Liked the Show? Maybe It Was the Commercials

Ego trip magazine created their own ads in their magazine before they could find advertiser. The idea and concept gave them a mean following based off that idea. So take the tips of screating your own reality show and sliding your own commercials in it promoting your product. maybe.

By BENEDICT CAREY

People eat chocolate bars in pieces, waiting and savoring. They space their cigarettes through the day, their gossip sessions, their calls to friends. They like their sports with timeouts, and practice their religion with fasts and periods of self-denial, like Lent.

So why is it that commercial interruptions always ruin TV programs?

Maybe they don’t. In two new studies, researchers who study consumer behavior argue that interrupting an experience, whether dreary or pleasant, can make it significantly more intense.

“The punch line is that commercials make TV programs more enjoyable to watch. Even bad commercials,” said Leif Nelson, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of the new research. “When I tell people this, they just kind of stare at me, in disbelief. The findings are simultaneously implausible and empirically coherent.”

Over the years, psychological research has found that people are not always so clear on what makes them happy. When reporting on their own well-being, they exhibit a kind of equilibrium: After a loss (divorce, say) or a gain (a promotion), they typically return in time to about the same happiness level as before. Humans habituate quickly, to hardship and prosperity, to war and peace.

Yet even modest pleasures — a cup of coffee in the morning, an afternoon walk, a Scotch before bed — seem to follow a law of diminishing returns. “Alcohol is like love,” says a roué in Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye.” “The first kiss is magic. The second is intimate. The third is routine.”

To Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of the book “The How of Happiness,” this raises a provocative question: “If you adapt so quickly to pleasurable activities, and the pleasure decreases, how do you sustain a level of happiness or ever move up on the scale?”

One way people do this, research suggests, is to favor novel experiences over material goodies. The smell of a new car may go to a person’s head for months. But the memory of a mind-bending trek through the Australian outback — or the Amsterdam museums — seems to provide longer-lasting psychological sustenance, some researchers argue. In some studies, couples report greater satisfaction in their relationship after trying new things together. READ