Commercials

From rotisserie chicken to the plop, plop, fizz, fizz of a dissolving multi-vitamin, Canada’s greatest songstress has lent her voice or name to just about everything

Have we finally hit the wall when it comes to fast-food innovation?

But those ads have merely migrated to our fingertips

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This has already been highlighted in the “Need To Know” section, but I had to link to it from this blog as well:

1. David Simon, creator of The Wire (aka “TV for people who claim not to own TV sets”) says that television as a medium has “short-changed itself” because of advertising, and that “only when television managed to liberate itself from the economic construct of advertising was there a real emancipation of story.” I pass that along with a certain reluctance, because I think it’s basically poppycock.* The way Simon describes it, it sounds like the equivalent of saying that theatre has short-changed itself by the need to have between one and four intermissions, and not until the intermissionless Man of La Mancha did the art form really liberate itself. It’s an even odder argument in a time when HBO is being outdone by other cable channels that do have commercial interruptions. But Simon made a great show, one that probably couldn’t have been done on a network with advertising, and anything he says is on the subject is of interest. (And having argued that the over-abundance of commercials and the shrinking of running times is really hurting network TV, I’d never argue that commercials can’t have a negative effect on content. They do all the time, not just in terms of the way stories are told but in what advertisers are willing to accept.)

This was just e-mailed to me, and I can’t believe I didn’t think to look for it online: my favourite cigarette ad campaign ever, Camel’s “More Doctors Smoke Camels!” campaign. I first heard this on an old tape of Abbott and Costello radio shows from the ’40s, and this is the TV version. It is essentially the same as the radio version — same slogan, probably even the same announcer — except that it ends with a shot of a woman who is either not a doctor or the most elegantly-dressed medical professional in the world. Because one of the early rules of TV advertising was to get a hot woman into the commercial, no matter what the product was.

This was announced unofficially a while ago, but it’s now more or less official (and therefore okay for me to mention a second time on this blog) that Fox won’t be bringing back “Remote-Free TV,” their experiment with letting Fringe and Dollhouse do longer episodes and selling fewer commercials at higher prices. Maybe neither of those shows were, in retrospect, the best vehicles for this experment: Fringe has quite a bit of padding and may actually work better when cut back to 41 minutes, and Dollhouse has figured out how to make decent use of the extra time, it’s not successful enough to pull in the big advertising money.

With the U.S. discussing health-care reform again, a lot of people are bringing up the classic ’90s TV characters “Harry and Louise.” For the uninitiated, here’s the Wikipedia entry. Basically, as part of a campaign against Clinton’s ill-fated health care plan, health-insurance companies created some commercials with the characters of Harry and Louise, your typical suburban couple as envisioned by TV sitcoms (balding, slobbily-dressed, basketball-loving Dad; wise, MILF-y Mom), complaining about the lack of choice and rising costs that (the commercials claimed) would be created by a universal health-care plan.

Fox’s experiment with “remote-free TV” — a fancy DVR-era name for returning to the old practice of having longer episodes and fewer commercials — didn’t turn out too badly, but it didn’t turn out well enough for them to continue with it. They won’t be repeating it with other shows, and when Fringe returns for another season (and if Dollhouse does) it will probably be back to shorter running times and longer commercial breaks.

In this tight economy, cheesy, low-budget commercials are big-budget business

Anybody remember this commercial? I remember seeing it in the early ’80s, but apparently it had been running since the late ’70s. It’s another reminder of how low-tech commercials used to be in terms of filmmaking. Many commercials tended to be shot like a scene in a movie, with some care taken over the lighting and editing, but without any attempt to amp up the pace or bombard the senses. Now even commercials that do have a story or characters tend to have much more in the way of spectacular effects or stunts — they’re trying to be a movie in themselves, rather than one scene in a movie.