Advertisements That Say The Exact Opposite

For some reason right now there are several ads on TV that, confusingly, attempt to negatively portray their competition but instead only bring this negative portrayal to themselves.

"The Settlers" -- a family is portrayed as turn-of-the-century homesteaders who are "settlers" because they settle for cable TV.  Yet the fact that this is an ad for Dish Network only comes out at the very end, long after the association is made between primitive TV technology and satellite dishes.

"You total your car" -- a series of actors talk in the second person(?) about damage to your car and how your insurance company jacks up your rates afterward.  Yes, they all do this, including Liberty Mutual.  Apparently you can buy a special rider to prevent this; but at what cost?

"Swipe swipe swipe" -- this ad is either for Dish or Comcast; to be honest I've never been able to figure out who is the "good guy" in this ad.  An installer is shown instructing a new user to swipe his credit card every time he wants to add a feature to his TV service.  Since BOTH cable and Dish do this, it simply reinforces the negative experiences consumers have with content delivery.

It's astonishing that so many companies spend so much money on television advertising and fail to get their point across. If every tv viewer was like me, they would save their money and not run any commercials at all. As soon as an ad comes on, I hit the mute button. That doesn't happen much, as I almost never watch a tv program during its broadcast time; I record them so that I can fast forward through the ads, saving myself about twenty minutes out of every hours of tv viewing. For a visual medium, it surprises me how many of the commercials cannot relay any information without audio.

When I was young, there was typically a two-minute commercial break on the hour and half-hour, and a one-minute break at 15 and 45. We used to have to hurry to go take a leak or get a drink before the program returned. Now, one can go make a sandwich - hell, a waffle - during the commercial breaks. Commercials are about thirty percent of the broadcast time now. Ridiculous. And then you have to sit through all the ads they place on the screen during the program itself.

And the quality of the commercials is so deplorable. I find them to be so insulting to my intelligence that I have refused to buy some products just because of that.

(We should have had this discussion in the rant forum.)

I don't know if the same rules still apply, but when I left England, commercial TV was restricted to 7 minutes of ads out of every hour. It was a bit of a shock to discover that at some times of the day, American TV would have a single commercial break that was 7 minutes long.

Yes, it is inexcusable.

If I had to watch the ads in order to watch the program, I would use the tv only as a monitor for watching dvds. I would not watch a single minute of broadcast television.

Quote :

In 2009, the broadcast networks averaged 13 minutes and 25 seconds of commercial time per hour. In 2013, that figure grew to 14 minutes and 15 seconds.

The growth has been even more significant on cable television. In 2009, cable networks averaged 14 minutes and 27 seconds per hour. Last year, the average was 15 minutes and 38 seconds.

Note that those are averages.

_Howard wrote:

It's astonishing that so many companies spend so much money on television advertising and fail to get their point across. If every tv viewer was like me, they would save their money and not run any commercials at all.

I'm not so sure that's true.

Advertising is, so far as I know, tax deductible.  I think some large corporations (Coke, McDonalds, Boeing) advertise not to attract new customers but to adjust the amount of taxation they're liable for. If it's a choice between throwing their money at the government, or putting their name in front of the public, "advertising" is the clear winner.

That would only be financially beneficial if the tax rate was over 100%.
Spending a million dollars to save a half million in taxes is not beneficial.