PGA - Pretty Generous Advertising
I watched the PGA Championship over the weekend, and CBS put on a classic display of how not to televise a golf tournament. Yes, I understand that advertisements pay the bills, but two or four minutes of commercials for every 45 seconds of golf seems a bit excessive. Okay, maybe I exaggerated just a bit, but not by much.
I wonder if these companies realize that, as just one example, I’ll never do any business with the Royal Bank of Scotland, whatever that is. If that guy started engraving the trophy for Jack Nicklaus one more time, I think I would have jumped out the window! Okay, so I watched it from the first floor, and would have landed on my deck, but I think you know what I mean.
What a pleasure to watch the Masters Tournament, on the same network, but with only four minutes of commercials for every 60 minutes of golf! A few years’ back, we got to see the Masters with no commercials, because someone was protesting the fact that The Augusta National, an all-male club, had no female members! Strangely enough, I didn’t see any guys in the Miss Universe Pageant, but that may have been because I never watch it.
Aren’t we lucky to have computer graphics, though? Now, while we’re attempting to watch a birdie putt, we see people dancing across the bottom of the TV screen! All types of clutter shows up there, none of which ever interests me. Yes, I want to know about it if a major city (or even a minor one, if it’s near me) is being blown up by terrorists, or even by natural causes, but I can avoid “Dancing With the Stars” without being forewarned.
I wonder if CBS realizes that ESPN exists? When I’m watching a golf tournament, I really don’t care about the details of baseball games and tennis matches. That’s one thing that they actually could have scrolled along the bottom of the screen without much annoyance, rather than taking a “sports break” to keep me updated. The only updates I cared about were on the leaderboard at Medinah.
I also wonder if these corporations that spend millions of dollars on advertising realize that, much of the time, I don’t even know what they’re advertising! I’ve watched some of these ads dozens of times, and can’t even figure out what company I’m supposed to be buying something from, or why I’m supposed to buy it! Do they really think that I’ll run out and buy a particular vehicle because some girl changes into sassy clothes before hopping in the passenger seat? I would consider some of these cars they advertise, if only I could find a local road where the speed limit is 140.
But the PGA Championship wasn’t all bad. I don’t remember a single beer commercial. According to the beer companies, it’s okay to steal, as long as it’s your favorite beer. And beer should be much more important to me than the company of a pretty woman. My take on beer is that it never should have left the horse in the first place.