Aren’t there enough commercials out there already? Are Americans turning into walking zombie-consumers? Yes and yes. This article about the new Project Canoe, which the major cable companies are beginning to develop, really reminded me how important commercials are to America’s economy and that millions, or probably billions, of dollars are put into advertisements that may or may not help a product succeed. It’s also strange, but expected, that there is now software monitoring our TV watching and that commercials are now going to be catered to our specific interests. Thank god for tivo and dvr!
Perhaps, the most saddening fact of this story is that Google is getting involved with the advertisement world. I know that Google needs ads to survive as a website, but why join the side of the advertises and inundate us with even more commercials. The Internet was an escape from unwanted ads for me because i could block pop-ups and no ads ever really interrupted my web activity, and to know that Google is going to help TV companies market commercials to me makes me wonder what Google’s real purpose is.
The other particularly annoying part of this article is that Cable companies continue to operate in their ever powerful oligopoly of commercials and overpriced television. The fact that all of the cable companies, all six of them, went in on a deal to make sure that they won’t ever have to pay for Google to tell them what commercials they need to run. The fact that the cable companies don’t want to pay Google makes sense to me, but for people to be blatantly controlled by an entire industry (which a lot of people have or feel like they need) seems to be a rip off, or maybe even illegal. In a radio program called This American Life there is one show devoted to a similar, much more illegal, scheme between all of the industry leaders of a different industry that really makes my stomach churn. Now in the case of the radio program, they are fixing prices and with Project Canoe the cable companies are only watching out for themselves which is not illegal, but still represents the power that companies can have in an industry where there are only six major companies.
