Commercials as Entertainment

NPH is on vacation this week, enabling him to indulge in such luxuries as American Idol. Incidentally, the real entertainment during Fox's broadcast last night was not the parade of magnificently mediocre Idol wannabees, but rather Oleg the Cab Driver, the star of Fox's innovative eight-second commercial pods.

Viewers were treated to Oleg talking to Rosie O'Donnell and Oleg ripping on Donald Trump's hair. The spots actually started the night before on Fox's broadcast of 24, and the network plans to continue through the rest of the week.

Read about it here.

And watch two clips here:



What NPH finds intriguing about the spots is that they're not attached to any advertiser. They are original programming content run during the commercial breaks with the sole objective of keeping viewers from changing the channel or skipping through the ads via their DVR. Of course, their launch runs strangely close to the start of the Nielson ratings blitz, which has some people calling it nothing more than a stunt.

But NPH is intrigued. We think there's a real possibility here for television advertising time to be changed into something else. Could it be that viewers habits (aided by new technology) of skipping out on ads has finally caught the attention of programmers, so that the 30 second ad spot will soon be a thing of the past?