Why Are Most TV Commercials Crummy?

By Mike McDaniel

Everybody, even Imus in the Morning, watches some TV. And you can't watch any TV these days without being subjected to hundreds of commercials, most of them, crummy.

With some cable systems offering uo to 500 channels, there's a lot of room for commercials.

Most of the major players in the cable network business are re-running popular series and cramming four, five even six minutes of crummy commercials into every break. They even hire people to trim the re-run to make room for the extra numbers of commercials.

Every one of those crummy commercials cost a bunch of money to produce. The companies employ ad agencies who write and produce the commercials for an additional fee, then show them to the boss in a darkened room, and guess what the boss says: "I like it, run it!"

The result, we are bombarded with commercials a monkey would click off. But because we want to see that re-run for the 234th time, we sit through it.

As it happens, most of the really crummy ones are the ones shown over and over. The other night while watching a cable network that rhymes with what the teacher asks the kids to write, I saw the same crummy commercial twice in one six minute break. Give me a Break.

I voted no, by clicking away. I went to my local station. And there was the local car dealer standing in front of a bunch of cars telling me he was number one in the district (there's a good reason for me to rush over there and trade). The camera showed me a service guy leaning into an engine compartment (I guess the cars he he sells don't run so well) and at the end, two little girls yelled something at me about getting a car from their grampa!

I bet his neighbors love it. But you know what? It's a crummy commercial, just like most of 'em on cable TV. Awful. I feel like the late Rodney Dangerfield; "I Get No Respect".

Let me put it another way; anyone who wants to sell me something with a TV ad, let them tell me how they are going to make my life better. Let them tell me what's in it for me, to do business with them. That's not crummy, that's salesmanship.

Sell the benefits and forget the screaming grand kids.

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