In Fact, You DO Like Commercials in Your TV Shows

Admittedly, I'm not normal. I have been known to yell "Hey, I was watching that!" when my daughter changes the channel in the middle of a commercial. But it turns out, admit it or not, that you like TV commercials, too. Or at least they add to your enjoyment of the TV shows you're watching. That was one of the research nuggets I heard on last month's HBR (Harvard Business Review) podcast entitled, "Strange-But-True Research Insights."

In the podcast, they cited research from a professor at Berkley. In his study, when people were asked if they liked commercials or not, most said no, they did not. However, when he tested how much enjoyment people got out of a show they were watching, those who saw the same show with commercials rated their enjoyment much higher than those who watched it commercial free. He attributed this to a process he calls adaptation, where we adapt to something, even if it's pleasurable, over a period of time, so it lessens the pleasure. By interrupting the flow of the show, our pleasure mechanisms get restarted after each commercial. So, having commercial breaks really do add to our enjoyment of a show.

What about great shows on HBO and Showtime, you say? They had an answer to that, too. If you look at the kinds of shows that are popular on pay TV channels, they have 4 or 5 intricate plot lines woven into the main storyline. So, as they switch from one to another, they are creating the same interruption patterns that commercial breaks give you.

For my own self, besides the fact that I'm not normal and enjoy watching commercials for their own aesthetic value, I have found myself getting restless if we DVR something and spend an evening fast forwarding through commercials. Apparently, fast forwarding isn't enough of a break, especially since you have to concentrate to see when you need to press play again.

So, you may think you hate commercial TV, but in reality, it adds to your enjoyment. Now, if an advertising actually creates good advertising on top of that, your pleasure increases. For those who say, no one watches commercials – I say no one likes watching bad commercials. Just look at the numbers for views on YouTube for ads that we all enjoy, like the Old Spice "I'm on a horse" campaign. In this case, people are actually going out of their way to watch TV ads.