I have to give credit to my wife for this entry. Of course a big benefit of cutting your cable is being able to stream television shows with no commercial interuptions. It’s just nothing but entertainment.
This has allowed my wife and I to sort of live in a social experiment of our own creating by accident. We’ve noticed that our three year old daughter isn’t as influenced by major brands as we were when we were children. This was the most prevalent when one night when we were both short for time and had a busy night planned, as most families these days do. We decided on McDonalds for dinner and asked our daughter what she’d like. She said she didn’t want anything. Yep, read that again, I’ll wait.
We noticed it’s not just McDonald’s but other brands as well. The result is we as parents have regained a lot of control over what we allow our child to be exposed to. As this trend builds up steam over the next few years, we will have an entire generation that will not be faced with television ads. What this means for the future, and branding and marketing remains to be seen. I do believe though, it’s a sign we are looking at the death of traditional marketing.
Joel MacLeod.ca 