Yeah, I’m a little befuddled by the hate for commercials. It’s not like they’re some new thing that they just introduced into the heretofore pristine and non-commercial TV landscape or anything like that. They’ve been on broadcast media for nearly a century.
I will fast forward when I can, but that’s less out of any sort of hate, than a desire to get back to the program I was watching.
I am annoyed that so many streaming services both charge you and make you watch ads. That bugs the crap out of me. One or the other would be ok, but both is really craptastic.
As a fan of some old TV shows, I have to ask if you’ve checked the total runtime of the actual shows nowadays? They can be nearly 30% commercials, sometimes more. That’s the “new thing”.
It’s true that in the good ol’ days there was also the annoyance that the main sponsor’s name would also sometimes appear in the show’s title and a single sponsor might “own” the show in terms of dictatorial control over the content, but that was a different problem. Today the problem is the sheer dominance of commercials (not to mention their audio volume!). I don’t need this crap.
Today’s half-hour shows run about 21-22 minutes, so eight or nine minutes of commercials in a half-hour.
I’ve been binge-watching the original Dick Van Dyke Show, from the early 1960s. Those episodes check in at about 25 minutes each. There were some product placements in the odd show that might as well have been a commercial (e.g. Rob and Laura enjoying and commenting on Kent cigarettes), but there would have been five minutes of regular commercials in the half-hour.
So over the years, show lengths have shortened, while commercial airtime has lengthened.
It’s not just the show interruptions, it’s some of the programming that some stations (including my local KQED) choose to show for pledge periods. I’m referring to the lecturers who will talk and talk and talk about, oh, keeping your brain strong, or improving your mental health, or eating healthy and/or losing weight, or making better investments, or just about any self-help subject you can think of, generally aimed at senior citizens. These people all have something to sell (although you can get something from them for “free” as a “gift” if you pledge), and it all smells like either 1) snake oil, or b) the screamingly obvious. (Full disclosure, I have never watched more than 5 minutes of one of these, because they seem to make me physically ill.) There are lots of other shows for pledge periods that I don’t mind, like recaps of popular series, usually Britcoms, but these self-help do-good gurus lecture as if their livelihoods depend on it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they do. Yech. Include me out.
PBS has always had advertising. “This program has been made possible by a generous grant from Charles Schwab” is an ad.
I’m so used to advertisements that they don’t really bother me. Am I influenced by them? Absolutely. Do I find them annoying? Sometimes. I just accept them as part of the landscape.
This being MPSIMS, where we can occasionally make some tangential comments, I’ll make one here. I think one of the reasons that commercials annoy me so much is not only that they’re LOUD and obnoxious and geared to the mentality of a ten-year-old, but that commercial broadcasting is at the heart of one of American’s major problems – the ignorance and apathy that manifests at election time. Because commercial broadcasting is solely profit-seeking, and responsible journalism is at the very bottom of their list of priorities.
Public broadcasting is so poorly funded in the US that this, the richest country in the world, has by far the lowest per-capita funding for public broadcasting in the entire industrialized world, by a very wide margin. One could personify the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a homeless bum who begs for coins on a street corner and sleeps under bridges at night. It’s an absolute embarrassment and a major contributor to the American idiocracy.
Canada is far from perfect and we’re also rather sadly lagging in funding public broadcasting, but no country anywhere is as bad as the US. The CBC News program and website do fine journalism on a shoestring budget, and CBC Radio is a national treasure. In the era of the GWB administration, the first time I found out about the insidious “Project for a New American Century” that formed the core of the Bush dogma driving foreign policy was from a CBC News documentary. This was despite watching a lot of American TV news back then. American journalism is pathetic despite heroic efforts by a few individuals to buck the trend, and ratings-fixated commercial broadcasting – along with Republican efforts to defund or entirely shut down public broadcasting – is a major reason for it.
So in answer to someone’s query upthread about why some of us get so upset with the dominance of TV commercials, that’s another reason why.
A brief credit at the beginning or end of a program is not an advertisement. What is concerning, though, is the influence that these “generous sponsors” may have on program content. David Koch in fact reportedly had an outsize influence on PBS and was directly responsible for the cancellation of a documentary unfavourable to him.
There is no substitute for government funding of responsible public broadcasting with a statutory arm’s-length relationship ensuring complete independence of the broadcaster.
In addition to the loudness, let’s not forget the grandparent playing with a grandchild in slow motion, while an announcer loudly drones all the side effects of a prescription drug. Jeez, drug advertisers, get a little more creative, willya?
That being said, and as @wolfpup noted, Canada is far from perfect, and technically, doesn’t allow prescription drug commercials. Well, kind of; they’re allowed in Canada, as long as they don’t describe the drug, what it treats, or pretty much anything else about it except its name, and perhaps “Ask your doctor.” That made the advertisers get really creative. Here’s one for Cialis that has a little dialogue, but gets its point across (for those not in the know, Cialis treats erectile dysfunction):
A few years ago during their fund raising, my gf’s ad agency was triple matching every employee donation. So, if you gave $100 they gave an additional $300.
My gf decided to make a large pledge. Great, it worked out just wonderfully.
How did they use her pledge? Mostly for postage for the mailings they send her over and over, hoping she’ll give even more.
I have a visceral reaction to visual or aural ads of all kinds, like a light punch to the stomach. Maybe it’s the autism. I have never owned a television set, but over the past ten years or so I have subscribed to streaming services, mainly Netflix, to watch movies on my laptop; back when one could do this, I would watch DVDs that way. I buy the premium service to avoid ads. I watch two or three films a month, I’d say, taking a week to watch them in small increments. I can’t watch films in theaters as they are too overwhelming, so all the films I watch are at least a year old.
Because I have less than zero interest in sports, and get my news through reading it, I don’t have any need for television per se. I have watched a number of dramatic series through Netflix and PBS. Not a huge number. Often in a foreign language.
When various news websites beg me to allow ads, I ignore them.
I disagree. Having their name announced in front of a broad audience is the whole reason those generous sponsors are providing funding. It’s not as blatant as a commercial or product placement, but it’s absolutely a form of advertisement and the sponsoring company sees it that way.
Yes, this is a new infuriating. The only thing I can do, that is pretty weak, is to note the advertiser and, if possible, give my business to their competition.
I don’t watch much tv except for movies and something like TVLand (for Seinfeld, Mom, etc.) in the middle of the night. Every commercial is for either a candy bar or a prescription. I’m pretty good at muting the sound every 10 minutes and maybe dozing off. (the tv shuts down automatically after a while). When did that happen? I guess I’m watching the wrong channels. No laundry detergent, junk food, bourbon and beer commercials, just singers and dancers pushing ‘Fukitol’.
Sure, but now we’re having a semantic argument about what “advertising” means. To me it’s something that directly promotes a product or service. It provides information intended to create an enticement to buy, or in the most indirect case, an enticement to view the company as a growth investment opportunity. Getting credit for contributing to a PBS program is more like having your name on a plaque because you were one of the contributors to a new hospital wing. It’s a public acknowledgment that may enhance an individual’s or corporation’s reputation, but I wouldn’t call it advertising. You’re entitled to your own definition, of course.
I would change that to “a product, service, or industry.” My gf did advertising work designed to improve public perception of an entire industry because that industry was having difficulty hiring workers.
Yes, I agree. The humourist Dave Barry once commented about companies that advertise on popular media that make nothing that any consumer would ever buy, and Barry rhetorically asked something like, "OK, I saw your ad. Now what to you want me to do?
One company (I think it may have been BASF) even ran ads that said something like “We don’t make anything that you buy. We may the things you buy better.” This sort of awareness promotion is what I had in mind when I mentioned “an enticement to view the company as a growth investment opportunity” as a potential objective of advertising. I didn’t think about promoting them as a desirable employer as another benefit of this kind of promotion, but that’s a good point.
