Pop-Up Ads on TV! No way!

[KevinG]

Don't look now, but TV ads suddenly have found a whole new way to invade our space.

All of a sudden, not even the programs themselves are safe.

I'm not talking about the ads interrupting the shows, which have been a staple of broadcast network TV for half a century. I'm not even talking about the increasingly annoying practice of product placement, in which characters on TV shows drive vehicles that conveniently pop up in ads during the next commercial break.

And I'm not even talking about those annoying network promos that pop up in the lower third of the screen while a show is in progress - the ones that interfere with the enjoyment of what watching one program in the hopes of enticing us to watch another one later.

No, this is something new, and sinister, and, if it catches on, terrifying. And like so many things that drag TV down instead of elevating it, there's no reason it won't catch on, unless viewers complain.

What is this sudden new threat to quality TV viewing? Monday night on NBC's "Heroes," just as the action switched from one scene to another (not to a commercial, just a different part of the narrative), one of those lower-third-of-the-screen interruptions popped up.

The promotion, pulling attention away from whatever was happening on "Heroes" at the time, was there to deliver to viewers the following written message: "'American Gangster' - In Theaters Friday."

Not another NBC show. Not a news flash. An ad for a movie - one distributed by NBC Universal - right smack in the middle of a program.

NBC has also done this with "Bee Movie."

But "American Gangster," shilled in the middle of the action of "Heroes," is difficult to miss.

Which, of course, is precisely the point.

Now that TiVo and DVR technology allow viewers to time-shift their favorite shows and zip through the commercials, product placement within shows is way up, and newly released Nielsen ratings confirm the common wisdom: Give people a chance to skip commercials, and they will. Since broadcast TV is a commercial medium, what's a network to do?

Stick ads right into the shows, where they can't be fast-forwarded through, that's what.

NBC has a term for these: "snipes," a word borrowed from construction-site papering of ads.

Here's an even more sinister-sounding term, and one with a noble TV history: "blipverts," which suggests both the quickness and pervasiveness of an advertising message. The term comes from an episode of ABC's "Max Headroom," and was coined almost 20 years ago.

If we don't complain now, and loudly, blipverts are destined to be our future.

Source: NY Daily News

I think ads can be annoying, but people also have to make a living, and some of them happen to depend on ads to do so.

This author's opinion doesn't take commerce into consideration.

The smart, market-oriented solution would be for cable and dish companies to offer another level of service where you don't have any ads, but you have to pay more for your monthly cable or dish bill.