The Associated Press/ABC News reports Eight O'Clock Coffee wanted its ads to hit people right where they live in their own homes, just waking up in the morning, craving that first cup of coffee. So the company started studying how people actually use its products, taping them in their homes and in the process using an increasingly popular form of research: commercial ethnography.

A mix of marketing and the techniques used by anthropologists, commercial ethnography can unearth information that more traditional research methods such as focus groups might miss.

"The idea behind this was to see what people really do and think," David Allen, director of marketing for Eight O'Clock Coffee told the AP.

Jeffrey Wolf, a partner and director of account planning at Deutsch NY, said he first came across commercial ethnography 10 or 15 years ago, but more marketing researchers have been using it the last five years or so.

"We've actually called on anthropologists to help us," Wolf said. "Essentially, it is observational research by a trained eye."

Eight O-Clock Coffee hired Kaplan Thaler Group NY, which had 14 families in Pittsburgh and Chicago use videocameras to record a typical morning. The "reality TV" segments from that first week in May show a struggle to get moving.

A teenager, for example, slides from her bed to the floor and tries to protect her eyes from a bedroom light. One man waves away attempts to get him up and a distracted woman tips a bowl of cereal she is preparing, spilling milk onto the kitchen floor.

Using the videos as inspiration, Kaplan Thaler created two TV spots that began airing in October along the East Coast and parts of the Midwest in a 7 million, four-month campaign.

One commercial shows 2004 International Whistlers Competition Entertainer of the Year Steve Herbst struggling to keep a tune until he has a cup of coffee. The second features 2004 WNBA Rookie of the Year Diana Taurasi unable to make a shot until she sips some Eight O'Clock Coffee.

Kaplan Thaler's director of strategic planning and research, Chris Wauton, says a milestone in developing commercial ethnography came in 1979 with a book written by anthropologist Mary Douglas and economist Baron Isherwood titled, "The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption."

"Whereas the traditional approach was to ask a bunch of questions in a focus group or in a quantitative survey, people began to realize that the observational approach might also be a powerful tool," Wauton told the AP. "Actions speak louder than words."