you used to see those kinds of commercials during the weekend financial/political shows like those old ef hutton commercials that I had to explain what they were about to my mom …
Which is what the sponsorship does. The audience for PBS has a high percentage of professional white collar workers and that’s who Charles Schwab wants to target. When that PBS viewer starts thinking about investments the hope is they’ll think of Schwab first or when they start looking at companies they’ll gravitate towards Schwab because they’ve heard of it. You might not consider it advertisement, but marketers certainly do.
I see ads for Boeing. I’m not in the market for a 737.
I see ads for Lockheed-Martin. I’d be in the marked for a F35-B if they’d just sell me one. Sadly, they don’t seem to think I qualify.
Actually, that one’s a lot more direct. You don’t buy jet airplanes, but you do buy airline tickets, and airplane manufacturers are super-sensitive about passenger preferences because that affects what the airlines buy. It’s why Boeing is in such deep shit right now and is going through CEOs faster than most of us change our underwear.
What is harder to comprehend is aggressive advertising by a company that makes plastics, or just makes chemicals that make plastics more versatile. This is what Dave Barry meant by “what do you want me to do?” 
That would have been odd, since I used to buy BASF video tape all the time for my VCR.
Conferences sell supportorships all the time. That gets a companies name out there, even if they don’t have a booth, and builds brand identification. For PBS perhaps they think they are connecting with a higher class of viewer, and connecting their brand with high class shows.
However, we also record things before watching, even local news. Especially local news because the weather report, which my wife is hooked on, is sliced into three small segments scattered over the hour. Our local PBS stations were showing concerts (Dylan and Tom Lehrer - not on one bill!) and it really helps to skip the incessant messages. Especially the 10 minutes before the stirring ending of the concert - the credits.
BASF has had a few consumer products over the years (videotapes, and computer floppy disks, which is how I’d first heard of them), but my understanding is that those were a tiny part of their overall business – and, yet, what many everyday people knew them for.
BASF. “We don’t make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better.”
Dupont. “Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry”
Thank you. Apparently I had more or less remembered it correctly. And both that and the Dupont motto make me chuckle when I think of Dave Barry’s response to the ads: “What do you want me to DO?” 
My local PBS station starts every Antiques Roadshow ep with full-on ads for American Cruise Lines and Ancestry. It’s not a brief “this program was made possible by…” credit.
And when The Great American Recipe was airing new, Roadshow got interrupted like three quarters of the way through for a full-on ad for TGAR, and sometimes a repeat of the ads for American Cruise Lines and Ancestry.
Absofuckinglutely.
Commercials get a mute and I go look at something else, like a book, or whatever.
Can’t have that trash in my mind. It’s a hellish realm of vocal creak/vocal fry, annoying music, upsetting photography (moving or still), and some failed attempts at “comedy” or “story.” I despise television commercials in every possible way.
And yet some people watch commercials, gladly. Good for them, I guess; not for me, ever.
I don’t give money to PBS because of the pledge drives. They have “special programming” that includes a lot of alternative health grifters. Being associated with PBS makes them seem legitimate and credible. Some of them might be helpful for people, but others are shady and worthless. Especially the ones that say all of your health problems can be resolved in 3 easy steps, and one of those steps is giving up wheat, corn, soy, sugar, dairy, eggs, and meat. 
My other problem with the pledge drives is that when they’re over, the shows I want to watch are gone, and they’re not replaced by anything good. I’ve been watching Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, and it probably won’t be coming back after this current pledge drive. 
Eh, I’d say that the point of advertising is to convince businesses to pay for advertisements. The real customers being aimed at are the buyers of advertising. Which is why there’s been so little historical concern over whether advertising works to attract customers, or even angers or drives them away. The public is the excuse, the hook; not the actual point.
Quoted for truth. Growing up in a newspaper family, I knew from a young age that the sole reason to drive up circulation was to have the numbers to show to possible advertisers.
The discussion of PBS pledge drives reminded me of a fantasy I used to have back in the 80s. Every time the local PBS station was having a pledge drive the talked about having a specific goal of how much money they needed to raise “to be able to continue to bring you this quality programming”. I always wished that I had enough money to be able to call them and say, “Here’s the money you say you need to raise. Now stop interrupting shows to beg for money. Oh, and here’s a list of shows I want you to air for the next two weeks.”
This is mostly my feeling. I think folks got so used to having the ability to avoid them that when they don’t have that option, the ads seem that much more irritating. And I get it; I don’t have cable but I do have those free channels that come with some smart tvs(in my case, Visio) and it is jarring to go from ad- free to 3 minutes of ads every 7 minutes. I just use the time to do something else. It doesn’t ever occur to me to mute them because I don’t generally pay attention. I will change the channel on the sad animal ads, though.
Did they only show one season or all three? Its original airing ended in 2015, so there aren’t any new ones coming. There is Ms. Fisher’s Modern Mysteries which was also only three seasons and ended in 2021. They’ve both been repeated endlessly on our PBS stations.
That makes the businesses seem kinda thick.
My hate is not new. I’d say I’ve had it since adulthood. Since I have never owned a television, when I accidentally viewed one somewhere else it was startling how loud and abrasive commercials always were. If you listen to them all the time perhaps you cease to notice them. And then if you become, through new technology, able to avoid them, you are newly un-desensitized. A hypothesis anyway.
I don’t know about your channel choices.
The granny channels are weird with their ads, all the time.
But late night ads are different. And worse. And repetitive.