Wednesday, September 24, 2008

TV Advertisements

During a 15 minute interval of the show Underbelly on Channel 9 last night I counted 8+9+13 = 30 advertisements over 3 successive ad-breaks. The period was between 9-15pm and 9-30pm. I noticed most of the ads were of short duration but was still astounded at their sheer volume. How anyone can question the value of commercial-free ABC TV is beyond me.

Why should we pollute a major source of information and entertainment with lies and bad taste? Even if you do support the hideous quality commercial TV shows is it sensible to plaster them with such a huge volume of advertising even from the perspective of commercial interests?

Surely the incentives are to pre-record material and delete the advertising during playback. I have slipped into doing this almost unconsciously with the pay-TV service I subscribe to.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can get personal recorder devices now that cut the advertisements seamlessly. Not surprisingly the commercial TV stations have done all they can to stop them. This threatens their entire business model.

Anonymous said...

Sadly SBS is now placing ads in the middle of programs. I didn't have much problem when all the ads were grouped at the end or even in a long show a few in the middle.

The need to break shows to run ads forces program makers into a style of narrative that runs in short stop start blocks. This works not to badly in say Seinfield, but does tend to effect everything.