A … system would be technically capable of offering its customers not just pay-per-view but TV-sans-ads. How many viewers would be willing to pay their local cable system an extra five or ten bucks each month not to see any advertisements? … Subscribers could program what kind of ads they wanted to receive … and screen out the ones they didn’t … Needless to say, a media distribution company could charge advertisers a pretty penny to identify the households that wanted to see their offerings. As telephone and cable companies merge and smarten up their networks, they inevitably become powerbroker intermediaries between the advertisers and the viewers. They become the royal gateways for the next generation of advertising.
Predictor: Schrage, Michael
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article about advertising in the digital age for Wired magazine, Michael Schrage, an MIT Media Lab fellow and columnist for Adweek magazine, writes: ”Ray Smith – chair of the proposed Bell Atlantic/TCI multimedia merger giant – likes to joke that, sometime in the future, you may be ‘too busy watching the telephone to answer the television.’ His colleague, TCI mogul John Malone, has promised to bring a new generation of smart cable converter boxes to the tops of televisions everywhere. When all video is digitized, encoding and tracking all the ads becomes a snap. That means a Bell Atlantic/TCI system would be technically capable of offering its customers not just pay-per-view but TV-sans-ads. How many viewers would be willing to pay their local cable system an extra five or ten bucks each month not to see any advertisements? By smoothly regulating the flow of the digital images, the television programs will run seamlessly so that viewers won’t even notice the missing ads. With just a tiny bit of technical finesse, a Bell Atlantic/TCI could even rig the converters so that subscribers could program what kind of ads they wanted to receive – auto, beer, perfume, jeans – and screen out the ones they didn’t – tampons, public service announcements, detergents. Needless to say, a media distribution company could charge advertisers a pretty penny to identify the households that wanted to see their offerings. As telephone and cable companies merge and smarten up their networks, they inevitably become powerbroker intermediaries between the advertisers and the viewers. They become the royal gateways for the next generation of advertising.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Advertising/PR
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Is Advertising Dead? Adviruses, digimercials and memegraphics: The Future of Advertising is the Future of Media
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.02/advertising_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney