The biggest bogeyman on Madison Avenue goes by a four-letter name: TiVo. The technology, which TV viewers can use both to record programs and to take the commercials out of them, is a couch potato’s delight—and a marketing executive’s nightmare.

Although TiVo is catching on more slowly than many observers had predicted, it is a hit with its half million or so users. If, as some research suggests, 50 percent of all US households will be using this or similar products to delete advertisements in five years’ time, what then? The spread of interactive television, when it arrives, and other forms of entertainment based on the World Wide Web will contribute to the same effect: fewer people watching commercials.

No wonder advertisers lie awake at night. But they needn’t. TV commercials are only one (and not the most efficient) way of interacting with a target audience. If marketers want their relationships with consumers to stimulate sales—and which of them doesn’t?—they should stop relying so much on TV ads and take up the very technologies they fear.

The upside

What does that approach mean in practice? Simply this: companies must find a way to use interactive media—TiVo-like technology, the long-awaited...