Commentary: Movie Ads on Networks Conflict of Interest?

It amazes me that anybody can somehow get millions of butts into the theaters by showing a 15 second ad that tells the watcher absolutely nothing about the movie whatsoever except for the so-called stars I don't recognize as star quality, a fast-flashing sequence of movie titles and billings at the end, and a few seconds of clips that are designed to entice the dimwitted TV watcher to go to the theater, shell out some bucks they could be using to fill up their SUVs, and waste two hours of their lives on Friday and Saturday nights seeing yet another poorly-produced predictable motion picture.

Meanwhile, the networks are foundering in record low ratings on Friday and Saturday nights as people go to theaters or watch DVD rentals instead of watching their network TV lineups.

Now, I have seen those MTV-paced movie ads and 15 seconds later, I can't figure out what the movie is about; the title of the flick is no help, the leads are unrecognizable, I can't find the story in the ad, and the scenes go way too fast for me to digest the information.

Yet the stupid people watching this stuff somehow figures out that it's something that should be seen by them. Talk about feeding empty brains. They leave to go to the movies on a weekend night, forgetting that the TV networks even exist on those two days.

So, what's the point of the networks in airing ads for movies if they're competeting against them? Opening nights are murder on their ratings on the weekends. You watch the formerly Must-See-TV network, the old age network, the young chick network, the body slam network, the live show network, and the bad show network, and see the movie ads flash by for a brief time. Why are you more convinced to go out to see the movies and waste your money away instead of waiting six months for the same ones to appear on the pay channels? After you've been burned out on a bad movie, you wish you hadn't spent your hard earned money on this piece of shit movie that some network blasted at you this Thursday night.

I just saw an ad for "Super Troopers" as I was writing this during "The Job." Just a car chase and some dialogue about a police car after somebody else. This is supposed to get me to part with my money? Duh! What are they thinking?

At least when I get burned on a bad episode of "That 80's Show," I don't lose any money over that.

Subject: Alyssa Milano & "nightmare" 1-800-COLLECT commercial

Just a thought, in her newest 1-800-COLLECT commercial in the role of "Eva Savalot", Alyssa has the nightmare of her life when she gets a collect call from someone who didn't use that product and that made her pay alot for the call. Milano then says in it "who would do such an awful (?) thing??". Does anyone else out there think the answer would be Shannen Doherty?

NBC's Opening Night Coverage Is More Limp Than Olympic

When the games went to NBC in 1988 (at least CBS did a half decent job in the 90's winter games), the quantity of games went up exponentially, while the overall quality of coverage went down, being diluted in so much about covering the storytellers instead of focusing on the action. To add insult to injury, in 1992, NBC produced a PPV Triplecast, which was greeted with a thud in the summer.

Well, blame it on the high rights for a network to cover the Olympics. The network has to make a profit somehow off of all the billions and billions of dollars they paid the greedy Olympic people. So, the network decided to put some of the games on CNBC, some of the games on MSNBC, and the rest on NBC-TV, which, by the way, is known for targeting mostly women singles 25-49. Their trick is to feminize the male-oriented sport, in this case, the Olympics, in order to get the women to watch the games every night. How? By putting on events that appeal to them, but figure skating 7-8 nights in prime time? You got to be joking.

Meanwhile, I keep reading in the papers that the audience is getting older and not getting the younger viewers to watch the way the sport once did. Well, duh! Just look at the presentation of the product itself and you'll find all the answers there.

Furthermore, who the heck has that much time to watch all those hours of Olympic games? On the daily, we got five hours on MSNBC from 10am-3pm and 10pm-4am, CNBC from 3pm-9pm, NBC from 3-4pm, 7:30-11pm, 11:35-1:05am, plus the prime time replay from 1:05-4:35am. Times vary, so check the TV Guide every day. Somehow, there is somebody out there taping all the Olympic sports with a hundred blank VHS tapes and plans to watch them all during the rerun season in the summer time. That's one way to spread the games out so you can watch a little bit of games every day, fast forwarding through all the stories and talk, and just cutting to the action stuff, the stuff you want to watch in the first place.

We Need New Olympic Sports

Al Queda in Staitjacket Skiing - captured terrorists are forced to wear a straitjacket, restricting their use of their limbs, while tied down, head facing front, to a widened ski, that goes down the hills at speeds up to 70 mph downhill, scaring them so straight that they will never think of terrorizing this country ever again!

Cross-Dressing Skiing - men in drag don dresses and other sissy things in competetion.

Hip Hop Snowboarding - rappers compete in snowboards equipped with exploding bass stereo systems used to help them increase their speed.

Gay Men's Bobsledding - pairs couldn't get any closer.

Dog Ice Hockey - instead of humans, why not train the dogs to compete in the sport. Making their own pucks on the ice doesn't give them a puck of their own to use!

Senior Slow Skating - senior citizens in walkers compete against each other to go just a yard, but it's not as easy as it sounds.

Boxer's Ice Hockey - fights break out in hockey games. Why not put real boxers in the game, legalize fighting, and let the two players fight until there is a winner, who will then score.

And the most popular Olympic sport of all...

Lesbian Doubles Figure Skating - no Ellens and Annes here, and no kids either! We want two babilicious women between 18 and 25 who really look good. I want to see two women who look like Shakira and Shania pair off with each other and getting really romantic with each other on the skating rink. Even Howard Stern says Lesbian Skating would be a ratings draw!

Top Ten Rejected Olympic Events

9. The "skiing while on malt liquor" slalom event

8. Swimsuit Bobsledding

7. Javelin throw/milk carton toss

6. Three legged ice dancing

5. 10 minute taxidermy

4. Ventriloquist yodeling

3. Triathlon and egg hunt

2. Sumo Jump Roping

And the number one rejected Olympic Event

1. Blind Archery

Clutter Cramps NBC Olympic Coverage

If NBC's "Complete Olympics" don't seem to be all that complete, there's a reason. They aren't.

A lot of what's going on in Salt Lake City is being left out day after day, in part because of all the "clutter" mixed in with actual coverage — about 17 percent more distractions than viewers are used to seeing in prime time.

"Clutter" is the term used by the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Association of National Advertisers Inc. to refer to what they call "non-program material" — local or national commercials, network promos and anything else on TV that's not really germane to the substance of the show.

Those associations sponsor a semiannual study to count "clutter," and the latest data were issued Thursday. One of the findings: In prime time, the four major networks average 16 minutes, 8 seconds of "clutter" an hour.

By this reporter's count, NBC's Salt Lake City Olympics coverage is averaging nearly 19 minutes an hour of "clutter."

That adds up.

Over the course of a 31/2-hour prime-time Olympics show, that means there is more than an hour of the sort of window dressing probably not worth tuning in to see: Julia Louis-Dreyfus ski jumping or the Gateway cow talking or sponsors' names scrolling over a panoramic shot of Salt Lake City.

Then there are the times it feels as if the raison d'etre of airing each night's Olympics coverage is purely to get people to watch the next night's coverage.

And so it shouldn't be all that surprising to learn that when all those items are tallied up, viewers are left with just a tiny glimpse at the whole Olympic picture.

On Wednesday night's prime-time show, for example, there was about an hour of features, analysis, and other away-from-competition information. There were about 11/2 hours of true coverage of sports events (including interviews with athletes and announcing before and after competition).

About 50 minutes of the latter was live for viewers on the East Coast — commendable given that it was pretty close to the network's vow to show 60 percent of these games live in prime time, but not so commendable given that these Olympics are on U.S. soil (and even less commendable given that viewers on the West Coast saw everything on a 21/2-hour tape delay).

In between those bits and pieces of action are all manner of extras: nationally aired commercials, local affiliates' commercials, promotion of network programming, roll calls of sponsors, and commercials designed to look like they're part of the coverage.

There are other wastes of time, including studio host Bob Costas letting viewers know who will appear on Jay Leno's show.

And while it's bad enough when Costas interrupts his own segments to plug network programming, it's far worse when a play-by-play announcer does it during competition.

Here's a 25-second snippet of commentator Ted Robinson's call during the men's 5,000-meter short-track speedskating relay heat Wednesday night:

"If you like something like this, let me remind you of something you'll see this weekend on NBC: More high-speed thrills in the Daytona 500, the world's most important auto race, and it's live this Sunday at 12 noon Eastern, 9 a.m. Pacific. The Daytona 500 this Sunday on NBC."

Now there's an insight that surely helped viewers follow Apolo Anton Ohno's quest for four gold medals.

With so much space filled up by nonessentials, sometimes things get squeezed out. One example: Coverage of the women's luge was dropped completely from Wednesday's prime-time show (not even the results were mentioned), so that NBC could provide updates on the simmering judging scandal in pairs figure skating.

It certainly makes sense to follow the biggest story at these Olympics (and the network hasn't missed a beat in that regard). But perhaps instead of wiping out event coverage, the reports could have come at the expense of something else — perhaps the two minutes of footage of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier cavorting on stage with a Canadian rock band.

One also is left wondering whether one fewer "Harry Potter" reference when talking about Swiss ski jumper Simon Ammann, the first double gold medalist of these Olympics, could have left room for Costas to bring viewers a look at updated medals standings, for example.

Or how about if NBC declined to spend 25 seconds showing someone holding a sign that read, "I drove 5 miles to meet Bob Costas"?

But that would mean missing out on a chance to spend a portion of one night's show promoting the next night's show.

"STUPIDITY IS NOT A HANDICAP. Park elsewhere!"

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