Tv Commercials

[mulester7]

......HEAD ON, DIRECTLY ON THE FOREHEAD....HEAD ON, DIRECTLY ON THE FOREHEAD....HEAD ON, DIRECTLY ON THE FOREHEAD.....I can't stand this one, and have the remote ready to kill the audio of the cable tv channel over actually just this one, haha....and then there's the crooner with guitar on the Snicker's candy bar commercials....if that guy's a singer, I'm sending this from a Mother Ship somewhere around Pluto....have you seen the one where the guy reaches out a crank-open house window and flips a burger on a grill right by the window?....it's a commerial for a heating and air company....they've got a new one where a guy opens the bottom part of a window on the face of a garage apartment, and fires a basketball 20 feet to make a basket, shooting from above the rim....then the window shuts and you see 40 basketballs sitting under and all around the goal....good one....you Guys got any commercials you think stink, or are really good, or humorous?.....

 

[billy p]

Hostess Chips going back a bit

on the air up here several years ago it was classic!Two Eskimos in the middle of the Arctic circle nothing but glacier around them as the commercial nears the end the one not eating the chips asks "can I have some" and the one with says "if I give some to you I'll have to give some to everybody else! The commercial ends zooming away from them.roflmao

 

[Hi Ho]

Commercials drive me insane. I especially dislike those for The Money Tree and those ones that say "Visit 49biz.com and make thousands of dollars per week!...". Also, I can't stand the countless commercials for prescription medications listing the numerous side effects and the unpleasant conditions that they treat. That Nexium commercial with the "I'm a fix it person..." lady is quite infuriating. Even worse, "All of us have internal plumbing... sometimes it can spring a leak...". I'm easily annoyed by commercials, especially those that run nearly every commercial break. Some are quite funny and entertaining but those seem to get more scarce by the hour.

I regained my sanity by purchasing a Tivo, which arrived on Wednsday. It is, without question, the best purchase I have made in terms of watching TV. I can tell it to record a show and start watching it 15-20 minutes late, then I can skip the commercials! I haven't seen a commercial since Wednsday, except on the rare occasion that I'm watching live TV. I wish Tivo had released a dual tuner model long ago, I would have bought it then.

 

[zildjian]

I regained my sanity by purchasing a Tivo...

Ha, I thought I was going to lose mine once trying to set up my brother in law's Tivo. Ended up being a defective unit, wouldn't communicate correctly and wouldn't respond menuwise to a lot of remote commands. Ah, that was a day. I always mute commercials when watching TV. I'm up a lot of odd hours, so if I turn on TV late night/early morning, the infomercials are rampant and how many girls gone wild commercials are there... It's almost like by airing those commercials at that hour it's like they are saying, "if you're watching TV at this hour, you have no life so here's something that you may want to buy!"

The lawyer commercials asking if you have a terminal illness to call since you may have lost precious time by not being diagnosed earlier and deserve compensation... those really boil my blood. Those sharks need to get some morals. How do they sleep?

 

[Tomorrow]

I wish Tivo had released a dual tuner model long ago, I would have bought it then.

Oh yeah...our dual tuner DVR is like THE most useful piece of equipment in our house...'cept for the john, of course.

 

[hemiram]

I have a talent for remembering faces amazingly well, I see the same people in ads all the time, and it drives me nuts. It cracks me up that most people don't recognise these same people showing up all over the place. When I see these ads, I just think "phoney". With all the actors out there, what's the point of saturating TV with the same people all the time? I know most people don't notice this, but it annoys the hell out of me.


There's a woman all over the TV, doing ads for Zelnorm, Boniva, hair dye, some restaurant, and about 6 others. She can pass from late 30's to late 40's, depending on her hair color, and the way she's dressed. She's turned up on a couple of Law and Order reruns recently as a restaurant owner, and some rich guy suspect's wife.

Then there's the grey haired guy, in his early 40's, who does the Bob Evan's restaurant, whatever the anti-depressant is that has a minimun of sexual side effects, and 3 or four others. He turned up on some show last week, as a murder victim.

There used to be a grey haired woman, with a very odd voice, who was a "teacher", a "doctor", a grandma, a best friend, someone who has a "disability", and a few more, all running at the same time, sometimes, running one after the other. Then she started playing professors and shrinks constantly on TV shows, and on the commercials, she would be talking about bad breath or something. After she died, her commercials ran for years afterwards..

 

[ForMiseri]

Volume!

The biggest pet peeve I have with commercials is the HUGE change in volume when a commercial comes on. You have the volume set high for a show (OTA movies especially) which are barely audible and on comes Billy What's His Name screaming at you to buy a product A while back, I can remember Congress passing a law to keep broadcasters from doing this. Is this correct?

 

[Tomorrow]

The biggest pet peeve I have with commercials is the HUGE change in volume when a commercial comes on. You have the volume set high for a show (OTA movies especially) which are barely audible and on comes Billy What's His Name screaming at you to buy a product A while back, I can remember Congress passing a law to keep broadcasters from doing this. Is this correct?

I recently saw an article in the Oregonian newspaper about this very thing. It is STILL a law, but apparently not much enforced. When pressed with questioning, the networks claim to have "no control" over the ads, and further that the advertisers' video makers "don't increase the amplitude", but use "particularly dynamic audio". How's that for a bunch of recycled bull food?!

 

[zildjian]

the networks claim to have "no control" over the ads, and further that the advertisers' video makers "don't increase the amplitude", but use "particularly dynamic audio". How's that for a bunch of recycled bull food?!

If our iPod's and iTunes have controls to keep all the songs at the same volume, then I wonder why the same technology can't be afforded by TV stations. hum.... yeap BS.

 

[WmAx]

and further that the advertisers' video makers "don't increase the amplitude", but use "particularly dynamic audio". How's that for a bunch of recycled bull food?!

Well, they are using an extreme dynamic compression, similar to[but even worse] as what is used on many modern compact discs to increase apparent volume level(s). By reducing the dynamics(not increasing) of the signal, they can effectively turn up the volume higher without distorting/clipping as much as would occur otherwise. The audio is anything but dynamic. What a joke, if they actually claimed what you quoted. It's compressed to probably a -5dbFs average RMS range or worse, though I have not bothered to analyze commercial television audio tracks; just a guess.

It would be technically feasible for broadcasters to use equipment that adjusted the average RMS level of the sound tracks to a standard target level. However, such an action may tick off the advertisers, since they would now then the same volume level overall as the normal broadcasts, and in reality, even less impactful sound than the normal broadcast(s), since they removed all of the true dynamics from the signal(s) when compressing to extreme levels.

-Chris

 

[ForMiseri]

Coming and Going

I guess they get you coming or going. This is quite disturbing late at night and your trying to watch something without waking the whole house! The difference in volume (at least in this area) is that substantial. They really BLAST em.

 

[Tomorrow]

Well, they are using an extreme dynamic compression, similar to[but even worse] as what is used on many modern compact discs to increase apparent volume level(s). By reducing the dynamics(not increasing) of the signal, they can effectively turn up the volume higher without distorting/clipping as much as would occur otherwise. The audio is anything but dynamic. What a joke, if they actually claimed what you quoted. It's compressed to probably a -5dbFs average RMS range or worse, though I have not bothered to analyze commercial television audio tracks; just a guess.

It would be technically feasible for broadcasters to use equipment that adjusted the average RMS level of the sound tracks to a standard target level. However, such an action may tick off the advertisers, since they would now then the same volume level overall as the normal broadcasts, and in reality, even less impactful sound than the normal broadcast(s), since they removed all of the true dynamics from the signal(s) when compressing to extreme levels.

-Chris

As you say, it IS a joke...and a dodge.

And while it is also technically feasible for the broadcasters to modulate the RMS level, they don't think it's their responsibility to do so under the law and because of the 'difficult financial requirements involved'. Right.

I guess we need to invent an after-market automatic television audio level adjusting device. It would be immensely popular! (In my foggy, old-man memory engrams, I seem to recall such a device from the past. It probably didn't work...or was sabotaged by the FCC regulation that DID work for a short time.)

 

[agarwalro]

The biggest pet peeve I have with commercials is the HUGE change in volume when a commercial comes on. You have the volume set high for a show (OTA movies especially) which are barely audible and on comes Billy What's His Name screaming at you to buy a product A while back, I can remember Congress passing a law to keep broadcasters from doing this. Is this correct?

Ditto for me. I noticed this on the HD channels also.

 

[Hi Ho]

I guess we need to invent an after-market automatic television audio level adjusting device.

Some TV's already have this. I'm really surprised there isn't already a seperate device that would do it.

For night viewing, I use my Sennheiser wireless headphones so I don't blast the rest of the house awake. Volume adjustment is quick and simple with the turn of a knob.

 

[hemiram]

We have a channel on our local cable company (buckeye cablesystem) that is the worst at blasting you out of your daze by being about twice as loud SOMETIMES as any other channel available. This channel is run by the cable company itself! There is one "machine" playing shows and commercials that is insanely loud, it's to the point it's clipping/distorting. I actually called them up and spoke to an "engineer", who claimed they didn't know why it did it, nor how to fix it. They alternate between two machines and so if the volume is down, it usually blasts at the next ad or the show itself when it comes back on. I was watching one of the courtroom shows recently, and it was badly distorted on the show itself, from the level being so high. The ads sounded fine.

This has been going on for about 3 years now, and it's kind of a bad joke at this point. I have a friend who's an engineer at the local NBC affilliate, and he snickers at them claiming they don't know how to fix it. I don't understand why they would do it on purpose, but apparently, they are.

 

[JaceTheAce]

LOL! I hate that commercial too...

Here are some parodies of the commercial since so many people hate it:

Parody:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zqnASjunx8&mode=related&search=head-on commercial

3-minute version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAbAIpZG7II&mode=related&search=head-on commercial

Another parody:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MoeeiG7CeI&search=head-on commercial

 

[Mr.BBQ]

Yeah, I hate all commercials, except the Red Stripe ones. I dont drink, but I want to buy that beer. Anywho, the commercials nowadays dont make sense, and are generally horrible. I cannont stand them. I volenteer at the local TV station making shows, (comedic ones) were I oft poke fun at modern commericals. I.e. once I had a guy talking about how delicious a candy was for several minutes, but at the end of said skit you found out that the commerical was for a car tire. Got quite a few laughs out that one...