Television ads are the biggest bane in my lackluster life. The average TV program uses the 1/3 rule when it comes to advertising. As a rule of thumb, every thirty minutes of programming contains ten-minutes of ads; a sixty-minute show fills 20-minutes with ads.
If you are a realist you should be able to easily understand the who, what, and why, of advertising. Sponsors create advertising to promote and sell their products. Let this sink in. That’s the reason for all those annoying ads that make you turn the TV off.
On the other hand, if you have a product in high demand, you have no need to advertise. Have you ever seen a television ad for a Ford SUV? Sure you have.
Have you ever seen an advertisement for a Rolls Royce? Of course not because, although they are terribly expensive and of limited production, they can’t keep them in stock – unlike the Ford SUV.
Ads have come a long way since I began watching television as a child. Back then, TV shows and commercials were in black and white; color television hadn’t yet been invented. And back then, ads were 30-seconds in length, and since most shows were 30-minutes long, ads therein were very limited, too.
Catch a re-run of an old program such as Andy Griffin, the Adventures of Superman, or I Love Lucy, ads were 30-seconds, as well as containing only one or two 30-second spots.
Today, commercials hawking life insurance, pet rescues, cosmetics, and medicines, often run 2 ½ minutes in length, and longer.
The bottom line is that the more commercials, the more revenue the program makes. Rather than just a few paltry minutes of advertising in yesteryear’s black and white, today’s ads stretch long enough to write an opinion essay.
But content of ads have changed throughout the decades, too. Soft drinks were promoted by uncapping a frosty bottle, then pouring the beverage over a sweating glass filled with ice cubes, anxiously awaiting the prize of thirst quenching soda.
Today’s ads have now morphed into short stories being told in a limited 30- to 60-seconds. And the contents have changed, as have the times.
A modern commercial begins with a clearly open-minded black man carrying a beautifully cooked turkey to a smiling white woman who is surrounded by mixed-race children, along with a few aging Asian people and a wheelchair-bound woman.
A typical American family, according to
Madison Avenue
By the time my mind deciphers the association betwixt and between this unusual mishmash of characters, the expensive ad is over without leaving so much as an inkling of name recognition behind.
This idea of product appeal crosses the line of the sexes, too. Now we see women allegedly in the military, launching rockets, flying drones, and commanding large ships, with aplomb.
Equally visible, but seemingly
misplaced, are depictions of white men who are regularly cast as dolts needing
their insightful 10-year old kids, and mixed race significant others, to point
out how inept they are. There’s nothing
like race and sex shaming to make
A few years ago, Cheerios, a cereal, began promoting their product as “heart healthy.” That was a wonderful campaign, until every character on every Cheerios commercial was clearly black.
After criticism, Cheerios, a General Mills product, defended their advertising onslaught which featured only minorities, because blacks suffered from heart disease. Indeed, but whites, browns, and other races suffer from heart disease, too.
Here’s some interesting trivia
for your cereal making military officer, General Mills: “Heart disease is the
leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic
groups in the
Please re-read that last paragraph. I’ll wait for you.
The CDC was not at all nebulous as to who is affected by heart disease. By the way, it’s not only blacks, not only whites, not only men, not only women…
If General Mills is stuck on selling their products to, or merely directing their advertising at blacks, simply say so. But they couldn’t possibly make it more visually apparent.
Meanwhile, if you were a just-landed space alien who turned on a television, you’d think black men and white women appearing together in ads was the law; you might even be mistaken that such a scenario was an honest reflection of society.
Speaking of which, there are seemingly endless commercials touting various drugs from pharmaceutical companies advising viewers how to treat everything from ring worm and hoof and mouth, to HIV/AIDS and eczema.
Of course what you’re not told is that these life altering drugs require a doctor’s prescription from a subsequent doctor’s office visit. By the way, I dare you mention a TV ad for a pharmaceutical to a doctor before you ask your doctor for a ‘scrip.
Society has come a long way from the early days of advertising to where we stand today. And as of right now, I have no idea to whom ads – biased or not – are targeted or sometimes what they are even selling.
While advertisers are welcome to ply their goods, I remain happy because I’m a capitalist. But I also have a television remote control with a mute button, which makes me happier.
