PBS shows will soon get commercial breaks.
This is sad for two reasons. First, nobody wants to snap out of the Ken Burns zone for even a few seconds. As The Times points out in their coverage, PBS’s chief selling point to both audiences and sponsors was the unbroken programming, a format that both felt more authentic and supports the in-depth focus of shows like Frontline or any of the network’s many documentaries about everything you didn’t think was so exceedingly interesting until you sat down and leaned in for an hour.
The above is exactly why this news makes me sad (excellent little graphic, btw).
This commercial for the video game “Call of Duty: Black Ops” is probably the best video game commercial I’ve ever seen. The average American 30-somethings firing weapons; Kobe and Kimmel; “Concierge”; The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”—stopping and restarting at the perfect times; and no actual game play footage all underscore the perfect tagline: “There’s a soldier in all of us”.
Hopefully the game will live up to the commercial (it’s got zombies…how bad could it be?)
When a 1 hour 36 minute movie takes 4 hours to show.
And before you start thinking too much, I already did the math for you:
- Movie length = 96 minutes
- Total length of showing = 240 minutes
- Total commercial time = 144 minutes (Total length – Movie length)
- Amount of commercial time for each minute of movie time = 1.5 minutes (total commercial time / movie length)
That means that if they display 10 minutes of movie, you have to sit through 15 minutes of commercials.
And you just know the commercials on the Hallmark Movie Channel will make you want to scratch your eyes out.
Update (May 22, 2009) — They’ve done it again!
I was watching TV and saw a Wendy’s commercial touting how their burgers are made with fresh beef. I like looking at the fine print in ads, so I noticed the following screen:
In case you can’t read it, at the bottom it says, “Fresh beef available in contiguous US and CN.”
So what exactly are the burgers made of in Hawaii and Alaska?
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