I love Television.
I don’t love everything on it, probably not even half of what’s on it, but I’m in a gracious mood and I can accept that most other people have much more blunt, clandestine taste than I do when it comes to entertainment.
But there is one thing which ruins my life, ruins your life and sucks the life from the programming we know and love. And that thing is advertising.
It is generally accepted that we have become so numb to adverts broadcast on TV that even if people watch them, they slip into a coma like state where the contents of those ever lengthening slots slide over them like water over a duck’s back. Fast, smooth and leaving no trace.
So do they get more creative? No. They just get louder. Now when the ad break hits you it’s like a sonic boom of abrasive noise and sickening faux real life blathering. You’re forced to either ensure, as your hair billows back from your face and your eyeballs dry out like two old lychees, or shout like your nan about how the damn talky box is too damn loud Jeffrey.
So hated is advertising the rise of ‘on demand’ viewing services over the last year or two can only be described as meteoric. We all just want to watch the show, not a fucking stupid french kid and his panicky mum whoring themselves to a yoghurt company.
Even the hallowed ground of on demand viewing is being invaded by ads now. What retarded cretin in their right mind, thinks that someone watching a programme on 4OD wants, actually desires, to see an advert before, in the middle of and after the programme they have chosen to watch? Really?
Imagine this, if you will; Johnny ‘typical 4OD viewer’ Smith bangs on his PC to catch up a show he missed. He wants to watch that show, everyone he knows has been talking about it and he has thought of nothing else but seeing that last episode. But wait – an advert full of laddy wankers shouting about what great mates they are. What? What the fuck? Oh a Carling advert. Brilliant. Just exactly what Johhny wanted to be forced to sit through prior to watching the much anticipated show. And again at the ‘ad break’ which should not even exist.
I know they have to make money somehow, sure we all do. Yet it must take an absolute kung fu master of utter bullshit to sell the idea that someone will actually (a) watch, (b) appreciate or (c) act on an ad being shoehorned in to this scenario, like a child trying to ram a wooden square through a circular hole.
The days of the television advertising gravy train are long gone. That’s the truth. I don’t have to sit in front of the TV at a certain time to watch something anymore, there are a myriad of legal and illegal ways to watch what I want, when I want. And I do not want to watch adverts.
Television advertisers are a pack of mangy hyenas, still gnawing at the dry, boney carcass of terrestrial television.
‘So what?’ you say. ‘People have to sell things, you’re just a whinger’. Well maybe so. Is it that much to ask ad men to be proud of their trade, learn a bit more and try harder to put their messages in a context where it will be received more positively?
No.
Is it too much to ask them to stop the black plague of death that is traditional television advertising from encroaching onto services whose appeal lies in being free from advertising?
No.
Will any of this happen?
.
.
.
No.
