“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment’s notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-18 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from the week of March 25, 2018
This Week’s Podcast
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Commercial Extinction?
Just a week or so ago, I talked about the question of how much time is devoted to commercials on TV and the discussions about reducing it moving forward. Television commercials were a necessary evil for many years, something that we simply tolerated. But with the arrival of the internet age, and so many services that we can get without those irritating commercial interruptions, tolerance has declined. So more networks have been talking about finding ways to reduce the commercial load.
From the viewers seat that probably sounds pretty simple. Just stop airing them. What a lot of people forget is that advertising is how American TV makes money. Commercials are a vital piece of the business model. There may be money down the line in syndication for programs, and there are carriage fees and the like that bring in money as well. But advertising is what pays the bills and brings us all our favorite television programs. To the tune of some seventy five b-as-in-boy-in’t-that-a-big-number, billion dollars. So reducing the number of commercial minutes means finding some way to balance the books.
The most interesting comment on the subject came from Fox televisions advertising boss Joe Marchese who said that he and his team were looking at reducing primetime advertising minutes to just two an hour by 2020. That’s dropping from over ten minutes an hour in January of this year to two in about two years time.
How they will do that is still up in the air. Marchese talked about using shorter spots, down to six seconds, to doing picture in picture, where the advertising and program run simultaneously, and other possible experiments. Unspoken in all of this is that the price of advertising overall is going to have increase. The Fox ad folk talk about increasing efficiency as a way of justifying the change. It’s going to take the buy-in of everyone involved, the networks, the advertising community and viewers if this is going to work.
All of this really struck home over the weekend as I watched ESPN just butcher one of my favorite sports. The Worldwide Leader in Sports now carries Formula One racing. They managed to make a complete hash of the first race of the season, simply because they couldn’t manage to control the advertising content of the broadcast. Putting the race on half the screen and the commercials on the other half while jumping in and out of the action randomly managed to make things worse rather than better.
That should probably be used as the standard to avoid for the networks moving forward.
Commercial Basics
I got an unusual opportunity the other day. I’ve been doing some work as a substitute teacher over the last year. There’s quite the demand for subs where I live, so I get to bounce around a lot of schools (there are something like ten high schools in this district) and be in all kinds of classes.
So imagine my surprise last week when I look at the plan for the day, and it includes a section of radio commercial copywriting! I wrote my first radio ad in 1981, and wrote hundreds more over the next several decades. It was the process of learning how to do it well that really made into the commercial fan that I’ve become today. As I talked with the students about my experience and thoughts on commercials, I began to think about how little most folks really understand about this American art form.
And then I thought, “Hey, I could talk about that”!
The good news is that I’ve already used up about a third of this program. So let’s stick to the basics. Trust me when I tell you that there are all kinds of theories about what makes a good commercial. My theory is that there are only two things that the advertiser really needs you to remember from an ad. The first is easy, I’ll bet some of you have already said it, but the second almost no one ever gets.
The first thing you need to remember? How many of you said “the name”? Absolutely correct. A great commercial is a total failure if you don’t know who or what was being touted. The name of the business, the service or the product.
But the second one is tougher. Because it’s not information. The second thing is emotional. How do you feel about that business, service or product? A positive emotional response means you will be on the look out for it. That’s what makes you look it up on the internet. But sometimes, especially in political ads, they may want you to have a negative emotional response. Whatever the response, they want you to associate it with the object of the ad.
After billions of dollars are spent, and millions of hours are put into creating the ads, the end result rests on those two simple concepts. After you’ve seen the ad, do you remember the name and how do you feel about it?
Knowing this won’t make the commercial breaks any shorter. But it might help you understand what they’re trying to get you to do while it’s going on.
Maybe next week I’ll tell you about being a Phys Ed teacher. Nah, probably not.
Facebook’s REAL Problem
Well, it’s the topic of the month in the media. So I suppose I should touch on it as well. It’s Facebook. What are we going to do about Facebook? Whose fault is all this mess?
I’ve got an answer to that last question, one that I am rarely hearing mentioned in all the hoohaw about the social media site. The problems with Facebook do have to do with their business model. Mark Zuckerberg’s naive insistence that this is still the platform he created in college is part of the problem. The lack of ethical standards by associated companies like Cambridge Analytica is part of the problem, as is the pathetic nature of Facebook’s security systems. We’ve been hearing about all of these issues for weeks now. But we keep skipping over the biggest problem with Facebook. The one that keeps getting us, the Facebook using community, in trouble.
Find a mirror, find the problem.
That’s right, in the words of the classic ‘60s political comic strip “Pogo” “We have met the enemy and he is us”.
The biggest problem when it comes to security on Facebook and other social media is the fact that you and I don’t care about it till after we think we’ve been hurt by it. That means we click on every idiot meme and survey and agree to let them have access to whatever the company wants in return. The official motto of the social media consuming public should be “Do With Me What You Will!” The original collection of data done by the folks at Cambridge Analytica began with hundreds of thousands of users agreeing to not only turn over their own personal information, but all the information they had on all their friends too. What happened afterwards is a different story, but the ball gets rolling because we act like toddlers in a sandbox.
I’m hearing from more of my friends who are thinking of leaving Facebook now. The problem is that there isn’t another alternative at the moment. Facebook grew because it was the only platform that could connect us as completely as it did. At the very least, we all need to re-think how we use it. I will be thinking much harder about using services that want my information, I am seriously considering eliminating the app from my smartphone, and I will look at tightening up the security on my account a little more.
Facebook has a lot it needs to fix. I’m going to help out by fixing the big problem first.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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