Newspapers have been doing it for years and now it seems commercial TV is also joining in on the party!
Australian consumers have relied on the informative News for decades, both in print, on television and to a lesser extent the radio.
National News (TV)
However, today it seems television stations run promotional spots throughout news broadcasts promoting TV shows. Even better if they can tie it in with a news story. Me, well I change channels, I do not care to hear about Big Brother, CSI, the X Factor or any other TV spot promotional stories, to be honest it makes me sick.
So if the commercial stations want to fight it out for supremacy they can do so without my patronage, I watch the news for news and that is why I tune into SBS or ABC. News that does not cross promote other TV shows. It really is getting embarrassing.
Newspapers
These have been guilty for a number of years, whether it be News Ltd or Fairfax. News Ltd are particularly brutal with the promotion of web sites such as ‘how a young lady took only 15 minutes to find a job on careerone.com.au’, gripping stuff!
Live Broadcasts
Hearing Ritchie Benaud talk about how he cannot wait for the next series of Survivor, or Bruce McAvaney tell us during a Tennis broadcast how much fun the last series of My Restaurant Rules was and how with Dicko coming on board it should spice things up even further ……is stomach churning.
Consumers do have a choice, switch off, because the more we accept this type of commercial TV, the more rubbish we will be served.
TIVO
I suspect all of this promotion is getting our minds set for the coming world of Digital recording, where you can erase (and skip) commercials, that is why so many ads now appear at the bottom of the TV screens during shows. It could cost all commercial stations a fortune, but it will take a couple of years to catch on. In the US it is big business and has been around for a number of years. You can watch a show, rewind whilst recording it and return at any time. It also has a function that recognises advertising and removes it altogether.
We might be seeing Richie eating McDonalds, drinking Coca Cola, chewing on a Uncle Toby’s bar, whilst flicking thorugh the latest edition of Womans Day!
Very clever, very annoying and could be costly.
1 Comment
Paul D
Yes Peter, all of that! The problem is that the newest whizz kid advertising graduate goes to work for one of the networks, (either TV or newspaper) and convinces the older and less tech savvy superior that “this is the way it must be done!! they are doing it in the States, so we have to do it here !!” They end up wasting a whole heap of time and money advertising their own programmes. Have you noticed that TV shows scheduled for 8:30pm never start until 8:40pm.
They used to be right on time, now the TV program is an approximation rather than a fact. The extra 10 mins is probably wasted on self promotion.
Watching TV in the United States is like watching a kaleidoscope, there are so many things running accross the bottom of the screen, up the sides, accross the top, and the programme in the middle. CNN is a classic example. The sports shows are the other thing that has every statistic possible being produced as they focus on an individual. Our TV coverage is beginning to get that way. It’s good for mental agility I guess, and people will eventually decide whether they want to watch that kind of thing or not.