Those sneaky, sneaky television networks

According to the Associated Press, network television is all about commercials. And also, if you can imagine, networks have made ads harder to avoid, and have been inserting them into their featured programming for quite some time now. And finally, it turns out that grass is, prepare yourselves, green. Now that we’ve mastered the obvious, how else does this story enlighten us? By revealing that commercial breaks, for all intents and purposes, are to be treated as featured programming from here on out. Nielsen will start rating commercial blocks like TV shows, and “networks are inserting games, quizzes and mini-dramas into commercial breaks [and] incorporating more product pitches into programming,” just in case people with DVRs actually want to—God forbid—avoid having something pitched to them every eight minutes. Of course, there’s really nothing good on TV anyway, so they might as well write episodic Pepsi spots or whatever the hell they’re planning. But if someone at work ever asks me if I caught last night’s Vonage ad, I’m digging a hole and jumping in. Photo by Big Fat Rat.

—Posted by David Kiefaber

May 31, 2007 in Kiefaber | Permalink