Each week Adam Frucci takes a closer look at the latest gadget buzz in his column, Shift.

With DVRs popping up in more living rooms every day, the advertising industry is scrambling to figure out how to keep TV ads relevant. Commercial skipping is making the commercial break less and less valuable, and since networks rely on these ads to pay for programming, that doesn't bode well for them. I decided I would do advertisers, network operators (including NBC Universal, which owns SCI FI), and viewers all a favor and toss out some ideas on how to change the way advertising works in this new age of television. You can all thank me later. After the jump, check out three new ways to deliver ads and keep the programming you know and love paid for. Of course, I'm not the only visionary out there, so please feel free to propose your own brilliant business models in the comments section.

People are annoyed by ads that they don't care about at all. Someone watching Monday Night Football probably doesn't care about diapers, and someone watching a Lifetime Original Movie might not be the perfect customer for the new F-350. While ads for different demographics are generally placed during shows that those demographics tend to watch, it's far from an exact science. Why not let people choose what kinds of ads they want to see? When setting up a DVR they could select categories they're interested in, such as movie trailers, automobiles, or personal electronics, and then have only ads from those categories slipped into the programming breaks. People will be less likely to skip stuff they really are thinking of buying, and the advertisers get to send their ads exclusively to potential customers, making their dollars work a lot harder.

This is and idea that's been tried out on the Internet with less than stellar results, but it has the potential to work better on television where ads are something more ingrained into the viewing experience. What if people were rewarded for not skipping ads? For example, what if you earned credits for every ad you watched. Then when a network had a pilot coming up, there could be an exclusive preview for people who had watched ads rather than skipping them. Alternatively, for every ad you watch perhaps a small amount could be taken off your cable bill (to a limit, of course). There's the risk of people just leaving the TV on mute all night in order to get credits, so something requiring user input every so often would need to be implemented in order to keep people honest.

As much as I hate to admit it, some ads can be entertaining. After all, as many people watch the Super Bowl for the ads as they do for the football. Movie trailers are an extremely popular download on the Web, and many clever ads become viral videos on sites like YouTube. Why not let people have access to these sorts of ads the same way they have access to HBO shows — on demand? Apple already gets this idea, integrating its popular movie-trailer downloads into the company's upcoming iTV unit, and some cable companies even offer on-demand movie-trailer channels. What if you could rate ads, and the top 10, 25, or 50 would be available on demand? Those ads people talk about around the water cooler, such as the Volkswagen accident series, could easily be viewed so you were always in the loop. Again, advertisers would kill getting access to viewers who have already expressed interest in their products.

Unless some other business model is adopted by the TV industry, programming will still be paid for by advertisements. But since DVRs enable viewers to skip commercials at will and they're only getting more common as time goes on, advertisers may soon think they aren't getting their dollars worth and they'll stop paying to keep According to Jim on the air. But by allowing customers to have as much say in which commercials they see as the advertising and network executives who program them now, people may start to look at ads as a useful service instead of an annoyance to be fast-forwarded through. That means shows stay on the air, advertisers are happy, and football fans everywhere will never have to sit through another Pampers commercial. Everybody wins. — A.F.