Once in a while you see a TV ad repeated twice during a commercial break, usually with another ad sandwiched in between. Usually this happens with ads that are particularly annoying and obnoxious, though since I despise ads in general it might just be the repetition that makes them seem especially so.
I assume that the repetition is on purpose. Is this because, God forbid, research has shown that being slammed with inanity twice in one segment gives the ad greater impact? Or is it a scheduling error?
All this is related to the dark & bloody mystery that has intrigued me since childhood, and merits a thread in its own right: How exactly is the sequence of material on the Eternal Blue Flame of TV broadcasting managed? Who decides how stuff is stacked on the perpetual conveyor belt? And even though I’m sure that it’s automated as much as possible, is there a person or person sitting at a console in every broadcasting facility monitoring every moment of output to verify that what’s been programmed is actually being transmitted, and to intervene if something goes awry?
Little Brother
This isn’t exactly what you were saying about “sandwiched” commercials but I think this is done purposely (as opposed to what Revtim said).
I remember a particularly annoying campaign from 20 years ago - “The heartbeat of America is today’s Chevrolet”. They would have that heartbeat sound at the start of one ad and then they’d talk about the new Chevrolet, etc and sing the stupid jingle. Then about 2 seconds later, you’d hear that stupid heartbeat again and pretty much the same ad again - they might have talked about a different Chevrolet but it was the same length, “jingle” and style of the first ad. It had a profound effect on me in that I will NEVER by anything from GM in my life.
There are several different ways of purchasing commercial time. The most expensive is to reserve a particular time in a particular show - the first quarter of the Super Bowl, for example.
The cheapest is to buy showings without regard to time. A company says to a station, I want to buy 1000 placements of my ad over the next three months. Fit them in whenever and wherever you have holes in your other advertising commitments. This can result in two showings within a single commercial block.
And there are firms who monitor stations to record what commercials are being shown when, that commercials for competing products are not placed back to back, that commercials are not cut off in mid-sentence, and whatnot.
On network TV, most of the ads are network ads but some of them are local ads. That is, most of the nation sees the same ad when it is a network ad and then each locality sees a different one at the same time for the local ad. Local ads are, of course, cheaper but less people see it. They are typically for local businesses but don’t have to be. It could be that a company bought network ads and also local ads which unfortunately were aired during the same break.
I had a friend named John who I’d occasionally visit at one of the local TV news stations. He worked there part-time, and yeah, one of his jobs was to watch the programming, as soon as the show was beginning to fade, he’d have to push a button to commence playing ads. I’m not too sure about how the ads were played (if it was satellite or on a tape). Now that you’ve mentioned it, how odd, you’d think that something like that could be automated, yeah?
This was about 8 years ago, though, so maybe it has been automated by now.
I recall one story he told me…he had gone into work a bit hungover once, and while watching the TV he had fallen asleep, and had missed the fade-out cue. So what happened was Joe Blow at home, watching two minutes of black screen, until the show came back on. :eek:
In the case of those Chevrolet ads fom the mid-80’s I know it was done purposely. (purposefully?) As far as I can remember, I never saw 1 of those ads. Nope - they’d always appear in annoying pairs. No doubt it was a 30 second commercial broken into two 15 second segments.