My wife loves TiVo. The person who never quite mastered the VCR and considers my 1970s-era stereo "too complicated" flies through the TiVo on-screen menu like an eighth grader on Mountain Dew. She grins as she lays waste to carefully planned programming schedules, and offers no apologies for fast-forwarding through the commercials, a few of which my company—the business that’s paying for our mortgage, college tuition, and everything else in the house, including TiVo—cut or shot, or both. An appreciation for irony only goes so far.
I’ve decided to break up with my stockbroker and refinance my home (again). After all, my family hasn’t lost their middle class sense of entitlement. So day after day, I plot and scheme and try to figure out how we can get ahead and prosper in a future that has rid itself of my bread and butter—the :30 commercial.
I liked it when all we had to do at Just Add Water was cut commercials. The boards came in. We bid them, cut them and shipped them. It was focused and profitable, and going to NAB to party didn’t have to be justified. My editors and directors are more than ready to create BMW-style films—but none of our clients are interested, at least not yet.
I’ve gone to PR industry get-togethers to talk "advertorial"—excuse me, "advertainment"—with the pros. If it’s so good, how come I’m the only one picking up a check? There was one industry function where a bright-eyed "content creator" pulled me aside to talk about his long format approach: "Cool commercials, but longer, and placed just like regular programming."
"You mean infomercials?" I said.
"No, like cool, and you know, informative," he said, slightly hurt.
Some say that product placement is the wave of the future, but like most of us in the production community, we know how to produce, not place. Besides, will the bachelorette of the week, drinking a soda between would-be boyfriends, really move cases of Coke or Pepsi? I’m not convinced.
Things have definitely gotten more complicated. There’s more competition and less money to go around. And my computer hasn’t made my office paperless, as I was told it would. Don’t get me wrong, I think those neo-marketers are right about the merger of advertising and entertainment. But the dancing girls are still in the wings waiting for their costumes to be fitted. We’ve added a production division. We even do VNRs. Maybe it’s time to change our name and logo?
I think that commercials are sometimes better than the programs they pay for. Not all commercials, but is all the programming good? I’ll take the Nike "Streaker" spot over Susan Sarandon in Antarctica any day. I’d rather watch Tiger Woods’ golf club covers talk than listen to Hannity & Combs. I don’t even like Everybody Loves Raymond, but I do like the color of Doris Robert’s hair—where’s the close-up of the Clairol box? When advertising is good, like Volkswagen or IBM, it’s great. And even when it’s really bad—take Miller Lite mud wrestling—you gotta admit it’s pretty good, and a lot cheaper than the Pay-Per-Views in the upper 500s.
As for TiVo? The other night I sat down in front of the TV. My wife had gone to bed. I went through the "Now Playing On TiVo" menu and realized that there wasn’t a single thing—aside from Six Feet Under, which I had already seen—that I wanted to watch. I went for the prime-time line-up, fast-forwarded through the shows, watched the commercials, and went to bed with a smile [on my face] and hope in my heart. Maybe TiVo’s not such a bad thing for our industry, after all.
