posted 2010/01/04 at 13:36
I've written before about how I went to private school with children of the family that runs Toledo's local cable company, Buckeye Cablesystem. (The same family also owns our local paper, the Toledo Blade.) I've made no secret of the fact that I'm hardly a fan of Buckeye, particularly when they were slow to add new channels I really wanted in the 1990s (Food Network, ZDTV, MuchMusic, Bravo), which was why I had DirecTV for a few years there. After the fire I didn't bother renewing DirecTV, though, mostly because I didn't have much interest in television once I went back to college, and by that point I was tired of trying to catch every single televised performance of every musician I liked. (Now that other people have put those performances up on YouTube, I feel fairly vindicated in my decision.) Buckeye does have the best local cable and high-speed Internet access in town, yes, but given how Toledo is, that's kind of like being valedictorian at summer school. There wasn't even any serious competition in town until recently, when AT&T started making offerings, and so far their introduction into Toledo has been a huge disappointment. (I don't even think they've gotten their service out here to my suburb yet.)
That being said, Buckeye still puts up a lot of its own commercials during various broadcasts advertising their various services, and apart from the gratingly smug tone many of these commercials take, some of them are just so bad I can't stand to watch them. One of their recent commercial lines has been to show "humourous" things you can do with your old satellite dish after getting Buckeye Cable, like use it as a frisbee or an outdoor grill. Now, they're not that funny to me, but I'm willing to accept that my sense of humour is significantly different from most people's, so maybe that's just me. However, in each of these commercials, when they're advertising their special offers at the end, those offers include cash and/or credit for selling them your old satellite equipment. In other worse, they're showing you what you can do with your old satellite dish, and then basically saying you won't have the dish after you use this special deal. This is the kind of elementary logic failure that makes me want to go down to Buckeye Cable's offices and start yelling at no one in particular about how ridiculous they make themselves out to be.
In another of these "alternate use for your old satellite dish" ads, they show a guy turning his old dish into a replica of a Star Trek starship that he then hangs from the ceiling of his bedroom. They even have a crappy synthesizer playing a rip-off of the first four notes of the old Star Trek theme, and they only refer to it in the commercial as a "starship model." However, the man's bedroom is full of licensed Star Trek merchandise, including bedsheets with the Next Generation logo on them and a life-size cardboard cutout of Data. It's like they're trying to have it both ways, referring obliquely to Star Trek like they're trying to avoid a lawsuit, but then having all this official merchandise in the background. There's no disclaimer about Paramount licensing the use of Star Trek stuff for the commercial, either, so I have to assume that Paramount could shoot a cease-and-desist order to Buckeye Cable here to get that commercial taken off the air, which would do wonders for my nerves.
The other big line of commercials Buckeye has introduced lately has been for their home phone service, trying to show why it's a good idea to have a landline even in this age of cheap cellular service. I have to admit that the first of these commercials, about a grown-up daughter bonding with her mother over the phone, was actually quite touching and well done; it's probably the best commercial I've ever seen Buckeye put out. However, after that they started trying to be funny, and as before, the commercials became ludicrous. One commercial shows a guy having to lean out of a window of his house, with an active beehive right above him, trying to get good reception on his cell phone. (They couldn't even afford to get fake bees for him to swat at, so he just looks like he's having an episode.) After the Buckeye guy comes in and does his thing and hands the guy a wireless landline phone, though, the guy goes back into his house, but only closes his window part of the way. If the bees there were as bad as he made them out to be, his home would be uninhabitable within about five minutes. It's like that commercial the soda industry put out trying to get Congress not to put a national tax on sodas where the woman takes groceries out of her car's trunk and then leaves the trunk wide open as she goes into her house and closes the door behind her. I'd meant to blog about that commercial a while ago, but then Jon Stewart beat me to it.
The worst of these Buckeye phone commercials, though, makes me want to pull my hair out, so of course it's in heavy rotation. It's about this guy who tries to order a pizza at 2101 (9:01 PM, if you insist) since he doesn't want to use up any of his weekday minutes, only to be told that the pizza place he called stopped delivering a minute ago. First of all, nearly every cell phone company I know starts offering reduced/free minutes at 1900, not 2100. Secondly, no pizza place I know of stops delivering that early. Pizza places, like fast food (especially Taco Bell), make a killing on the late night just-got-stoned-and-need-munchies crowd, so it's in their best interest to stay open as late as possible. Those logical flaws alone would be bad enough, but then the Buckeye guy comes in and gives the caller a landline phone, the caller smiles, and then places a call on the landline phone. Uh, excuse me, but why the Toot is he calling again! The pizza place will still be closed! He's still going to spend the night hungry and miserable! Couldn't you have gotten the phone to him fifteen minutes earlier?
I know that looking for logic in television commercials is kind of foolish to start with, and I admit I probably view Buckeye more harshly than I do other companies, so I'm probably looking for this stuff to point out. Still, though, stuff like this makes me batty. If your commercials are going to be smug and self-righteous, at least have them make some sense.
Labels: commercials, television, toledo
posted 2008/02/09 at 15:32
It says something about this election campaign that the candidate I'm most appreciative of right now is Mitt Romney, as his withdrawl from the Republican nomination means I'll only have about half as many candidate spots on my television to deal with leading up to Ohio's primary next month. Ohio doesn't look to be in play for Huckabee, and by the time Ohio rolls around I think Huckabee's momentum will be completely drained so McCain won't have any real need to buy more but a sprinkling of ad time locally. The Democratic nomination will still definitely be in play by the time of the primary, though, and although part of me feels like I should be excited that there's finally an Ohio primary that might matter, I am not looking forward to a month of dueling Clinton and Obama spots on every show on the dial. I got sick enough of those spots leading up to the Michigan primary (even though only Republicans bought ad time on Fox Sports Net Detroit), and I'm tired of watching the Obama and McCain spots that air on Countdown. Given how tight the Democratic race is right now, and given how close Ohio was in the 2004 election, I'm guessing that any moment now I won't be able to watch a half-hour of any commercial network on cable without seeing a Clinton or Obama ad buy.
I'll be skipping the primary vote, because there won't be anything else on the ballot that day and because I can't vote in the "official" state primaries because doing so automatically registers me as a member of whatever party's primary I vote in. I would much rather see Obama as the Democratic nominee than Clinton, but I'm probably not going to vote for him in the general election anyway. More to the point, I still remember several registered Democrats in my first-semester MA classes who got hassled by Ohio Republicans that year as the Republican Party challenged the voter registration of several people I knew, holding off on submitting the challenges until the legal deadline so that the students couldn't call off of work on such short notice to attend the hearings about their registrations. I can't help but wonder if Ohio Democrats might not try something similar with we Greens this year, given how ridiculous they were last time around in making sure that not even Nader's write-in votes would get counted. (Seriously, if they'd put that kind of effort into promoting their own candidate then Kerry might be in the White House now.)
Ohio's Green Party will handle its primary at their convention in April, although people who won't be attending can mail or e-mail a ballot before then. I think I may actually go to the convention, though, even though it's all the way across the state and there's no way I could reasonably make a daytrip of it. I'm still hoping that Nader gets in the race again, because I don't like the prospect of Cynthia McKinney winning the nomination; I'm still not getting a good vibe off of her. If Nader doesn't come in then I'll probably vote in the primary for Kent Mesplay, but I think the Greens need Nader more than ever now. Particularly if Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, people are going to need an alternative to the spectre of four or eight years of DLC neoliberalism, and even if there isn't a realistic chance of winning the presidency, at the very least we might stand a chance of getting that magical 5% of the popular vote that would give the Greens tens of millions of dollars of federal matching funds in 2012. I haven't been too directly involved with the Green Party itself since I first registered to vote, but more than ever now I feel compelled to do what I can to help the party along.
Labels: commercials, greenparty, politics, television
posted 2007/11/28 at 21:14
I'd like to post a bit of a follow-up to a post earlier this month about a television commercial about workplace safety on Canadian television that features incredibly graphic images of a woman with her skin peeling off as the result of accidentally throwing hot oil all over herself. First of all, if you didn't read the comments to the post, I found a copy of the commercial on YouTube later on, although before I link to it I just want to reiterate that this commercial is extremely graphic and nearly made me vomit. That being said, if you think you can stomach it and want to see what all the fuss is about, knock yourself out. The commercial has aired during the late-night games on Hockey Night in Canada each of the past two Saturdays, but I've gotten a lot better at switching the channel before the commercial becomes so horrible.
First of all, I should mention that there is a Website that goes along with this campaign, a Website which I tried to visit several days ago, but given that everywhere you go on the site there's a theme of this severed hand -- even if it's a cartoon severed hand -- I just got sick of it and stopped trying to see what all was in there. Again, let me preface this by saying that this isn't nice stuff, but if you want to see how this campaign has been translated to the Internet, the Website for the campaign is prevent-it.ca.
Naturally, I was curious to see what kind of news coverage this campaign was getting, and I found a good article about it at canada.ca. This link is safe, thank Goddess. However, given that I'd argued in my first post that late-night Saturday shouldn't be considered a "safe time" for this commercial given the high number of youths who watch Hockey Night in Canada, I was shocked to discover that the day I first saw this commerial, it also aired during a matinee hockey game that afternoon on CBC. In other words, CBC was showing a commercial that depicted a woman whose skin is, in the words of the article, "peel[ing] off in bloody ribbons," at four in the afternoon. How anyone could think that a commercial like this is suited for Saturday afternoon television just completely astounds me.
In my original post on this topic, I'd mentioned that I thought that the body that produced this commercial did so because they wanted to grab the attention of young adults who have been growing up on the Saw movies. (It was right after Halloween, so the movie franchise was kind of fresh in my mind.) After reading what that news article had to say about the kinds of comments that were posted about the commercial on YouTube, though, and after going back to YouTube to read more of the comments myself (you know, the ones with expletives that couldn't easily be reprinted in a news article), I couldn't help but think of Beavis and Butthead when reading through some of the replies. Having once again painfully reminded myself of how old I am, I tried to update the reference in my mind to Jackass, because shows like Jackass have likely led a whole generation of young people to think that televised depictions of these kinds of horrors are, well, cool.
As I said in my first post, though, I'm too much of a First Amendment believer to suggest that these commercials should be censored, although given the kinds of things that have been censored on Canadian television in the past, it doesn't make much sense to me that these commercials have been allowed to air. Still, though, even if I don't believe in government censorship, I think there's a lot to be said about self-censorship, self-restraint, and plain old common sense, and whoever thought that this commercial would be suitable for Saturday afternoon television is plainly lacking in one, or all, of those things. I'm all for calling attention to workplace hazards, particularly those hazards that are caused by corporate greed and indifference to workers (which, ironically, this campaign is all about), but if the sampling of comments I've seen on YouTube are any indication, this commercial may, ironically, be having quite the opposite effect. Regardless, I sincerely hope that I don't run across this commercial again, and that it gets shuffled off to viewing times when young children aren't so likely to be watching CBC.
Labels: canada, commercials, freespeech
posted 2007/11/11 at 20:39
Happy seventh birthday, seanshannon.org. I will have a .journal entry to commemorate the anniversary, but as has been the case so often these past few years, I've got to put off writing it until I get to Thanksgiving break and have some time to write it well (and also finish dealing with some personal stuff that's kind of weighed me down here lately).
On a mostly unrelated note, last night I think I came the closest to throwing up that I've been in several years. I had the late game of Hockey Night in Canada on my television, and this commercial aired where this young woman with a chef's outfit was talking about how great her life was and how she had gotten engaged recently. A somber look overtook her face, though, and she said that she wasn't going to get married to him the following weekend like they'd planned because she was about to have a horrible accident. She started to talk about how she should have cleaned up the grease spill earlier and how she shouldn't have put the deep fryer in the position it was in, and in mid-sentence she turns and slips on the spill, throwing a huge amount of liquid out of the pot she was carrying, covering her face, splashing behind her and causing the stove behind her to catch fire.
Now, up to this point I'm thinking that this is a highly effective commercial. At this point, though, the woman lets out this blood-curdling screen as another chef bends down by her to help her, and then, for about a half-second, the shot snaps to the woman, the skin on her face and hands completely scalded, before snapping to black, finally showing the URL of the Website people are supposed to go to in order to learn about safety. I'd been noshing on Doritos just before the commercial aired, and for about a good twenty seconds I thought I was going to lose it. I ran to the upstairs bathroom and lifted the toilet lid, but nothing came out. Needless to say, I kept my eyes glued to my flat panel here whenever the commercial came back on, as it did several times throughout the rest of the night.
I know that we're living in a post-Saw world and that some people argue that you need these kinds of jarring images in order to attract people's attention these days. I can remember a debate several months ago when Volkswagon started showing car crashes from inside the cars in a line of their commercials, the ones that famously ended with the person driving the Volkswagon saying "Holy shit" at the end (with the -it cut off by a similar snap to a black screen). However, I think there is a world of difference between showing car crashes (which despite all of the twisted steel never had a drop of blood or even the slightest hint of injury) and flashing to a shot of a woman with third degree burns on her face and hands. Even though Poppy Z. Brite is one of my favourite authors and I've written a bit of horror myself, I really have no desire to see horror on television or in films, and it couldn't be more obvious that this commercial was trying to play on horror-film schlock here, particularly given that they cut away from the burnt woman so quickly.
More to the point, this is not a commercial that should be airing when children are so likely to be watching it. The commercial only started airing during the late-night game, but even assuming that it aired only in eastern Canada and they didn't show it in the west, there are still a lot of children watching CBC that late on a Saturday night during hockey season. Hockey brings Canadians of all ages together in a way that the NFL only wishes they could get football to do here in the US, and little kids don't need to be seeing stuff like that. I'm too much of a libertarian on these issues to say that the Canadian government should outlaw the commercial, but given some of the ridiculous things some Canadian bodies (in particular the CRTC) does to regulate Canadian television, I would have thought that they'd never allow this commercial to air, much less during Canada's signature sports broadcast.
Labels: canada, commercials, freespeech, hockey, television
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