Customizing Commercials Won’t Work

I don’t understand the fascination with the “let-me-pick-my- own-commercials” model. Seems to me it’s broken right out of the box because, after all, we’re still talking about commercials. In a world where the perfect station is a set of earbuds away, who’s going to want to sit around picking through a bunch of advertisers who want to intrude on that perfect programming?

If a company can’t figure out how to engage a core audience of users with compelling, non-advertising content, it signals an underlying deficiency in the product — not merely a deficiency in the marketing message.