86 percent of viewers skip advertisements

If last Friday’s post didn’t get you to question your career selection, this one might. According to research by YouGov for Deloitte, almost 90 percent of TV viewers always fast-forward through advertisements.

While TiVos and other DVRs may have increased the amount of television people watch, this research shows that 86 percent of people always fast-forward through the ads when watching time-shifted programs. "Among television advertising's greatest preoccupations is measurability. While television generates billions of commercial impacts every day, it is hard to measure precisely how many of these are viewed," said James Bates, media partner at Deloitte.

The online folks have claimed for years that TV advertising was dead. No one watches television ads, these experts would claim. Despite those claims, this same research pours even colder water on those statements about the effectiveness of advertising on competitive digital platforms.

The report went on to say that only 2 percent of respondents said online video advertisements were “more memorable than any other form of advertising medium.” That number drops to an minuscule 1 percent of viewers that say ads on the iPod and iPad are more memorable. Take that Steve Jobs.

Not all of the research results were negative for television advertising. More than half of the respondents, 52 percent, said that television advertising was more memorable than ads delivered on other platforms. Newspapers were the next highest rated, receiving a 10 percent rating for this same question.

"What television does best — display and brand building — is what online struggles with. Online advertising is best at search, which previously newspapers, particularly for classified, had excelled at," said Bates.

This research shows that despite the growth of competitive technologies, television still delivers the most memorable form of advertising.

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