REPETITIOUS TV ADS ARE A WASTE FOR ALL
As a survivor of the bad old days of TV at the cottage, I love my satellite service almost as much as I hate the same ads over and over so much that I swear I will boycott the companies.
I literally once used a metal hangar to try to get a second channel. I boasted how the cottage I bought had one of those antennae that you could rotate. Actually I never ever saw one work, and the one at the cottage didn't either. It was frozen in the wrong position and I almost fell off trying to coax it to a better one.
Now I have dozens of channels available to me but the wealth of choices is crippled by poor content, a reduced number of recent movies and a shrivelled market garden of ads.
My experience of the last few weeks as the stock market booms and the Jays have started flying again is that life would be much better if I didn't have to watch the same damn ads several times an hour.
Now Honda is so proud of that ad featuring Indy race driver James Hinchcliffe that the ad has its own internet niche. All I know is that the twerp challenging Hinchcliffe is so annoying that I have set my own speed record in hitting the Mute button.
It is as annoying as an opposition HR on the Jays telecasts.
Now the family keep reminding me that enduring the ads is the price I have to pay for watching conventional TV. Except I think the price is too high when the same ad is repeating several times a show, and occasionally twice in a row.
Don't the advertising companies do surveys showing that repeating the ad hour after hour day after day month after month just bugs most people so much that they develop a hatred for the product?
There is no value to the repetition, the product isn't driven further into our memory, if we get mad at the sight of that damn Sonato ad with the guardian angel speaking incomprehensibly showing several times during every Market Call on BNN, the business channel.
There are regular breaks for ads on the two daily Market Calls. One purpose is to make money, the second is to give an opportunity for the host and guest to figure out what stocks they will discuss with callers in the next segment.
So we have the Medipac airport security ad, the Go Daddy one, VectorVest 7, the Cadillac vanilla ice cream one, Alarm Force, Moores' suit, Sears Optical, Audi 6, Toyota, etc, like the pendulum on a grandfather clock..
I would imagine BNN gives a deal. A lot of extra airings! It is obvious that BNN offers a lot of exposure. But hasn't anyone involved realized this backfires on the company but also on BNN?
I often record the Market Call shows at home and just fast forward through the ads. I imagine that happens a lot. So that defeats the purpose of the ad. And I will continue to do that as long as Questrade or Sandals or Money Talk ads repeat like a radish sandwich. .
When the stations or networks do this and flog the opportunity to have these ads shown so often, they are battering the geese that lay the golden eggs of advertising. Viewers will just turn them off. The bargain in exposure time for the advertising companies is really an exercise in alienation.
Give me a choice between watching some expert talk for the tenth time that week about BCE or Suncor or Apple, and have all the same ads sandwiched in between, or watch something really different, I will figure my Suncor is safe for another day and watch the other shows.
So BNN may be happy running the same ads all the time but the Market Calls would be better with fewer, and different, ads.
You would think the ad agencies would be smart enough to insist that an hour or two elapse before the ad could be shown again.
But I guess not.
So that is just one of the reasons why fewer and fewer people are regular TV viewers and the giant networks, once monarchs of all they surveyed, are struggling. We just get tired of that Honda commercal and just wish the twerp would go crash and burn and leave us, and Hinchcliffe, alone.