Do you Tivo online ads?

In The Purple Cow, Seth Godin has a chapter called 'Why the Wall Street Journal Annoys Me So Much'.  I'm a fairly avid reader of WSJ (and WSJ online) so I read with interest.  Seth's point was that the full-page ads in the WSJ cost more than a house in Buffalo, but are bad spends because they all look the same (complete with smiling friendly Asian-Americans and floating umbrellas and such). 

His point was a good one - but what was interesting is that those ads never have annoyed me because I have never, ever noticed them.  I have completely screened or tivo'ed those ads - it is as if they just weren't there for me.

Until a couple of weeks ago....when I did start noticing the ads in the WSJ.  They have recently started using 1/2 pages through-out the journal advertising their own digital space.  This does annoy me because as a reader I get annoyed that the paper is so aggressively soliciting ads that will annoy me when I visit their online content.

And yesterday I was struck by the 1/2 page ad for Dow Jones Market Watch that is entitled - Ten Seconds with JodiAndrews.  The ad is clever -- it shows how in the 10 sec's it takes to read about Jodi's likes and dislikes, that we've actually learned a lot about her.  And the premise is...well - just imagine if you had a full-page ad on MarketWatch's home page, how much the online audience would learn about your brand.

The datapoint of one here is that I never look at the banner ads on home pages of content sites.  I usually take a link that lands me directly on the article, and I purposely ignore all of the flashing, popping, glittering banners.  And if they are flash and/or animated, I work harder to ignore them.  I am trying to read - and it's like trying to read while someone waves their hand in front of your face.  At least, that's how I feel about it.

But - the BEST thing about this 10 sec with JodiAndrews ad is that one of the things we learn about her are the shows she Tivo's.  She Tivo's?  Isn't that an interesting piece of information to put in an ad about placing interruptive ads on a content site?