My return to daily writing is going to be celebrated by a rant. And by two observations. Because one forces me to write in too much detail for me to do it at odd hours of the night, and because I just like hanging a Louie halfway through.
Because I like putting off other things, and because I’m totally addicted, I’ve been watching episodes of House online. I haven’t decided if I’m going endorse my (legal) viewing site yet, but I’ll de-endorse its advertising. Every time there would be a commercial break on TV, one commercial comes on. The same commercial.
After the third time I watched the Hoover Platinum Collection commercial, I was pretty tired of it. By the sixth or seventh, I was wondering what exactly it is about House that makes advertising execs think the people watching it want to buy a vacuum. Granted, I began watching House because my mom was always watching it, and she’s a lot more likely to buy a vacuum than I am, evidenced both by the fact that she owns multiple vacuums and that her presence or my then-girlfriend’s was the only thing that got me or Anthony to vacuum our room in Greensboro.
In fact, not only do I spend two hours watching House most weeknights (an amount of time I haven’t spent in front of the TV in a looong time), I’m watching it on the internet. When the heck am I going to vacuum? I just don’t think I’m their target audience.
Point number two: I was annoyed enough by and inattentive enough to the commercial that I will obviously remember it. But even aside from the fact that I act on that by writing a silly blog post about it, if my related actions were (like most people’s would be) confined to my buying habits, annoyance isn’t the emotion I’d be going for when selling a product. So why advertising execs think that much repetition is a good idea.
I truly believe that free (and even cheap) web hosting would have died out a long time ago if it hadn’t been for super-heavy initial investment by people who thought the related advertising would take off. Even half the free web hosting sites don’t have banners anymore, because nobody wants to bother with worthless website advertising. Except for that same whole investment phenomenon, I’d worry that internet TV would go the same way, as it’s funded by commercials the same way real TV is.
My analysis, of course, hinges on the fact that I’m mostly immune to advertising anyway. I don’t shop, I don’t pay attention to commercials unless they are for a product I had not previously known existed (the one and only case in which I believe advertising effects me and accomplishes its goal) or for a product which I already know, love, and regularly support in a monetary or temporal fashion, and in which case the advertising is wasted. Either way, I’m both annoyed at repetition and very glad that the advertising world just hasn’t figured out how to really work their magic online (maybe those ads are better than I give them credit for, but placement is still all wrong, whether this blogger is giving them more coverage or not). It means I’ll be watching House from my computer for a long time.
