Resurrecting Advertising

I know, I know. Any of you actually reading this who've known me in meatspace will say "but don't you hate ads and turn them off any chance you get?"

I do. But bear me out.

I grew up hearing WCCO AM radio in the car because we waz poor white trash who couldn't afford an FM radio, let alone an 8-track deck in the dash, or Star-Trek-worthy unimaginable things like Powered Windows or Air Conditioning. Not for us, nope.

Anyway, WCCO did live spots. Ads read live on air from prepared copy, but often ad-libbed, peppered with topicality, and improved in the process.

Flash forward 2011 and I'm sitting hear listening to Kevin Smith and his lovely wife Jen Schwalbach doing their Plus One Per Diem daily radio show on the internet. (Or a podcast. I think you can get it any way but mainlining it, honestly. And somebody's sure to figure out a way to do that soon enough.)

I do not like ads. I hate it when youtube or hulu or whoever just zaps a totally random-length ad before a clip that may be SHORTER than the damned ad. Hello, stupid! Thy name is Advertising.

But then Kevin and Jen start doing live spots. And they remind me why I didn't mind Boone & Erickson or the Cannon Mess doing their stupid live spots, and I didn't tune them out or turn them off. This sh-t is funny!

Jennifer and Kevin can flub their lines, goof off, laugh, start over, berate each other, support each other. There's so many ways the understanding provided by a background in their Plus One weekly podcast will make these ads transcend their capitalist intent, it's just unreal.

So I say to Fox and whoever else still cares to shovel their advertising shite into prime time teevee: want viewers to stay for the ads? Get your stars to do a few live spots like Lucy and Ricky and Ed Sullivan had to do. Let them have leeway to screw it up or make it better, and people are gonna stay TUNED for that spot.

It's not like you haven't figured this out, youse Ad Media in general. There's great examples of breaking the paradigm more often lately than in previous decades, from this lapsed teevee viewer's perspective.

But I just noticed I don't listen to the streams of Kev/Jen on SIR, I listen to the podcasts. I press pause and step away for a minute, often. So I found myself just now pausing them in the midst of another live spot ad.

And I thought to myself: "Whatsamattayou?" for just a second before noticing that I actually WANT to hear this one.