Television--minus advertising: in the future, you'll decide when you watch commercials, if you watch them at all.

Sometime at the beginning of the year 2030, your television set could schedule a meeting with you. It would be one of the mandatory monthly "conversations" it has with you in order to deliver uninterrupted service. It would go something like this: You switch on your TV and a "program" would pop up, presenting you with some simple choices. Based on your selections, your TV would offer to show you commercials for products and services; you and your family get to choose which ones you will see. You would click on any number of boxes, depending on your tolerance for advertising for the upcoming month. You could also choose not to watch any commercials and pay the actual price of the TV content, just like you do at web sites such as iTunes. Your monthly bill would be configured according to your "commercial exposure."

This is a scenario that marketers actually considered about five years ago as part of a study sponsored by the European Broadcasters Union. Marketers and media owners from Nokia, British Telecom, Y&R Interactive and McCann Erickson's media unit looked at a possible economic model for interactive television. The study took a long view of advertising in a world where the customer's individual preferences play a big part in how media is consumed. Or, to put it more bluntly, it envisioned how television would survive without advertising.

Attila Kelemen, a longtime brand strategist who has worked at Landor and iCrossing, says this type of scenario planning reminds marketers that they must plan for a future in which "customers are truly liberated," alluding to the way consumer-generated media is storming the gates of traditional media. The economic forecast for businesses in this media environment would be rather bleak, he says. Once customers begin to filter out all marketing messages, the price of content would rise steeply. "Who's going to fund the production of the next round of Friends?" he asks. Or, for that matter, American Idol or BBC World?

Pay as you go

The advertising tolerance model could be quite fascinating. Let's say you are in the market for a new car this month, as well as a new washing machine and a vacation. You would check the boxes that your TV set presents and adjust the advertising exposure level to what you are willing to endure for the next 30 days. So instead of paying US$150 for 10 channels, you would offset the cost with your attention and bring it down to US$40. During that month when you are away on vacation, your television set would go dark, because you would have told it in advance you were going to deny it any attention.

If this is where we are headed, the entire media world, not just television, is in for a big shakeup. Just six years from now, traditional advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990, according to a recent report from the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. The cracks have already begun to appear as advertising migrates toward the Web in unique ways. Take the case of YouTube.com, which has become a de facto mass medium of the online world. I use the term "mass medium" somewhat loosely, as YouTube is still an unfocused medium, drawing millions of viewers, apart from the tens of millions of content providers that happen to be the audience too. Its lure is the free availability and enormous breadth of "programming" that bypasses the traditional gatekeepers of video content. But it's not just the zero price of admission that's drawing YouTube's audience. It's the viewers' ability to find what they want and view it when they want it.

To put it another way, the shake-up is all about audiences moving away from "destination TV" or "appointment TV" to on-demand TV. And this is where traditional advertising is no longer going to be relevant. On-demand has thrown the old world of media planning into disarray because advertisers can no longer schedule ads and be certain that their carefully targeted audience will keep the appointment. How could you schedule any message when your audience plans to record programs with their DVRs and TiVos during that expensive time slot and watch it on their own schedule? You can't on traditional appointment TV, but you can plan for this "dis-appointment" elsewhere--online. Just like YouTube, there are scores of alternative destinations and technologies that companies and individuals use to gain large audiences' attention. Time spent on scheduling: none. Budget busted: zilch. Percentage of buzz: priceless!

Finding alternatives

"As advertising volume has increased, advertising messages have become wallpaper," wrote Al Ries in The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR. The sheer volume of messages has a negative effect on their credibility. Consumers soon learn to set up their own internal blocking devices. Saturation, according to the McKinsey report, accounts for a 37 percent decrease in the impact of advertising. In other words, our television sets have checked too many advertising boxes for us, without ever asking us if we would pay attention.

Without waiting for smart TV sets to arrive, marketers are finding ways to circumvent the attention-deficit problem. A crude but working example of this is a campaign for Carl's Jr., whose hamburger is positioned as the meal for hungry men. It asked customers to upload digital pictures of themselves demolishing a burger and vote on the "burger slayers." The promotion combined two factors any marketer would want in advertising: product purchase and customer involvement. And how did the company advertise the promotion? Not through television, but on MySpace.com, where millions of Carl's Jr.'s core demographic hang out when they are not keeping their appointment with television.

But wait, there's more

If digital video recording tools such as TiVo seemed like the Big Bad Wolf, a device called Slingbox could really blow the house down by taking time-shifting to a new level--with place-shifting It works like this: Imagine you are away from home and don't want to miss a program you have already agreed to watch. The Slingbox, which attaches to your cable or satellite box, beams the program to your PC or laptop wherever you are via a broadband connection. It even forwards programming saved on your DVR, giving you a way to skip the commercials (unbeknownst to your smart TV receiver) and watch the program on a different schedule or in another time zone. In this advertising-free world of electronic media, how will any commercial message have a shot at getting through? The answer may be in ways that are less interruptive, and more engaging.

--A.F.

Angelo Fernando is a marketing communications strategist based in Mesa, Arizona.