Taking back large portions of your life by recording long television programs (called time shifting) is a great idea. Tim Sanders gives us his strategy for using Tivo to record football games so he catches up to the real-time event somewhere in the fourth quarter. This way he sees the entire game, catches the exciting ending at the same time as everyone else and completely skips all of the commercials.
There’s only one problem with that plan. What if you’re like me and you LIKE to watch the commercials? OK, maybe not ALL of them … and certainly not the same ones over and over and over and over (like during football games). But, I do like to check in on advertising strategies, rate the creativity, score the impact of the message, judge the editing … generally keep tabs on the world of advertising. Watching TV commercials, for me, is like fishing. It’s A LOT of boring mediocrity punctuated with just a few choice ads that make it all worth while. Believe me, I DO understand that I’m a little freaky in this regard (and if you just made a mental crack about the word “little”, you can contact my wife to join the club … she’s the president!) Sigh.
