Making time to watch television is becoming increasingly hard work, the researchers say, what with the internet to surf, family to quarrel with, texts to send, takeaways to eat. And when you do actually slump down on the sofa, then you have to leap for the phone to spend a shed-load of money voting on the regional heats of the X-Factor and, perhaps most importantly, grab the remote to shut out the ad breaks.

Which ought to make advertisers wonder why they bother, when they can buy 764 related keywords on Google. At least someone actively engaged in searching on the internet might be paying attention.

Well, perhaps. The truth is that enough people do pay just enough attention to the ads. Cars made of cakes, or furniture tumbling through a Spanish hill town are probably as much a part of the collective imagination as the high point of the latest epic sporting contest. But the perennial problem for the advertiser is the belief that half the money spent on the glossy spots is wasted. If only they knew which half it was.

The future could be different, though. Down at Heathrow, NDS — the technology company currently controlled by News Corporation, parent company of The Times — is working on next-generation set-top box software. Its knowhow is used by Sky and other digiboxes worldwide, so if the group is cooking up something it will probably be in your home in a few years.

One idea NDS is working on is targeted television advertising. The commercials download quietly to the set-top box and then, perhaps using knowledge about the viewing family gathered through market research, ads are selected from those stored in an effort to ensure that non-drivers do not have Toyotas screaming at them or the people without kids are not faced with images of nappies.

That is the possibility and in a way it is hardly radical. ITV's regions have allowed it to offer targeted advertising based on geography for the entire 50-plus years of its existence.

Abe Peled, NDS's chief executive, reckons (although he would) that ITV and the other commercial broadcasters should give away Freeview boxes with a built-in digital video recorder to the ten million or so homes that are probably unlikely ever to want pay-television. After all, it would only cost £500 million, wholesale, although the order might have to be reduced in size, spread over a few years and the bill shared with Channel 4 and Five. But it should be remembered that internet advertising is, like all fads, over- rated. Google's AdWords program offers the seductive proposition that advertisers pay only by the click.

That is true as far as it goes but AdWords isn't as targeted as all that. Google uses features such as “automatic matching”, which helps it to spend anything left over on a daily budget on other key words that may be only vaguely connected to sites being requested.

Nor is it transparent how the auction process — which is how adverts are ranked on a page — works. The highest bidder does not necessarily win because Google applies a quality factor to advertisers, so it cannot easily be proved whether smaller players trying to break into a market are paying a fair price.

Bearing all this in mind, life on the sofa could be very different in five years for the glassy-eyed viewer as media companies vie for their attention. Once advertisers wake up to the notion that Google is overrated and that television advertising, allied to new-fangled targeting is underrated, then, well, ITV might be able to afford to buy another round of FA Cup rights to keep Steve Ryder busy and Channel 4 could afford to keep those Dispatches documentaries going.

Sadly, things seldom turn out that simple. After all, not all advertisers might welcome their commercials being overridden and possibly the money that appears to be wasted is not. After all, there are reasons why non-drivers might be worth targeting. Children usually become drivers one day and on that day if Ford is more familiar than Hyundai, it is pretty obvious which brand the 25-year-old will prefer.

That sort of thinking suggests that the broad brush of television advertising is not quite that inefficient after all — but that will not persuade advertisers if there is better targeting technology around. Brand owners will want better returns on their investments, so while everybody on the same street in, for example, Wigan may be watching England's humiliating exit in the 2014 World Cup qualifiers, not all Acacia Avenue's residents would be getting the same ads at half-time.

— Michael Gove, a member of Shadow Cabinet and a columnist for this newspaper, seemed to blame the breakdown in families on lads mags a few weeks ago. One hesitates to disagree with a Times man but this argument is scarcely compelling. Lads mags sales are in fact collapsing — as yesterday's ABC figures showed again. Presumably the number of single-parent families will now miraculously drop as a result.

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