Sunday, March 25, 2007

What I hate about CBS's coverage of the NCAA basketball tournament.

Commercials. Lots of commercials, and even worse, lots and lots of commercial breaks. During every single time out, there is at least one commercial, but more likely three. And it is invariably one out of the set of about fifteen that keep getting run over and over and over.... And at the end of a game, where coaches tend to call time outs frequently, there is the same commercials for the same damn products or services that we have seen probably several hundred times over the past two weeks, if you are a NCAA junkie. I don't know about other people, but seeing the same friggin' commerical forty times in the span of six hours is N0T going to entice me to buy the product any more than if I had seen it sixteen times. In fact, I may be so annoyed that I might just BOYCOTT the damn product just because they are being so intrusive. And CBS absolutely has to shove in promos for their own programming IN BETWEEN FREE THROWS! Sweet Jesus.... They interrupt very intense and sometimes anguishing moments that could have been used to drawn the viewer in or fit in some commentary or analysis, just to fit in another 30 second spot for an ad we JUST SAW 30 SECONDS AGO!

They are destroying the emotional continuity and suspense of the game. It's hard to recapture the intensity of what just happened before this stupid commerical for Kentucky Friend Chicken (sorry, that is what KFC stands for, even if they now disown it the name) or Scott's lawn food. What possible studies have shown these marketing geniuses that inundating the viewing audience over and over with the same stupid commericals will make the product sell any better?

God, I hate commercials and the not-very-subtle attempts at behavior modification. I predict that, within the next 10 years, they will just figure out that they should be showing continuous commericals at the bottom of the screen, or in the corner, JUST BECAUSE THEY CAN AND BECAUSE SOME IDIOT MARKETING PERSON AT THESE CORPORATIONS WILL BUY THE COMMERCIAL TIME! Continuous commercials that you can't escape from if you want to watch the tube. At which point, TiVo becomes not as useful, as you cannot "fast forward" through them. They are on all the time!

I wonder if they will ever realize that they are already very close to saturation and the viewer's mind will just "tune out" the ads on a permanent basis. Any more and ads will become so much static that the mind just shuts out.

Or else gets a movie from NetFlix.

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