One ad features a certain group of newscasters shootin' the shit at a local coffee shop. They are laughing, delivering lighthearted jabs towards one another... just being all around buddy-buddy. That's fine and dandy, but let's not forget that they probably took an hour beforehand to set up lights and cameras in that coffee shop. Not to mention they probably had to juggle schedules like crazy to get all of them to meet in the same place to film the thing.
I just saw another ad for a different station with a touching montage containing footage of doggies, a man playing a trumpet for a boy, and the newscast all looking into the camera at the end of the ad with pearly white smiles as the song playing says "We're telling a story!"
Another angle they like to take is the scare tactic. "Is the fish you're eating at your favorite restaurant really Walleye? Our undercover cameras expose the truth for what it is at 10!" a.k.a. "Slow day at the newswire... we're going to kill 5 minutes by talking about fish." And here's what the average fish-consuming viewer thinks: "Holy shit... am I paying $40 for a plate full of carp? I had better tune in just to be safe.. jeez, you can't trust anyone these days."
It's all rather silly if you think about it. Do these people really change into their Dockers after the show is done and yimmer yammer with one another about how good so-and-so's potato salad was at the picnic last year or planning an all staff trip to Paint Your Plate? I doubt it. They rinse all that itchy makeup off, get in their nice smelling cars and go home. Is it really "news" that a small handful of restaurants we've never heard of serve something that is nearly identical to the taste and cost of Walleye? I'm sure there's more important things than that to cover, but sometimes that's what it takes to suck viewers in, I guess.
I'm sure these ads do their job of getting viewers to be subconsciously hypnotized to tune in to their news programs, otherwise why would they spend the time and money to do it? Sometimes it just makes me want to stick my finger in my throat to initiate my phony baloney newscaster commercial gag reflexes. Watch ad, puke, forget about ad, feel better until next time.
In case any of you newsfolk are reading this, here's an idea for a news commercial that would
make me want to tune in: get the whole newscast in KISS makeup, put them onstage with guitars, pyro, blood, the whole works, and have them play 30 seconds of "Deuce". Then at the end of the commercial the lead newscaster (I'll use Don Shelby for this example), who would of course be in Gene Simmons makeup, gets his face right in the camera, wags his tongue around, pumps that rock fist* towards the camera and yells "EE-YAY-YEAAAAAAAAAH!"That would be hella awesome.
*="rock fist" reference dedicated to Lance
