TV Commercials

"The standard half-hour of television contains 22 minutes of program and 8 minutes of commercials - 6 minutes for national advertising and 2 minutes for local. ... Highly-watched programs can command rates in the millions of dollars. For example, a 30-second spot during the 2005 Superbowl sold for $2.4 million. Commercials during less-watched programs are more affordable, but the cost of those commercials may still run in excess of $100,000 per 30-seconds." from Gaebler Ventures

I watch entirely too much commercial TV. I'm "watching" now as I write this and the fare at the moment is not very appetizing: Keith Olbermann and Maria Milito are ridiculing the contestants and judges on "American Idol." A show the viewing of which I've never had the pleasure. I do not arrogate superiority to myself for not having watched it. I confess that I watch a lot of commercial TV -- mea culpa.

TV from the consumers' viewpoint is a medium for entertainment and information. From the entrepreneurs' perspective, TV is money. Come to think of it, considering today's "free market," I find it remarkable that there aren't double or triple the commercials there are. I suppose diminishing returns would take their toll after a while: there are people who would watch TV if it were 75% commercials but I suspect they wouldn't have much buying power -- correlating to their lack of intelligence -- therefore the industry folks run as many commercials as they can. It's supply and demand -- wouldn't that be it? As I've confessed, I'm far afield when I dabble in economics.

When there's something on TV I really want to watch, that figure of 25% or so seems quite small. But I'll take the quotation above as accurate. I've often taped TV shows and FF'ing through the commercials it takes forty-some minutes to watch the show. Yet, I remember TV in the fifties, and one-minute commercials then occurred about every fifteen minutes. The good old days are gone, long live the good old days. On the other hand, there was no cable then (that is partly why Madison kept such a large part of its historic district intact, in my theory), no remotes, and no VCR/DVDs. Things have their tradeoffs.

So what's to be done about commercials? Enjoy them, I guess. At least some of them. At first I didn't like the one with the insomniac, Abe Lincoln, the beaver, and the astronaut. Now I look forward to seeing it. I also like the offended Seinfeldian caveman and the cockney Geico gecko. My favorite of last year was the elephant dancing to "Singin' in the Rain."

My favorite one right now is the one for The Nation, the print magazine for these times. It wasn't expensive to make, I'd guess (other than, perhaps, having Sam Waterston as the unseen narrator). It's just front covers maneuvered by computer graphics, I guess, with the assurance that there's "no White House spin, just the straight dope (W's face always appears at the utterance of that word) and it contains "that famous media liberal bias." Covers have included W. as Alfred E. Neuman (the resemblance is striking) and W. with a long Pinocchio nose. That's my favorite.