I had kind of a restless dream this morning. It involved putting putting advertising in the center of traffic lights, so you'd look up at a traffic light and there in the middle of the red glow would be, say, a Coca-Cola logo. Would be a great place to have ads for gas stations, for instance. Midas. Etc.
I am SO irritated at all the pop-up ads on television. I emailed my local channel the other night. They haven't gotten back to me yet. Probably kicking it upstairs. "A woman in North Portland turned off West Wing last night because of our stupid intrusive banner ads!" (I didn't actually turn it off.) I'm told (by Chris) it's because of TiVo that they do this. It's one of those things: no progress without some horrible cost to pay.
Well, now that I think about this...I assume the whole "let's show a big annoying graphical banner" thing happened originally just as a way to cram more ads into a given space of time. I think these banners are usually for shows on the same network, so effectively the network uses that space to advertise itself, rather than the precious slots of full-screen advertising (they can then sell more of those slots to McDonald's).
But I would also assume that the introduction of PVR's like TiVo, as well as program sharing (ahem, South Park) on the web have contributed to this form of advertising. If you know people are going to skip over or edit out your commercials, why not paste them right on top of the show itself.
The most interesting thing about this is that cable channels are doing it. I thought part of the point of putting something on cable was to fund the channel partially via subscription fees, thsu requiring less advertising. Yet, on the FX 24 marathon, there were constant animated, 3D, sound-effects-laden banners/popups. Grrrrr.
;Chris
Grrrr as well to commercials before movies (new ones, in the theatres). I never understood that one.
Hate to tell you Mary, but in some parts of the world way before you thought of it, advertising in traffic lights was already occuring.