There are times here at Yankee where I feel that the only platform that anyone notices is the mobile one. But for something as simple as television, the mobile platform drives miniscule audiences and even tinier revenues. Meanwhile, traditional Pay TV platforms such as cable, satellite, IPTV, VoD and DVR tick along, developing their own versions of Anywhere.

We’ve been tracking ad-avoidance behaviors on DVR in our survey products for the past several years, and I wasn’t surprised to see an article in MediaPost about a study that Starcom and TiVo did on the same subject. I was surprised to see such a generic conclusion — that people said that they would be less likely to skip through “relevant advertising.”

This type of finding is the proverbial red herring of the digital advertising industry. It’s sent us chasing our tails over behavioral targeting. It’s made us forget about the core idea of mass media. And it’s been enough for us to think that pigs can fly.

But the thing that raises my hackles is the simultaneous and conflicting idea of consumer rationality and marketability.

What’s Wrong With Rationality?

In a nutshell, people aren’t rational. Had they been, we probably wouldn’t have auto dealerships filled with SUVs today. The SUV wasn’t a rational purchase — it was emotional. Just like miniature crackers, single serving cold-cuts and capuccino drinks from the gas station. And let’s not forget paying $7 a gallon for filtered water in a plastic bottle.

If people were truly rational, they’d: buy everything in bulk, demand accountability from their governments, drink tap water, and stop expecting the pharmaceutical industry to solve lifestyle problems.

But they don’t. And that’s why we have marketing and advertising. After all, what does an animated lizard have to do with buying car insurance…or beer for that matter? Should we take bovine advice for what we should eat? Spend an hour with a cow, another hour with a chicken, and you’ll probably re-think eating at both Chick-Fil-A or even McDonald’s.

Rationality In Action

I bring up rationality, because there’s a fundamental difference between what people say and what they do. There are ways to measure what people do, to find out how they spend their time, to find out how much they pay and would be willing to pay. But it’s easy to cross a line when surveying people, and that line seems to be somewhere in the world of marketing where we cross from the hard facts of how much someone spends on groceries to whether she finds a reptile “cuddly.”

So when we survey people, they all say that they don’t like advertising and that they want less of it. That’s the rational being. But do we watch the Super Bowl for the football or the ads? Do we send YouTube clips of ads to our friends?

Of course, we want less advertising. But the point isn’t whether we want it or not — it’s whether it works. That’s the rub. Advertising is effective, because people aren’t rational. Because we’ll sit and watch the same advertisement over and over again, waiting for the program to continue. Some of us do things to skip advertising (such as using a DVR), others pay for premium programming such as HBO. But in the end, the vast majority of us will sit through the ad.

And when we get our act together to put a “speed bump” advertisement onto the DVR so that we’re watching an ad even while we skip through the traditional video advertising, we’ll respond to that as well.

Whose Definition of Relevant?

TiVo and Starcom have an agenda here. That’s probably TiVo’s new advertising network. Since people are skipping advertising on their DVR, what we need are better, more relevant ads on the DVR.

And TiVo has looked into the crystal ball and asked people what type of advertising they’d be “less likely” to skip. The answer is “relevant advertising.” But what does that mean? Is it that I would prefer a beer ad to yet-another-AARP convention in the back of a Ford Mustang advertising FloMax? Is it something else?

As researchers and industry analysts, we continue to run into this knee-jerk response to questions about advertising. People don’t like advertising. People say they don’t respond to advertising. People try to avoid advertising. And they say they’d prefer “more relevant” advertising. But these are rational responses to rational questions about a marketplace that is far from rational.

We’re over-intellectualizing consumer behavior. People have many reasons for how they spend their time and money. When quizzed, they revert to the rational explanations. But many consumer behaviors defy rational thought. I’ll rest my case with Lunchables.