Commercials Are Good for You

Forget the perils of time-shifting, here is some good news for Madison Avenue: Advertisements make watching television a more entertaining experience.

The reason? People are really lousy at predicting how much they'll enjoy something.

To test this assertion, Leif Nelson of U.C. Sandiego and Tom Meyvis and Jeff Galak of New York University showed two groups of university students a half hour episode of Taxi. One group of students watched the show with commercials and one without. Neither group had any previous experience watching the show. Still yet another group was asked to forecast who enjoy the show more. Not surprisingly, the forecasters predicted the group watching Taxi without commercials would have a better time. (Read the research paper here.)

You know where I'm going with this: The group watching the show with commercials reported a better experience.

In further testing, the researchers controlled for things like the quality and placement of commercials (whether the commercials were better than the actual show and whether the commercials were at the beginning and end of the show or cut into the show like we're used to.) and non-commercial disruptions. All the results suggested that it's our ability to adapt that is the key:

"Though they have trouble predicting it, people adapt to most positive experiences, often causing an initially marvelous experience to end only mildly positively. However, disruptions, even irritating ones, can reduce adaptation and therefore make positive experiences more enjoyable."

Why are we like this? Nelson, Meyvis and Galak think it might be that we focus too much on our dislike of commercials and not enough on any positive impact ads may have on the overall experience.

Another possible explanation the researchers don't delve into: We might put more value on the extra time gained from watching programming without commercials than from the incremental increase in pleasure from watching TV with ads.

And here is a great example of how things can go horribly wrong when we fail to realize our adaptive capabilities:

Related:

• Do Media Consumers Really Dislike Advertising?


• Rich, Successful -- and Miserable


• The Misprediction of Regret (pdf)


• Wouldn't It Be Nice? Predicting Future Feelings