Honda Live Advert Sky Dive Difficult is worth doing

Channel 4 will broadcast a short clip of 19 skydivers spelling out an advertisement for Honda live on Thursday night.

The £500,000 stunt is intended to retain the interest of television viewers who are turning off from advertising messages in greater numbers than ever.

Live adverts were common in the 1950s boom years of television development, especially during soap operas.

Tomorrow night, C4 will break from the dinner party series Come Dine with Me at 8.10pm to show the skydivers over the Spanish capital Madrid.

The experts, who are world and European champions, will have three minutes and 10 seconds to spell out the message.

If conditions are too dangerous, alternative sequences have been filmed.

Advanced television recording systems, such as the popular Sky+, has led to more people skipping adverts.

The trend is exacerbated by younger people, who tend to watch TV highlights on video websites like YouTube.

Last year, C4 posted its first operating loss since 1992, with a five per cent fall in the number of adult viewers watching each advert.

British advertising firms are expected to spend around £3.6 billion on the internet in 2008, which will exceed the anticipated £3.4 billion spent on TV adverts.

In America, Fox network is considering plans to remove commercial breaks altogether.

Instead, advertising logos will appear during the programme as 'product placement' or on a scrolling 'ticker' on the screen.

Product placement is common in mainstream films and on US television.

Ofcom, the media regulator, could relax the rules on product placement later this year.

Television advertising in Britain began on 22 September 1955 with a commercial for Gibbs SR toothpaste, which praised its "tingling fresh" qualities.

The next morning, Bernard Levin wrote in the Manchester Guardian: "I feel neither depraved nor uplifted by what I have seen... certainly the advertising has been entirely innocuous. I have already forgotten the name of the toothpaste."

Category:

Autos & Vehicles

Tags:

• Honda
• Live
• Advert
• Sky
• Dive
• Difficult
• is
• worth
• doing

[1993gandy]

@8gub or lamborghini :P

[pavilionbug]

The car at the begining lookedl ike a BMW?

[CharlieSqd]

That was just awsome!

[8gub]

What about Koenigsegg?

[WarthogGolf]

I don't think you've seen the VW Virals have you....

[plug007]

or Lamborghini.........

[inmysoul]

i bet volkswagen can't do anything like this ! hahaha

[alexholowczak]

It would have been great if they spelt "Toyota" in the air! That would have gone down well. :P

[Neath1010]

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