John Battelle points to TiVo's pending introduction of search for commercials as evidence for his theories on a merger of search and video. Let's take that one step further: What happens to design and production values in commercials when they become the target of search?
Such adverts probably don't look like today's. Years of battling the remote and now the DVR have turned commercials into attention grabbing eye candy. And it works, to some extent. The Tundra smacked by a meteor and the SUV carrying singing New Guinea tribesmen are funny, a few times. But if you're searching, not leaning back on the couch during halftime, is that what you want to find? The factual nuggets in those productions are pretty much limited to the brand name and vehicle style.
Optimizing to inform and motivate a potential customer is likely to produce quite different form and content. If search via TiVo, or Google, becomes a substantial fraction of the useful exposure time to customers, we're looking at a bifurcation in video production styles. How do you get information across to someone in a buying mood, without becoming deadly?