This is a brief rant about the amount of advertising on American television today. It is bad enough that nearly half the scheduled duration of a program is consumed by con-vertising: a deluge of inferior products (low on both concept and design), yet high on price, being sold as the best thing ever to happen to us. How did we (and our parents and grandparents) live without such nifty gadgets/diet supplements/electronics?
What is even more vexing is that the various broadcasting stations seem to have colluded to schedule their ads at exactly the same times! We no longer have the option of channel-surfing to escape these irritating bank-account-emptying schemes, as we encounter similar nonsense with every press of the button! The only way out seems to be to tune the TV out for the next five minutes. Go load the dishwasher, maybe. Or read a chapter of a novel, and still return to the TV show with plenty of time to spare.
Sometimes, the irritation is taken to the next level: almost every channel you visit is running the exact same ad! I wonder: do Bowflex and Magic Bullet make so much money swindling people, that they can afford to run so many paid ads on such a variety of channels?!
On a slight tangent, imagine several five-minute ad stretches within a half-hour program. The cast from the TV shows seems to be getting paid gobs of cash for "half-hour" episodes, when they essentially have to work only towards a fifteen-minute piece at best! Neat! Professional sport, here comes competition in the salary department!
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