TV channels have now taken to speeding up programs so as to fit in more advertising. They use pitch adjustment so that they don’t sound like chipmunks, but they can’t do anything about people just moving a little bit faster than they should.
They are. Heck, you just have to watch the news to see businesses engage in stupid behavior all the time.
Ok, boss. All those businesses who advertise, every single one, are just naive fools being duped by the fiendishly clever media outlets (businesses themselves, but much more clever than those other businesses. So clever that as part of their con they advertise their own product!) and all of them continue to do so despite seeing no gains to this practice. Yup. That tracks.
How do you feel about print ads or radio ads? Or for that matter, billboards and signs?
I kind of lump them together in my mind as unavoidable, and a sort of price to pay for the ability to choose and have competitive retail markets for all sorts of goods and services. Sort of an “it’s better than the alternative” sort of thought process.
Print ads I can very easily ignore. Billboards I dislike as ugly, but they do not get under my skin. It’s noise, talking, motion, that I cannot ignore. I don’t listen to the radio much at all except my local NPR station. They have donation drives which I turn off. That’s easy. Signs are usually informative. I have nothing against a business with a sign on it that says Bob’s Shoes: We Specialize in Hard to Fit Feet, or something. Local print ads, I actually skim them with some interest. I wish all advertising was like that.
You don’t need to be “fiendishly clever” or even clever at all to trick arrogant fools, which describes the majority of the people who run businesses. It’s fools tricking fools.
Yup. Everyone who runs a business, hires employees, sells a product or service, manages costs, etc etc, os a drooling fool. Got it. I’m sure that’s true in the world as it exists in your head.
Just watch the news. These people are idiots, not geniuses.
I’m out.
I think you’ve missed the point entirely, or at least abstracted it to the point of absurdity. The point of advertising differs depending on whose advertisements and whose product is being sold.
The point of ads is to sell products and services. So if a restaurant runs an ad, they’re expecting to see a return on that advertisement of some sort.
The purpose of the media is to sell ad time or column inches. They’re producing their product (TV shows, music, radio programs, etc.) to sell media time/space. But those businesses that are buying air time or column inches to are doing so in hopes that their products will increase in sales.
Ad and marketing companies product is the ads themselves. They’re selling the actual advertisements themselves.
The hard part comes in when it’s really hard to identify what advertising worked best or to what degree. Did that mom & pop restaurant have a 30% increase in sales because of that TV ad they ran during the local news? Was it because of the print ad in the paper? Was it word of mouth on social media? Was it because a new entertainment venue opened nearby? Is there a lag between the print ad running and people showing up into the restaurant? Is it a combination of all those things? That stuff is diabolically difficult to tease out unless you have enough money and time to actually do tests to see.
There are a lot of very smart, very motivated people working on this stuff, and despite that, you still end up with ads that don’t work, or that are unintentionally terrible or what have you.
But it’s not nearly as simple as you make it out to be.
That makes a lot more sense.
A better example was the billboards in Silicon Valley when I moved there, just at the beginning of the Bubble. They advertised things like FPGAs and ATPG software, which at least 95% of the people seeing them had no clue about.
I’ve seen most of the first season and a few episodes of the second season. Our PBS station doesn’t plan ahead. 
I’ve seen some billboards, even much more recently than that, that could not have targeted more than a couple dozen people. Like ultra-high-end datacenter storage systems. Stuff that could only be approved by the CTO of a company with billions in revenue. I suspect the times and locations were chosen to match the commutes of a few major targets. A single major sale would pay for the whole campaign.
At one time I used the built in feature of pause live TV. It works okay if you are the only one in the house, but somebody else can come along and ruin your delay. Or accidentally changing the channel.
I watch most things from recording, except news that runs at dinner.