Well there's no need to exercise your pudgy fingers any more! Because now when you try to skip over a Domino's ad, it will automatically give you the option of ordering a pizza through your TiVo. This is a breakthrough in ease of service to our nation's cheese-laden bellies:

"We believe that interactive television ordering is the future," Mr. Weisberg says. "Why even get up off that couch now?" In traditional ordering, there are numerous "barriers to purchase," he says, such as turning up a competing takeout menu while looking for the Domino's flier or deciding to eat from your own refrigerator after going to it in search of a Domino's magnet.

Not sure how this fits in with the national obesity crisis. [WSJ; pic via]

To entice Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer-product giant, to spend on its network, CBS created a campaign featuring the host of its entertainment-news show "The Insider." In so-called interstitials, or mini segments, during breaks in the comedy shows, the host dishes about the CBS comedies while preparing a new Bertolli product.

So if you can stand to miss the host of The Insider "dishing" about CBS comedies while preparing Italian food, Tivo away! Wanna see an example? Sure you do:

[via WSJ]

It's an interesting development for the networks, who continue to cede control of our eyeballs. Imagine if you weren't a loyal NBC viewer, but a Gawker TV viewer instead. You'd just have to fire up the TiVo box and there waiting for you would be all of the shows we are relentlessly obsessed with (so, like, 146 episodes of Gossip Girl and then a Frontline about sad people.) If a show starts to suck, like this season of Project Runway, we remove it for you. You don't have to press any buttons or anything! (What was that point Wall-E was trying to make again?) All the networks will be able to do is desperately act as publicists for their shows, hoping the astute editors at Ranger Rick TV or whatever will decide to pick up their new Tim Daly series and feed it right into our brains. A new middleman emerges? [WSJ]

Examples of MTV's work in this regard include several different "C.S.I. Guys" spots for Dunkin Donuts and Papa John's, and a three and a half minute long film about a young designer that is actually a Target ad.

Dario Spina, who handles the same job for MTV's entertainment channels like Comedy Central and Spike, said of countering the digital video recorder, "That's the idea here; we want to blur the lines between the commercial breaks and the entertainment content."

...

"Viewers keep watching right through the commercial," Mr. Spina said, adding that "good commercial content is good content."

Here's an idea: how about keeping ads clunky, boring, and easily skippable? Bad ads—or even just traditional ones—are very straightforward. They make a sales pitch. They offer information. It's quite simple to delineate them from the regular programming.

More entertaining and engaging ads are the work of the devil. The editorial- advertising divide is a good thing, even in its warped and watered-down television entertainment version. Enhanced product placement, which brings ads into shows, and more "podbusting," which brings shows into ads, add up to nothing but ads all the time. The takeover will soon be complete!

Please keep our television commercials in neat little blocks, so that we can get up and go to the bathroom while they are on, or, if we have the proper technology, skip them altogether. This whole "great ads that you want to watch just cause they're so great" is a huge backlash waiting to happen. It was also the business model of Firebrand.com, which went out of business despite a preponderance of nakedness.

We, as a society, have a social compact with television advertisers. We grumble about your sucky ads, and do everything we can to skip over them. But in the end we still buy your products. Everybody's happy. Start mixing up the shows and the ads too much, and people will get angry. That's when the revolution comes.

Well, probably not. But please don't make these fancy ads. Thank you.

[pic via Adbusters]