As most of you know, I am a television junkie. Did you know that a one hour program has about 43 minutes of actual show? That is more than 25% advertizing.
The Oprah show has very distracting commercials. Oprah does about two minutes of interview, then says, “We’ll be right back.” The O magazine goes on for pages before the message from the editiors, followed by more pages of ads before the first article appears. I’ll be sure to watch Oprah as a sort of apology for calling her out on this.
There is a show called the Doctors that airs weekdays. It, like Dr. Phil, treats us to previews of what is coming up next before cutting to the sponsor. Then they come back, we see the previewed segment presented again before another cut to commercial preceded by yet another preview of the next segment. It makes me wonder if after all the re-presenting of sound bytes, there might be a pop quiz. I haven’t timed this but I suspect this practice cuts a 43 minute hour to a 30 minute hour.
Some stations are what I call the All Commercial Channel All the Time. I forget what the movie is because the break takes so long.
Why don’t I turn off the television, or record all of my favorite programs and speed through the ads? Then I’d have to wait till the event had passed to see it and I am not all that good with the fast forwarding part of the remote control. I go beyond the break, then have to rewind and sit through the end of an ad anyway. And they put in images that trick me into hitting the play button before launching part two of the commercial segment.
I imagine the ad executives want to be placed before the fake out screen that makes me think the show is finally back. They add enough subtitles to make sure we know what they are selling even when we have the mute turned on.
Well, I am done complaining, I’ll go back to editing my work in progress while ads for LBL, Light Bladder Leakage, drone on as background noise.
If I could say one thing to the industry, it would be this – Just Because Someone Wants to Sponsor Your Program Doesn’t Mean You have to Accept it! Enough already.
Join me in a few days and I’ll entertain you with another topic. Leave a comment and go ahead and tell your friends about my commercial free blog.