Program scripts from week of September 9, 2013
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.
Super Bowl Sales
It is the second week in September. The first games of the 2013-14 NFL season are just passed. Everybody in the league is either 1-0 or 0-1. You probably still don’t quite have that football season feeling really settled in yet. We still aren’t sure just how bad the Bills are going to be this year.
And yet the Super Bowl advertising sales season is rapidly drawing to a close. Yes, that’s right the sales time for advertising for the 2014 Super Bowl, a game which will not take place until February, five months from now, is rapidly coming to an end. I mean when you run out of ad time to sell you need to wrap things up.
As of a report from August 23 in USA Today the folks at Fox said that 85% of the advertising time was already sold and they expected that to hit 90% sold by the time of the first game. The game they played LAST WEEK. So by the time the kickoff of the Broncos-Ravens game last week 9 out of 10 available spots had already been sold.
If there is anyone out there who still has any delusions about what is the most popular sport in these here United States let them put that fantasy to rest. When you call sell most of the advertising for the championship game six months before the game is played, weeks before the first game of the season is played you are talking about a very desirable commodity.
Think about it. These companies are laying down orders for advertising time that will cost them, on average, four million dollars for a thirty second spot. Just one mind you. 30 seconds. About a fifth of the length of one of these commentaries.
And they have no idea who is even going to be playing in the game!
Now of course we’ve noted before that the Super Bowl has become its own thing. The game in large part is less the event than the ads themselves. Unless your team is playing in the game, you have a bet down on the game or you’re a hardcore football fan my bet is that people talk through the game and pay closest attention to the commercials.
And THAT explains a lot about why people have been spending that kind of money for a game that is almost a half a year away.
First, cell phones are everywhere. Not everyone has one, it just seems like it. At the same time a survey done in June of this years shows that there are more cell phones in the United States than there are people. In fact in relationship to the total population of the country cell phone usage stands at almost 104%. So there are enough folks running multiple phones to make up for all the people who don’t have one. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it.
The other item beyond dispute is that people insist on using those phones at inappropriate times. Somehow we seem to have lost any sense of appropriateness when the phone rings.
Case in point, the news conference at UCLA last week. It was a far more serious moment than usual. The press was meeting with head football coach Jim Mora. Just a few days before wide receiver Nick Pasquale had been killed by a car while walking along the road. In the middle of the tribute to the popular player a TV technician’s phone rang. Faux pas. Then he answered it! Making matters worse, following the apparently loud conversation, the tech then told the coach to “Go on”. Mora stormed out of the press conference. I can’t blame him.
At some point we need to draw some lines about polite cell phone use. For me rule number one should be to remember that your call is NOT private. If you’re in line at the store, or on public transportation or at a restaurant all of the rest of us can hear. Rule number two is NONE OF US WANT TO HEAR YOU! Get up, leave the room, find some place to have the call. Or, and here’s a radical concept, let it roll over to your voice mail. Stunning announcement - you and your messages aren’t that important.
On the other hand you can overreact too. Take the case of a film blogger working at the recent Toronto Film Festival. After becoming annoyed by someone in the front row using their phone during a screening (and possibly recording the movie) this person called 911. The emergency operator apparently laughed at him.
I can live with that too.
Long ago, in another lifetime, I invented the hot new thing in TV watching. It’s called recapping and I was doing it in 1983. Recapping is the hot new service where you no longer have to actually watch TV shows. You go to a video channel or a blog and someone tells you what happened on your favorite TV show. That’s right you no longer have to waste your time actually getting involved in the story, you can ignore character development, all the time and effort that goes into shooting and editing the shows? Pfffffttttt! That is so 20th Century.
Now please be clear. We are NOT talking about time shifting, where you record the show and watch it some other time. No, this recapping thing allows you to avoid the whole sitting and watching the show altogether.
Recapping advocates will no doubt tell me that this is just a way for folks to catch up on episodes they miss and to provide a place for fans to gather and discuss the episodes. It’s a way to respond to the changing needs of the audience.
What nonsense.
My favorite explanation was the one that included a line about how it helped the audience deal with the subtleties of the story telling. Oh, so it’s to help the members of the audience who are too dumb to follow along. This from a medium not exactly known for its subtlety.
As a storyteller I hate this concept. This kind of “Cliff Notes” version of the TV show is utterly repellent. It denies all of the art of the medium and reduces the story to its least interesting parts.
How do I know? Because I invented it, remember? In the summer of 1983 I was unemployed. Mrs. Phlipside still had a job and she was a HUGE fan of the soap operas. We didn’t have a VCR yet (hey, we were poor) so it became my job to watch the shows, write down what happened and report back to her as we prepared dinner. Given that I thought the soaps were idiotic my renditions of the story came with a certain acerbic edge. In the end it wasn’t a particularly satisfying experience for anyone.
I can only hope the current version dies off as quickly as that early experiment.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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