You know, “what common household item do researchers say is killing your pet, find out tonight!” kind of ads. I was looking at the front page of CNN and this was on there:
“Crystal Kelley was offered $10,000 to have an abortion after ultrasounds showed the baby she was carrying for another couple had severe medical problems. She refused. Here’s what happened next” followed by a link to the story. If they want to give me a thumbnail version of it without the “here’s what happened next” crap that’s fine, but I refuse to follow a link when it is so blatantly manipulative.
I hate the “asking a question for which the answer is no” teaser: “Will eating snacks kill your child? Find out tonight at eleven!”
When getting ready for work, the TV is usually set at local news on the CBS affiliate. Weather, a bit of news. They often end a story by saying–we’ll have the full story in the next segment! Or I’ll get current weather conditions, then–stay tuned to hear the forecast for the next few days.
The bus comes at a certain time & I prefer to be a the stop. I’m not some housewife wondering whether I should switch to a Lifetime movie or one of the shopping channels. Or whether I should go back to bed & catch it all later. I want them to tell me anything important in the time I have!
(No offense to home shopping channels–I use them myself. On the weekend.)
Not to nitpick, but I wouldn’t call these teaser ads; an ad is for a product, while a promo is for a show. A teaser ad might be like those that show a vague draped car shape, while The Voice intones, “The 1978 Ford… coming soon to a dealer near you.” And cut to a Tide commercial.
But yes, teasers are bamboo under the mental fingernails. I don’t watch serial/broadcast/continual television, so I rarely see them these days, but I can’t recall a one that wasn’t designed simply to hold butts in the seats for a tepid, ten-second payoff. They got dreadfully overused in the 1980s, if I recall right, and the way channel competition is these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re nearly universal. Everything about current “continuous” TV seems designed to hold onto viewers for one more minute, at any cost.
ETA: When used online, it’s like every other technique intended to get you to click a link (such as breaking stories up into several pages): every page refresh allows them to drive more ads to your browser. As well as keeping you on their site to click yet more ad-driving links.
No, they don’t bother me at all.
Kind of like hating “Coming up at 10:00 Action news” - Damn, why aren’t they giving me the news now?!
I hate almost all ads, only excepting the ones that teach me about a product I’m interested in (which I pretty much only see in technical magazines).
But the “teaser” types do seem particularly and insidiously capable of ticking me off, yes.
Since I record everything I watch and FF commercials, they don’t bother me a bit.
i identify tabloids this way. you know they’re worthless when they garnish mundane stories with a sensationalist headline on the front page.
It doesn’t bother you that they’ve gotten trickier and trickier about arranging ads to foil zippers - varying length, order, flashing in segments from the show, etc.?
Bravo is particularly bad about this, and I am particularly lazy, so I just ffwd through those short show segments too 
I feel like every headline on Yahoo used to be a damn teaser. Since they overhauled the Yahoo main page, they seem to have hired more professional headline writers.
The trick is that they run teaser clips for the show you’re watching, so you stop and discover it’s a 10-second tease followed by three more commercials. Enough of this, and enough tricky randomness to the order, and I’m sure they’ve beaten many zippers into giving up the practice.
The ads are also arranged to get their message across, blipvert-style, even at high speed, and the tailing ads have their significant content in the last 5-10 seconds. All to foil zipping. Look, too, at how much significant dialogue gets put in the first few seconds of each segment - you can’t really get away with missing it.
I have never been happier to pay by the episode and get my dreck utterly commercial-free. Worth every penny… which is less than paying for cable, anyway.