It seems almost everyone out there has a love-hate relationship with TV commercials. Deanna Walsh, 36, a waitress at Blackbeards restaurant said, ”On the whole I like them but sometimes they get too repetitive.” But Mary Barrett,45, a waitress at the Golden Biscuit eatery responded: ”That is what they make remotes for. Every time the commercials come on, I’m changing the channel.”
Commercials are a necessity to help maintain our standard of living but they can really be aggravating. Some of the really annoying ones are the cave men, along with all of the honest, sympathetic lawyers eager to help you sue whoever they think you can collect from. The ads for products to enhance your love life are really bad..
So are the medicine ads that warn you of all the horrible side effects and end up telling you to stop taking the medicine and call your doctor if you start to go deaf or blind.
Some ads can actually be entertaining like the Geico Insurance Gecko, the Aflack Duck or the cat that advertises for a hound dog to help find the odorless litter box. Most adds involving animals are amusing, although Caesar can get on your nerves. The moving men who drop a grand piano from several floors up and then deliver the pieces in a glad garbage bag are a real hoot.
Here are some of the interesting technical aspects of advertising:
# Ads are usually louder than the programs. The sponsors know that the viewers have a tendency to leave the room when the ads come on.
# TV dramas are actually written so that the story reaches some crisis point just before the as come on. It is envisioned that some day in the future you could hear the following. “This just in, terrorists have exploded nuclear warheads in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Fatalities could be in the tens of millions. More after these important announcements from our sponsors.”
# The ads appear to be synchronized from channel to channel so when you flip channels to avoid an ad the other channels also have ads. What’s really aggravating is that sometimes the channel you flip to will have the same ad you just left.
# Sometimes you can avoid commercials on a drama program by switching to a sports program.
# There is very nearly one minute of commercials for every two minutes of programming.
People have been fighting back against ads since the beginning. Before the remotes, my parents had a switch installed with a line going to the TV so they could turn the sound off during commercials.
The ultimate weapon against commercials is digital recording. You prerecord the programs you want to watch and then use the fast forward to zip through the commercials. There is great satisfaction in watching the commercials fly by and getting quickly back to the program.
If you don’t prerecord, you can record the program you want to watch at the moment, spend the first one third of the program time doing something else and then play back the program you have been recording and fast forward through the commercials.
People in the business say that the digital recorder represents a real threat to the TV commercials.
I would suggest that the industry fight back by making the ads more clever, more entertaining and fewer and farther between. One minute of ads for every two minutes of program seems like an awful lot.
If and when the ads become less irritating, people won’t go to such trouble to avoid them. This would be good for everyone.