Searching for TV ads

John Battelle notes Tivo is planning to let you search for Ads and has an elaborate scenario mapped out.
Tim Oren wonders about the effect on production values:

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.

What both of them have missed is the already-existing business that has this solved already, which is QVC. They have the programs set up to explain the products and they have the web/TV integration that Battelle dreams about. They just need to segment and add the metadata to their productions, so they can show up as feeds and get past the LIVE TV mentality they use to drive sales on TV by having fixed quantities that sell out.
TV ads as artforms, on the other hand, may have a future, as Jonathan Sanderson points out regarding the Sony bouncy balls ad.