Challenge The Bastards

It's time for all you spineless ad ferrets to get up off your asses and defend yourselves.

Yesterday we talked about a new study that laid bare as a fraud the ubiquitous story that TV is dying.

Unfortunately, the effect of this story is not just that our newspapers and airwaves have been full of bullshit for the past five years. There have been real-world effects on the lives and livelihoods of real people.

It's time to undo some of the damage.

Next time some smelly Twitter-weasel starts screeching the "tv is dying/advertising is dead" stuff and starts mouthing-off about his precious social media, challenge the bastard.

Here at The Ad Contrarian we abhor violence. But putting a good scare into a bedwetter never did any harm.

Here is your Offical Ad Contrarian Anti-Bullshit Cheat Sheet:

- TV viewing is at an all-time high. The average American now watches more television than ever before.

- Contrary to all the baloney about consumers desperate to avoid advertising "the largest observational look at media usage ever conducted" found that...

• TV accounts for 99 percent of all video consumed.

• YouTube, Hulu, iPhones and all the other online video and cellphones combined account for less than 1% of all video viewed.

- TiVo and other DVRs account for less than 5% of all TV viewing.

- Fewer than 3% of total tv spots are being missed as a result of TiVo ad-skipping.

- TV viewership has grown over 7% since 2000.

- The positive effect of more viewership on advertising is twice the negative effect of TiVo ad-skipping.

- The New York Times recently reported on two new studies that show that commercials actually improve the enjoyment of watching TV. (That one's a little hard to swallow, but we've gotta use whatever ammo we've got.)

If you weenies don't get up off your butts and do something soon, we'll all wind up writing freaking meta tags for Google.

Oh, I forgot. We already are.