I am sick of TV advertising!!!

[Lance]

When I watch TV, usually very late at night and into the early morning, one of my favourite channels is National Geographic. The one thing I despise is the constant interruption of their presentations with ad after ad, many repeating so frequently, sometimes the same one twice in a row and then showing them again a few minutes later. Now, I also know and realize that advertising revenues do much to keep the channel on the air. However, it is an insult to the intelligence of the American people to be shoving these commercials down our throat, as it were. I am most appreciative of a channel such as Turner Classic Movies [TCM] where movies are NOT interrupted by commericals (such as it is on AMC). While I see more ads about TCM's own shows and productions than I did a year ago, at least it does not raise the blood pressure! It is just TOO MUCH advertising on all the other channels. I try not to pay attention to the commercials, and none of them are of interest to me to go out and buy their products. (I can't be bought this way.) The great Weather Channel is guilty of this though we do have the opportunity to pay a little bit by month (or year) to NOT see their commercials and get only the weather. I am thinking of doing just that! I want to know about the weather, not the countless times LUVS diapers appears on their phone app. Shame on IBM, who owns the Weather Channel, for allowing this to happen. Again, I come back to how insulting all these repetitive ads are for Americans. It's not the way I want to be "sold" a product. Given the demise of local newspapers, I suspect we will be hammered to death by more commercials to come. There ... I feel much better now!

[John F]

The way to get around the ads or anything else on TV that you don't want to see is to subscribe to cable and have a DVR (digital video recorder) as your cable box. The signal from cable is recorded on a hard drive in the box and immediately played back to your TV set. This allows you to time-shift any program you want to watch - you press the record button to save the program to the hard drive, and later you press another button to play it back, during which you can fast forward through the unwanted stuff. There are other ways of using the DVR but I've kept it simple.

But come on now. It costs lots of money to produce those National Geographic programs you like. How is National Geographic to pay the bills? By selling time on its channel to advertisers. As for it being "an insult to the intelligence of the American people," I think you overestimate the intelligence of the American people, many millions of whom voted Donald Trump into office either believing his many obvious lies or not caring. Those who watch National Geographic may be a higher class of Americans demographically, but even they can be conned and swindled by the likes of Trump. The ad agencies and their producers and writers of ad copy know how to sell the product, and if you don't happen to be in their target audience, many millions are. As for those repetitions, that too works; advertising slogans stick in people's memory and continue to sell the product subconsciously. (Remember "Where's the beef?") Unless you want to move north across the border, you're stuck.

If you want to get a feel for how this works, you can't do better than a hilarious book by adman Jerry Della Femina, whose title is in what I'm going to quote. Della Femina's agency was trying to land a huge advertising account from Panasonic and they'd prepared a number of campaigns to show agency executives, who watched the presentation with stony faces. "Finally I decided, what the hell, I'll throw a line to loosen them up. "The headline is, the headline is: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor."

[david johnson]

I mostly just mute the ads. I will watch the ones I find amusing. The 'Mayhem' guy can be funny. I chuckled all the way through the "Doomed" commercial several years ago.

[Lance]

Well John, I understand they need $$$ to keep those incredible productions going. [But how does Turner Classic Movies do it - no commercial advertising?] However, I try not to pay any attention to the ads, mentally cutting them out, and am thus not interested in ANY of the products. If there are a million others, then perhaps they love seeing the commercials. For me it is always a great time to make a pit stop or get some cookies and cold milk! I guess, more than anything else, it is the constant repetition of the same ads. It seems to me, I heard or read a few years ago one could purchase a special unit that would automatically cut off any ads and would resume as soon as the presentation continued. I believe the FCC banned the idea. All the more reason, too, to watch public TV.

[John F]

how does Turner Classic Movies do it - no commercial advertising?

I don't know the business plan behind Turner Classic Movies and the other channels in the former Turner Broadcasting System, but I'd guess that since TCM owns all the movies it shows, so that its programming is essentially costless, the fees it collects from the cable services that carry it may be enough to pay the bills and turn a profit.

Ted Turner, who created the channels that have his name, was an idiosyncratic businessman to put it mildly, and no doubt TCM took the form it did, imitating and competing with the American Classic Movies channel (which later ran commercials), because Turner wanted to put all those old movies he owned to commercial use.

"Classic movies?" Only by courtesy. I'd never looked at TCM but your post led me to, and when I tuned in the next movie was a 1958 Mexican flick titled "The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy," in Spanish with English subtitles. Even at this time of night I have better uses for my time, like going to bed.

[lennygoran]

I'm with John on this-I try to DVR as many shows as I can-then I too can fast forward. I've been watching alot of MSNBC political shows that runin the evening-I DVR them and then use the fast forwarding-you'dbe amazed at how much time I save. Then there are the hearing which are run on CSPAN-no commercials. Len