Fast forward - 2012

Does wasted time gnaw at your conscience? Do you lay awake at night counting minutes you'll never get back - hours spent waiting in line? Afternoons playing online poker? That whole year when - well, let's not digress.

We Americans are pretty efficient. We don't take monthlong holidays or leisurely lunch breaks. We eat at our computers, like normal people. There's nothing worth doing that's not worth doing faster, am I right?

So you'll be happy to hear that those moments you spend zipping through television commercials on the DVR aren't actually unproductive. In fact, a University of Iowa researcher has found people often better remember commercials played at warp speed. You're busy, so here's the upshot:

Rob Rouwenhorst, a lecturer of marketing in the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business, studies the psychology of advertising. He also watches TV.

Which got him wondering: “Do Zipped Commercials Influence You?” That's the name of his doctoral thesis, which concludes, yeah, a lot of times they do.

In fact, he writes, viewers watching commercials zipped at 300 percent real time remember ads better than when they watch them at normal speed - probably because they're paying closer attention in order to stop when their program comes back on.

His work answers advertisers' zillion-dollar question (more than half of the 36 million Americans who own DVR devices used them to fast forward through commercials). But I think there are civic and practical uses for this new knowledge, too.

Let's think big!

Take the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, which is shaping up to be a yawner. Now that Donald Trump, Mike Huckabee and (probably) Sarah Palin are out, who will bring the spark?

Guitar jams and blustery birther tirades are too 2010. Forget made-up feuds and (dare I?) Chuck Norris - none of that plays at 300 percent.

Ditch the town hall meeting for tweeting. Hit the fast forward on debates (bonus: the candidates will sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks).

Newt Gingrich could scratch this week's “big conversation,” and slap his face on a NASCAR race car. Seventeen cities? Pshaw. He could hit all 99 Iowa counties this week.

Think bigger: There would be savings at the statehouse - no more choosing between Debates to Nowhere and governance.

Bigger: Crop planting, child rearing, world diplomacy ... I'm telling you, this is a moneymaker.

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net