Life is Funny

Back in the old days (1940’s), TV commercials were used as “a note from our sponsor”. In exchange for some TV advertising, the sponsor would deliver a short entertaining message to the audience, and the TV station would receive funds in order for it to function.

That form of advertising was understandable. The TV commercials were non-intrusive, and entertaining.

After awhile, instead of 1 or 2 notices from your television sponsors, each commercial break would have 3 or 4 commercials.

Often people would use this time to get up off the couch, go into the kitchen, refresh their drink, and sit back down infront of the TV.

Advertisers soon figured this out, and began toying with peak volume.  Basically there is a legal limit to the volume spectrum you can use during Television programming.  When watching a movie, they will often take advantage of the highest peak volume during things like explosions, or a thud during a horror film, etc.

But TV commercials will use audio tricks to maintain the entire commercial at the highest peak volume during the entire commerical.

They did this, so when you walked away into the kitchen, you could still hear the audio of the TV commercial while you were moving around, and you would still subconciously be receiving the details of their advertisement, even if it was in audio format.

This concept made sense. But I believe it is time to re-evaluate this concept and realize that the advertising is ironically causing their advertisements to not be seen or heard!

If you remember the original cable boxes and early TV remote controls they had TV channel selectors and volume selectors. However MUTE buttons were less important than they are today.

Today, when the commercials come on, they are usually loud and blaring. What do we do? HIT THE MUTE button. Now we can’t hear the commercial.  We usually watch the screen for a second, and it’s not fun watching a TV commercial with no sound, so we’ll either engage ourselves in a conversation, make a quick phone call, head off to unload the clothes dryer, or some other miscellaneous task.

Now that the commercial is muted, we’ll often not hear when the TV program returns, so we’ll get preoccupied with other things for 20 minutes.  Once we’re done, we’ll come back to the room, and hit REWIND on our PVR.  We pick up the programming where we left off, and watch until the next TV commercial break. Since we have a lot of the live TV now in our PVR memory, we’ll simply FASTFORWARD through the next set of commercials, bypassing them completely.

So by them being intrusive with their “peak volume” on the TV commercials, they’ve caused us to:

a) Mute the commercial entirely

b) Encourage us to stand up, walk away, and find something else to do to preoccupy the 3 to 4 minutes of commercials

c) Use our PVR devices to buffer the live TV, so when we do finally return, we’ll watch our program and then be able to fast forward through the next set of commercials.

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Why can’t the TV broadcasting industry realize that they’ve pushed their viewers away with their methods? STOP being so darn intrusive. It doesn’t work, and it puts us on the defensive.

You have to encourage people to watch commercials. Everyone has the internet, use some codes on your commercials that people can type into websites and win something. Give some value for us to sit there and watch the commercial.

But most importantly DO NOT USE PEAK VOLUME.  WE ALWAYS HATE LOUD ADVERTISEMENTS.

Now we return to your regular scheduled programming..