapers so valuable that it would do more harm than good to blackball offenders like Forbes and ZDNet?

From the first moment that I tried the internet, I was instantly hooked. After signing up for a “free” dial-up AOL membership, I remember getting my phone bill and being shocked at over $300 worth of local toll charges. Being 15 miles outside of civilization, I should have known that I was paying by the minute, but honestly I didn’t really think about how much time I was online. After that, I was more careful, but still paid more for that connection each month, then I pay for broadband today. While it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where that time was spent, it was the ability to find information on topics that I really cared about that kept me clicking to all hours of the night.

When e-commerce started to become a reality, some were nervous about trying new companies online, but I had no reservations about being one of the first ones in online. While I still miss my Webvan and Kozmo.com deliveries, no one can say that I didn’t do my part to support the shift from bricks to clicks. Given my preference for the online experience, it would be easy to conclude that for traditional retailers, I’m a lost cause. Yet, recently I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the biggest weaknesses of the online experience. For as fast as all those ones and zeros move, when it comes to instant gratification, you still need to wait a few days to receive most purchases.

While I do tend to plan ahead, there are times where I’m willing to pay a premium to have something right away and while it’s easy to transport media over broadband connections, when it comes to physical goods, you typically have to wait for UPS or the post office to stop by. This is a huge advantage for traditional retailers, but it’s one that I don’t believe that they are leveraging enough. Certainly, they do their best to draw traffic into their stores, but if they want to court the internet generation, they’ll need to use technology to better highlight this advantage.

Recently, I was in the mood for a little bit of world domination, so I set my sights on a lengthy game of Axis and Allies. For those who aren’t familiar with the game, it’s a complex simulation of world war two that is a ton of fun and can take all night to play. While there are digital versions of the game, it can’t fully replicate the real world experience of the board game.

It may have only taken me 10 seconds to find a copy of the game online, but when it came to finding out which local retailers carried the game, it was almost impossible to find. After a half a dozen phone calls to all of the usual suspects, I finally tracked down a copy that was over 40 miles away

In this case, I was so motivated to play the game that night, that I begrudgingly made the long journey to get it that day. While real time search has seen huge improvements over just the last year alone, when it comes to searching retail inventory, it’s almost unheard of to be able to check availability before driving to a store (let alone to be able to get that information in real time.) Yet, many companies employ expensive sophisticated inventory management software, that allows them to know exactly what’s sitting on their shelves, what’s being delivered via truck and what needs to be ordered pronto, just so that it can be restocked in time.

Despite this wealth of information though, unless you’re an employee inside of one of these companies, the data more or less doesn’t exist to the public. While there may be some competitive reasons to keep sensitive inventory data out of the hands of the public, I think that retailers are missing a golden opportunity to use that real time inventory data to draw online adopters like myself, back into their real world stores.

In the case of my situation, I would have gladly paid 50% more for the game, if I could have found it within 10 miles. Instead of being to forced to compete by heavy discounting, local stores could compete using their greatest advantage, the instant gratification that the internet simply can’t provide.

While i don’t expect that we’ll see this void filled in the near term, I do think that the firms who sell real time inventory solutions could easily become the next Google, by negotiating to list their client’s information online. Not only would retailers be able to charge different prices based upon distance or availability, but they could allow consumers to reserve and purchase the item before they even got in their car. If one of these real time inventory firms could get just a handful of major players to participate, it wouldn’t take long before real time inventory software went from being an efficient. but expensive luxury to a lucrative revenue source for their clients.

When Copywrite.org stumbled onto the Belgian DVD company, DVDPost, he noticed something eerily familiar about their website. Over the years, Netflix has inspired their fair share of copycats, but DVDPost had cloned more than just their business model, they completely ripped off Netflix’s website as well.

The similarities between the two sites made Copywrite wonder if Netflix was running a secret European division or if this was just a cheap international counterfeit. While the conspiracy theorist in me desperately wanted to believe that Netflix was using Belgian subsidiaries to expand internationally, deep down inside I knew that this was just another internet knock off. It wasn’t the first time that Netflix’s website had been copied and it probably wouldn’t be the last.

My gut reaction was to start blasting DVDPost as a fake, but luckily I decided to do a little research first. Instead of finding another internet scam, I found a renegade DVD company that has been trying to make a name for themselves, by stirring up controversy in the media.

DVDPost first struck publicity paydirt, when they ran a commercial for a spoof company named Rent-A-Wife. The ad featured a man tying up his wife and trading her for a new one DVDPost claimed that the ads were meant to be light hearted, but critics felt that the company had gone too far with the shock tactics. After local media pressure, DVDPost yanked the Rent-A-Wife website, but followed it up with an equally tasteful ad, featuring Osama Bin Laden as one of their customers.

While it’s possible that DVDPost is trying to fool consumers into thinking that they are somehow related to Netflix, I think its more likely that their recent web redesign is part of a PR campaign. Normally, I try not to fall for this kind of PR bait, but I found their marketing techniques too entertaining, to resist commenting on this latest guerrilla ad campaign.

When I first heard that Fox was coming out with a new business channel, Rupert Murdoch had me at “more corporate friendly.” Since CNBC seems to only cover the hype and Bloomberg is painfully boring, I was hopeful that Fox could provide a fresh perspective on business events, while still entertaining me with their bombshell anchors and their sensationalism style of reporting.

Unfortunately, Fox Business News has turned out to be a big joke and continues to lose credibility on Wall St. Since launching the channel, I’ve seen three of their stories to go viral, but instead of giving me a reason why for why I should be tuning in, the stories have been about embarrassing gaffes by the channel.

The first story involved an anchor who incorrectly reported that Apple had purchased an 8% stake in AMD. Even after discovering the mistake, Fox compounded this error by misreporting that it was the “Arabs” who had purchased AMD instead.

A few days later, Fox followed up this viral hit with another blunder, after they rushed to report that HP had missed their earnings estimates, when in fact they had easily beaten them.

The latest story to hit the innerweb, involves a man on the street interview with a planted shill from the National Retail Federation

I don’t know why Fox is having so many problems getting their news right, but these types of stories are having a serious impact on their credibility. “Fair and balanced” may work for their political reporting, but when traders are betting millions of dollars on breaking information, they expect their news to be accurate.

While it’s easy to blame these PR errors on clumsy anchors, I think that Fox’s PR failings have more to do with their web video strategy. These may only be a few isolated events, but without positive buzz, it leaves people with the impression that Fox gets things wrong, more often then right. I don’t think that Fox can prevent future goof ups from going viral, but by making it easier for the web community to share their reporting, they could begin to repair their tattered reputation.

When it comes to premium content, it’s understandable that the studios would be reluctant to move it to the net, but when it comes to business news, it’s an entirely different animal. You don’t need to watch Heroes live, in order to extract value from the content, but breaking financial news isn’t the sort of thing that people time shift.

Because the information is time sensitive, it protects business channels from the DVR effect, but it also limits the monetary value of their archived content. Even though people won’t pay for a Squawk on the Street DVD box set, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t real marketing value locked up in the business news vaults.

The problem with Fox’s web video strategy, is that they are trying to control what goes viral, by only uploading certain highlights to their website. This might help to beef up the content on their site, but it doesn’t make the best use of their archived footage. I believe that the stock market is the ultimate example of the long tail in action. The large cap companies may get all the press, but there are an unbelievable number of companies out there and each one has an eager audience. By making it easier for the long tail community to easily share their reporting, I believe that Fox can strike a body blow against their CNBC rival.

Over the last year, Sling Media has been working on a clip and sling service, that would allow their customers to snip certain sections of a program and send them to people in their social network. Sling hasn’t released very many details on the software, but it’s already stirred up some controversy among some of the media companies.

Instead of fighting this technology, Fox should be using it as a weapon against CNBC. If Fox were to run a 20 minute delayed feed and let viewers clip and share the news within their social circles, they would soon have an army of volunteers creating a massive and valuable advertising platform for them. It may only be a 60 second clip talking about an obscure company, but that clip would get included in email groups, message boards and blogs, that are devoted to these subjects.

By running the news at a 20 minute delay, it would also encourage people to watch the channel live, so that they could then jump online to share the video. It would also help the home viewers have a better understanding of how breaking news impacts the markets. With most online quote services being 20 minutes delayed, sometimes its hard to tell why a stock is jumping or falling without the live data. If home viewers had a way of syncing the business news with their delayed quotes, it could help them to make better sense of the trading activity in the markets. A 20 minute delay would also give Fox enough time to at least spin/correct any mistakes, before the bloggers jumped all over them.

Giving up this type of control can be scary for big media companies, but Fox has already lost control of their live video. If they have a major screw up, someone out there will take the time to get that footage onto YouTube because scandal sells and people love to gossip, but if they have an interesting interview with an exec, someone needs to be really motivated before they can share that content with their audience.

Instead of fighting this trend, Fox should accept that they can’t suppress live video and instead make it easier for people to share the good reporting that is also going on. Instead of limiting their videos to mainstream content, Fox should be opening up their programming to the entire web, so that they can leverage the marketing power of the content. When you only hear about the negatives, it’s hard to put a lot of value on Fox’s live coverage, but if people started to see content that was relevant to them, it would make them think about how they would have seen it live, if they were only watching Fox business instead.

It’s hard for me to believe that there isn’t prior art for this already, but while I was digging through the US patent website, I noticed that IBM had filed an application for putting non-skipable commercials onto DVDs. According to the application, the commercials could either be updated via the internet or they could be embedded directly on the disc.

“A method wherein contents of DVDs may be restricted based upon purchased certificates is provided. The certificates allow for secured information on playback. Specifically, whenever a DVD is to be played, a certificate is consulted to determine whether the content of the DVD should be played with or without commercial interruptions. If the certificates provide for commercial interruptions, then commercials can be obtained from an online service that renders commercials on demand, or from the DVD itself. In such a case, the content of the DVD may be interspersed with commercials.”

I’m usually a fan of new DVD technology, but I’ve got mixed feelings on this one. Every now and then, I’ll come across a DVD that won’t let me skip past the previews and it drives me absolutely nuts. If I’ve already paid for my content, then should I be forced to watch advertisements? It makes me feel like the studios are double dipping.

On the other hand, I could see plenty of advantages to having ad supported DVDs. There are a lot of people who aren’t willing to pay money, in order to watch a DVD. If they can catch up on a series by dealing with the ads, then this technology could introduce time shifting to an entirely new audience. It could also open up new distribution channels for content providers. For example, if McDonalds included ad supported Disney flicks in their Happy Meals, I’d wager that they would reach more viewers, then Friday nights on ABC.

With advertisers already scared to death of the ad skipping powers of the DVR, I could see studios adopting this as a way of shoring up advertising revenue. I’m certain that the TV producers would prefer live viewers, but if a consumer ends up watching the ads eventually, then why should it matter, when they see the program?

One of the more interesting components to the IBM application, was it’s focus on internet delivered advertising. Whenever I’ve been forced to watch previews on DVDs, it’s typically been for movies that were released a long time ago. While the previews may have been relevant seven years ago, they seem a little outdated today. I don’t think that the free DVD consumer market is going to have the latest internet connected DVD players, but I still found it interesting to learn, that IBM is working on a solution to this problem.

I don’t see this patent making it all the way through the application process, but I do expect that we’ll see more of these types of advertisements in the future. The optimist in me, would love to see this technology used to reach new consumers, but my inner cynic knows that the studios would rather unleash ads on paying viewers, then risk cannibalizing their precious DVD. I don’t fully understand IBM’s motives for filing the patent, but thought that it was an interesting solution for bringing entertainment to the masses.

Every now and then, a study will be released suggesting that DVR owners don’t actually skip very many ads. While I can understand why people would want to watch certain programs live, it’s always hard for me to take this kind of data seriously, because it tracks so differently, from my own DVR experience.

I love being able to time shift my television and take full advantage of my fast forward button. If I absolutely need to see something live, I’ll still wait 20 minutes, just so that I can skip past the commercials. Over the last six years, I’ve been every marketers worst nightmare and yet, there has been one company that I have never been able to block.

Sleeptrain Mattress Centers

It’s not a major company, but this sleepy little company has been able to outsmart the DVR, by exploiting the very fast forward feature, that I love so much.

When you are fast forwarding, you don’t know when to stop until after your program has already started. Because of this, TiVo has built in a feature that starts playing the program a few seconds before you actually hit the play button. The idea is to account for the time that it takes your brain to tell your finger to hit the button.

When I bought my first TiVo, I did a good job of fusing with the skip back feature. By instinct, I knew the exact moment that I needed to hit play, in order to achieve TiVo nirvana. It sounds funny, but there is a certain sense of satisfaction, in starting a program exactly as a commercial ends.

It wasn’t until I “upgraded” to a cable company HDTV-DVR, that I lost my TiVo mojo. The fast forward speed on the generic device was beyond ridiculous and I had a hard time adjusting. Add to this the lag time, whenever you hit play anyway and it was easy to go 15 minutes into a program, before I could regain control of the DVR. I don’t remember the exact timing on the cable skip back, but it seemed much shorter then TiVo’s and required lightning fast reflexes, in order to get right.

When I upgraded to a TiVo series 3, I thought that my commercial skipping rhythm would return, but sadly, I haven’t been able to make the adjustment back. I’m still trigger happy when it comes to hitting play and start things far too early. I’ve thought about using hacks to shorten the length of the auto skip back feature, but would rather try and adjust to the default if I can.

Because I’ve had difficulty hitting the TiVo sweet spot, it means that I catch the end of a lot of advertisements. There aren’t a lot of companies that have focused on this, but over the years I’ve noticed that Sleep Train Mattress Centers seems to be at the end of a lot of commercial pods.

At first, I thought that this was a random thing, but I’ve also noticed that they buy time at the 30 minute marks, so that their logo is the last thing you see, when you delete a lot of programs from your DVR. As advertising continues to adjust to a DVR world, we’ll see more companies begin to pay a premium, in order to capture even a few seconds of a viewers attention.

In thinking about DVR advertising, there are two key spots. The first spot following a commercial and the very last moments before a program starts. The first spot is important because the advertiser has a chance to convince the viewer to watch. It’s like a home version of the Gong show. The minute you realize it’s boring, you hit fast forward and are back to your program. Sometimes, if it’s a movie preview or an especially creative ad, they can convince me to watch, but most of the time, I’m fast forwarding the second I know that it’s not part of the show.

With all of the middle ads being largely ignored, those last few seconds of a pod may be the only other chance for an advertiser to reach a fast forwarding public. I haven’t seen a lot of companies take advantage of this, but give kudos to Sleeptrain for having taken early advantage of this. They may not be able to convince me to buy a new mattress, but through the use of micro commercials and smart placement, they have succeeded at burning their logo into my brain, every time I hear a train whistle.

If you’ve ever called up your bank or credit card company, you know that most financial institutions tend to stick with the same old boring account verification questions. There may have been a time, when your mother’s maiden name was enough to protect you against identity theft, but in today’s information society, this is no longer good enough.

I’m not sure why we haven’t seen banks ask more creative questions, but I like Om Malik’s suggestion, that it’s time to come up with new secret password questions. In a post raising the issue, he suggests alternatives like what is your World of Warcraft name or who was your first online date?

The World of Warcraft suggestion is probably a little weak because outside people can figure that out, but I’d argue that the first internet date question, is probably a much bigger secret then the last four digits of someone’s social security number. Since most of Om’s suggestions were geared more towards the Web 2.0 crowd, I decided to put together a list of my own questions, for digital television enthusiasts. Feel free to chime in, if you have your own suggestions.

1.) What show do you always record, but never find the time to watch?

2.) Name a TV show that you love, but would never admit to being a fan of?

3.) What is the worst show on television?

4.) What operating system do you use for your television (ex: TiVo, Media Center, Xbox 360, etc.)?

5.) If you had to remove one button from your remote control, which one would you give up?

6.) How many hours of TV do you watch each week?

7.) What time is prime time for you?

8.) What’s a show, that you make sure to always watch live?

9.) How low do prices need to get, before you’d be willing to pay for VOD content?

10.) What is your favorite TV channel?

For a few of these, it would be hard for a bank to implement them because they don’t apply to everyone, but I still like the idea of tougher security at the banks, even if they don’t end up using my digital TV questions. It’s strange that you have to change your banking passwords every 6 weeks, to something that is alphanumeric, contains wacky symbols and is only 8 – 10 digits long, yet all it takes is the city of your birth and someone can change your mailing address or gather information about your account.

The banks would benefit more than anyone, from better security questions and I see a real marketing opportunity for the first institution to step up and take Om’s suggestion seriously. If someone agreed to add, even one of his (or his readers) questions to their password reset screen, they’d get a lot of viral love highlighting their commitment to protecting their customer’s identity. In the end, it’s up to everyone to keep an eye on their own accounts, but by making the security questions more personal, it would make it a lot harder for fraudsters, to gain unauthorized access.

TiVo released a video of their HD start up animation online and I think it’s really creative. I haven’t seen this show up on my series 3 yet, so it makes me wonder if this is what people are seeing when they boot up the new HD TiVo? I like how they were able to use different TV shows in the animation.

As an added bonus, I also found an advertisement for TiVo and Sky+. The ad is very surreal, but I like it. I think that the ad was originally produced as a trailer in UK movie theaters in 2000, although I’m not 100% on that. After getting used to hearing the “TiVo Gets Me” tagline, it was interesting to see a more British version of “TiVo Understands Me” on this clip. Oddly enough, I think I prefer the British tagline over the American.

TiVo latest hook up with Pay Per Post is beginning to look less like a relationship and more like a one night stand, after the company responded to criticism of the program, by asking “postees” to pull the TiVo ads off of YouTube.

In fairness to TiVo, there is evidence to suggest, that they had intended these ads to carry a sponsored by TiVo disclaimer, but due to quality control issues at Pay Per Post, the ads were leaked without the proper disclaimers.

Even though I think that TiVo made a mistake by partnering with Pay Per Post to begin with, killing the campaign was the right antidote for dealing with this poison in our community. There will always be times when companies make mistakes, but it’s how they react to those mistakes that define who they are and in this case, TiVo made the right move by deleting the campaign.

By moving quickly to kill the campaign, TiVo demonstrated that they are willing to listen to their community and take action, even when they’ve misjudged the rules that their community plays by.

In the long run, this won’t represent more than a five second skip back in the history of TiVo, but I do think that other companies can learn a valuable lesson from TiVo’s experience.

User generated content is sexy and it’s tempting to try and manufacture buzz, but sooner or later, your customers will find out that you are gaming the system and they will attack. Steve Rubel said it best, when he recomended that marketers be careful about trying to manipulate the social web.

“Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us and other collaborative news sites are like Bengal Tigers. They’re beautiful to look at and admire, but they’re very dangerous to touch. If your stories end up landing on these sites, then terrific. Be happy. Include the metrics in your coverage reports. But seeding PR links is trouble waiting to happen, especially as these communities become barraged with spam and the users’ sensitivity meter goes to code red.”

If your brand has no value, then there may be no place to go but up, but if you think that there is any equity in your brand, then smart marketers will think twice before supporting this tumor on the world wide web.

Even if there were an upside to astroturfing YouTube with fake ads, this controversy alone should make companies rethink their support for the Pay Per Post brand. If by partnering with the company, you end up damaging the reputation of your brand, then what have you really gained by paying people to create fake testimonials?

If I was an ad exec and my marketing consultant suggested Pay Per Post to me, I would fire them and find a marketing firm that has better ethics and an understanding of what it really takes to build grassroot support. Instead of uploading fake ads to YouTube, TiVo would have been better off, by having someone search YouTube, LiveJournal, Blogspot and MySpace for real TiVo testimonials and then leave comments thanking them for the support.

There are lots of times when I make suggestions for TiVo and while not everyone of them is a great idea, I can tell you that I would freak out if someone who worked for TiVo, left me a comment validating an idea and promising to consider it as a future development. Even if TiVo never implemented my idea, knowing that someone from the company took their time to consider it, would be exciting enough. This isn’t astroturfing, this is interacting and responding to your customers.

Fake ads, will always run the risk of blowing up on you, but by being open and transparent with your fan base, it’s not that hard to turn happy customers into viral customers. Instead of supporting companies like Pay Per Post, businesses should instead be thinking about how to engage their existing fans.

While you may or may not agree that the ethics behind Pay Per Post are deplorable, it’s clear that the company is a lightning rod for criticism. Whether or not that criticism is fair, should be irrelevant to marketers. There are some who believe that even bad publicity is good publicity, but I don’t think that anyone wants to see their brand dragged through the social mud. It’s exciting to see grassroots support for your products, but if you are going get into the same cage as the tigers, then you shouldn’t be surprised when they turn on you and attack. If some PR hack recommends Pay Per Post as a way to build buzz, do yourself a favor and go hire someone who knows what they are talking about.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of different TiVo marketing campaigns. Some of them have been great and some of them have been bombs, but TiVo has never been afraid of taking risks, especially when it comes to generating publicity. Whether it was their funeral for the VCR or their ad throwing a TV exec out a window, they’ve been able to get pretty good bang for their buck, from the social web.

Despite my normal enthusiasm for TiVo’s PR stunts, their latest campaign has been a little over the top, for even my tastes. It started in late August, when TiVo issued a press release that declared that their new TiVo HD box, had all the features that people expect from a perfect companion. When I first read the release it was so syrupy, I could barely finish it.

I even almost wrote a snarky blog post, where I was going to point out that despite their claims, I’m actually looking for something a little bit different from my “hook ups”, then the family friendly criteria that they included in the PR fluff. Things like someone who won’t freeze up on me after I had been out drinking with the boys or someone with a pair of really big hard drives or a companion that doesn’t get jealous when I play video games.

I ended up getting distracted and never wrote my post, but when I saw TiVo issue another lovefest press release, I just rolled my eyes and figured that I was in the wrong demographic to ever understand this one.

Normally, I wouldn’t have thought much more about this campaign, except while I was surfing YouTube, I came across several clips that appeared to be fan made videos expressing their excitement for the HD TiVo product. At first I actually thought that these were made by TiVo customers. There is definitely an indie feel to them. One of them actually does an amusing simulation of the world from TiVo’s perspective It wasn’t until I got to my my favorite video of the bunch that I finally figured out why there was such a sudden rush of TiVo videos on YouTube. Of all the clips out there, this is the only one that I could find, that was honest enough to at least identify that it’s part of the Pay Per Post program.

Pay Per Post has been a very controversial company from the start. Because they pay individuals to make fake user generated content, that are really covert advertisements for sponsors, the FTC has even expressed some concerns over the truth in advertising issues related to their service.

Now I don’t think that there is anything wrong with TiVo paying someone to make commercials for them, but there is something wrong with conning consumers into believing, that they are witnessing legitimate testimonials when in fact, it’s really just a shill that is being paid to tout the product. If TiVo were requiring these video bloggers to put Pay Per Post on every video, I wouldn’t even see this as controversial, but 5 of the 6 ads that I saw, carried no warnings.

In the past, I’ve appreciated TiVo’s edginess in how they advertise. It may not always be to my liking, but I don’t mind them taking risks. This time though, they’ve crossed the line. By not clearly identifying this content as an advertisement, they have insulted the grassroots community that already spends so much time and effort evangelizing TiVo’s brand. By polluting their community with this vaporous buzz, they damage the credibility of every piece of user generated content, even if it really is being made by a legitimate fan.

If TiVo already had a terrible reputation or couldn’t get buzz to begin with, I could understand why they would stoop to this level, but their customers already love their products and spend plenty of time gushing over each and every little development. With as PR savvy as TiVo has been, it puzzles me why they would risk this kind of damage to their reputation, just so that they could get a few more videos up on YouTube?

If they really are proud of supporting these artists, why not put a big TiVo logo on the front of every clip and let YouTubers know that they are watching paid programming? If this was on the up and up, TiVo wouldn’t be hiding this, but because they want it to appear authentic, they’ve choosen to support Pay Per Post and let them do the dirty work.

As a member of the TiVo community, I love it when I see cool fan creations. It’s neat to be able to connect with other people who feel just as passionate about the TiVo experience. Over the years, TiVo has gotten a tremendous amount of grassroot support from the social net and to betray that trust is a huge blunder. By choosing to “hook up” with Pay Per Post for their latest ad campaign, they have introduced a toxic poison into the TiVoSphere that can only make it sick. TiVo needs to end this questionable form of guerrilla marketing, before they damage the credibility of their fan base any further.