Monday, February 13, 2006
 

Olympic TV

Since I don't generally watch a lot of TV on commercial networks (the Law & Order series and Monk is about it), I don't get exposed to a lot of TV commercials, so when the Olympics roll around, all of a sudden there are all these ads to watch that I've never seen before. It's a crash course in television advertising.

So far, not a lot of what I've seen has struck me one way or the other. The Coca-Cola series which features an Olympic cheerleading team should be funnier than it is, and I confess I don't really get the McDonald's ads which center around a full-size plastic Ronald McDonald -- aren't they rather reminiscent of the Burger King commercials or the Quaker Oats ads where the kids pull around a full size Quaker figure? And what's the appeal of these ads anyway?

I am glad to see that Chevy has dug in its heels and rejected all this talk about global warming, the possibility we're reaching the point of peak oil, and the danger of our national addiction to petroleum and the internal combustion engine, and is running an ad where a family in one of their huge gas-guzzling SUVs looks down their noses at a family going by them in a smaller, more fuel-efficient car. (The joke is that the smaller car is so small that the family has to get around in three of them, with the dog and luggage in the last car which has no driver -- talk about your straw man argument!! "Buy our wasteful and expensive to operate vehicle because otherwise your dog will need his own car.")

Chevy's intransigence comes when other automakers are touting their hybrid cars, which, however expedient and opportunistic on their part, at least reflects the slowly turning popular viewpoint that we'd better start getting a little greener. I mean, shoot, even George W. Bush's advisors could see that worm turning (enough to insert some greenish-sounding mumbo-jumbo in the SOTU), but GM apparently doesn't have a friggin' clue. I expect their complete inability to grok the zeitgeist will be reflected in the stock market sooner or later. Too bad that innocent people will lose their jobs because these bozos don't know their asses from their elbows.

By the way, I'm undecided as of yet about NBC's coverage. There's still much too much human interest stuff, interviews, medal ceremonies and various sidebars, all at the expense of actually watching, you know, athletes compete, but maybe the balance is a little better than in previous games. I'd still like to tape an hour of prime-time coverage and count how much competition they show in 60 minutes, just to know.

Still, it looks like they'll be showing a fair amount of curling, which struck me hard at the last Winter Olympics, so that's good, even if some of the coverage comes at 3 in the morning. Hooray for DVRs!!

Ed Fitzgerald | 2/13/2006 12:27:00 AM | | | del.icio.us | GO: TOP OF HOME PAGE







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