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Sub way ads and TV ad campaigns and public reaction
Posted by admin on August 3, 2008Proving again, these are strange times in the “broadcast content” game.
The broadcast world still feels a big chill from the FCC’s largely symbolic, but effective, “crackdown” threats following the 2004 Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident.
Yet advertisers and producers now present even more graphic content, by avoiding specific words and images.
Ads for Viagra and Cialis, at first gauzy and circumspect, are becoming more explicit about what they’re really selling. A pregnancy-test ad that ran during the Miss America pageant this weekend on TLC featured “pee” hitting the test stick.
The media tend to work like this, each new wave pushing the line and flattering viewers that they are urbane and sophisticated.
Or not.
Because the same ads tell other viewers that if they feel uncomfortable, they must be unhip and uncool - a response, incidentally, that many advertisers think is fine.
Just as a 4-year-old loves getting a reaction from Mom and Dad by saying “doo-doo head,” a lot of adults enjoy a line more if someone else finds it shocking. Call it “Howard Stern syndrome.”
The old Madison Avenue wouldn’t have risked chuckling at even a tiny percentage of the potential audience for a mass-appeal product like a sandwich.
Today it will, and that in turn may be one more small part of the reason so many Americans today consider TV an alien force.
Even beyond the handful of fanatics who think “Desperate Housewives” is ruining America, millions of rational people feel TV is indifferent to them and at times downright dangerous to their children.
And to whom can they turn? Well, the FCC last week decided to help cleanse the airwaves by slapping a $1.4 million fine on ABC for a 2003 “NYPD Blue” in which a young boy walked into a bathroom just as actress Charlotte Ross disrobed to step into the shower.
Nudity? Well, yeah. But the scene was a joke, which would make it useless in drawing any kind of content line even if such a line existed.
Similarly ad for cealis from Eli lilly too.
Television is such a vast, sprawling entity today that there are as many lines as there are Americans. No matter how we try to throw a rope around it, that’s where we are.
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