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CHOOSE RANT | ||
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Title: Commercials Day: August 25, 1999 Author: Ruiner |
[End first television segment. Roll commercials.] "Here at Brian's, we do things my way…" [Return to program.] ... [End second television segment. Roll commercials.] "Here at Brian's, we do things…" [Remote is thrown, wedged into repetitive boob-tube's cyclopean eye.] Okay, so it's a bit extreme, but man I wanna do it. Living with the new roommate, I've taken to devouring some of my free time by watching television. Nothing spectacular. Some shows on Sci-Fi or TNT, some cartoons, some MTV, even occasionally some wrestling. But before you turn away and flee from my poor television choices, hear me out. I've got your weekly dosage of venom for you… These channels I watch are all cable channels. Supposedly those extras that you pay for with the basic inflated cable prices. I know they're not premium channels that you specifically have to pay for like HBO, but they're up there. The channels that you will never find using that crisscrossed lightning attractor atop your house. I know that these channels probably take lots of money to produce, maintain, transmit, and all that. And so they need sponsors. Commercials, just like the mainstream media. They pay the bills, and I understand that. On your major networks, you see a wide variety of adverts, everything from video game systems to feminine products 'with wings'. Apparently, the cable-only channels are in a state of limbo between normal broadcast media and your premium channels. They do not require as much money because they're already getting paid by the cable services, right? So they don't need as many sponsors, limiting the amount of commercials they have to show. But the shows are built to the specific normal broadcast format, where an hour-long show is sliced-and-diced to allow three large and one small commercial breaks. So what do these cable networks do? They show the same damned commercials over and over and over again! I sit down to watch a decent show, perhaps an hour in length. I don't want to see the same commercial more than once. I would understand if it were two different ads, meaning that the company has a specific hand in the program's purse strings. But no, I get to endure a commercial so many times it leaves electromagnetic scars etched into my retinas. It's so bad that I may forget certain details of the show I watched, but I could recite that damned jingle from memory. I even get this beautiful moment: One crappy commercial goes off, another follows behind it, then the third commercial is the exact same as the first one I saw. Perhaps that's the 'get them if they went to the bathroom' tactic. I get so angry sometimes seeing this, but I cannot really decide who to direct the anger towards. Usually it's at the company responsible for the commercial, which to me, would have a negative effect on the advertisement. Give me subliminal advertising anyday. 'Wow, I never noticed that all of those cool fighter pilots were drinking Jolt cola. Man that makes me thirsty.' Or 'Wow, those people dancing to that music look cool. If I bought that album I could be cool like that.' Simple stuff like that. I can't wait to see how the web integrates with our broadcasters over the next ten years. Maybe it'll be like those questionable, yet successful porn and MP3 sites that are so rampant out there in webland. You can view our program, but you must first click on our sponsors fourteen times. Then it will be shown in it's entirety. (small print: unless you take a break and pause the program - then it's another mandatory ten clicks in case you forgot something, boyo!!) Until then, expect me to grumble and display extended fingers towards:
Oh, and let me just say Heaven help you if you watch a Pay-Per-View event. Sure there aren't any commercials during the event. But before and after it's nothing but, repeated over and over. We watched an event last night and I saw the ad for the event nearly fifteen times before I could leave the house. And the repetitive movie snippets made me feel like I had been stuck in the Chinese Hell of Blockbuster Video Trailers (which is ironically adjacent to the Chinese Hell of Blair Witch Parodies). I'm surprised I didn't dream about the crap. But I suppose I shouldn't be all venomous without offering a solution. First and foremost there's my old credo: turn off the damned television. But that usually doesn't work. Even I have shows I occasionally must watch. How about change the age-old format restrictions for production companies. Give them more time to tell their stories. I know that goes against the whole standarization thing I fight for in the software industry, but it's a different beast here. Or set anti-idiot standards, where like some radio stations, you're not allowed to play the same one twice over a two or three hour period (of course I'm talking about songs, because radio stations can be just as bad with commercials). There are solutions. The difficulty is many people overlook the problems. But that's just me and my little dreams. I don't want to change the world - all at once. Just a broken piece at a time. B.Mooney | ||||
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