Longtime Boxcutters listeners will know that I have never been one to watch much live TV. When we started doing this show, I had three video recorders hooked up that I would variously record on or try to work through the previously recorded shows while juggling the physical tape space on multiple VHS tapes. I still have episodes of Jake in Progress and Caroline in the City I’m sure I’ll get to one day… Anyway, I digress… The reason I was a power user level time shifted viewer from way back was so as to have a ready reserve of quality viewing available at a time convenient to me, rather than the time and day convenient to the networks, and to waste less of my life waiting for the show to come back after the ads. With more than 25 years of experience, I’m a veritable guru when it comes to readying the zapping finger over the remote buttons at the first sign of going to a break and getting the right count to come back to normal speed.

So it takes something really special for an advertising campaign to start to piss me off consistently. Congratulations channel 10… You’ve done it. Continued inside »

We’ll be discussing this new Freeview ad on this week’s Boxcutters. It launched last night. Watching it is all the homework you need to do this week.

Here’s a nice little scene I wouldn’t mind the government using our taxes to run in an advertising campaign.

From McLeod’s Daughters:
Continued inside »

I’m just listening through to the last Boxcutters episode and found I pledged to reference the report on the stats of viewers watching the ads even with the option of skipping on PVR/DVR/TiVo/Fox IQs, so here it is:
From NY Times
Viewers Fast-Forwarding Past Ads? Not Always
People with digital video recorders like TiVo never watch commercials, right?

Add that to the list of urban ? and suburban ? myths.

Continued inside »

I saw the latest Hyundai ad last night and quite liked it. This morning, reading the paper over my Weeties, I find out my pleasure will be no more.

AUSTRALIA’S advertising watchdog has yanked a television ad for a car off the air after viewers voiced fears that it might encourage toddlers to jump behind the wheel of the family car.

The Advertising Standards Bureau yesterday told Hyundai to pull its “Next Generation” ad, which shows a toddler getting behind the wheel of a Santa Fe four-wheel-drive, putting on a seatbelt and picking up another child hitchhiking along the road.

The board said it had received more than 80 complaints about the ad. Several weeks ago, Hyundai had voluntarily moved it to a later time slot to appease viewers concerned about its effect on young children.

But the bureau said the ad did not comply with the code that governs vehicle advertising.

“The board certainly acknowledged that the notion of a toddler driving a car was unrealistic and fanciful, but under the (code of practice), fantasy cannot be used when it contradicts, circumvents or undermines the code,” bureau chief executive Mark Jeanes said. “Many of the complaints were from parents concerned that the advertisement would encourage copy-cat behaviour in young children and might lead to accidents.”

Hyundai spokesman Richard Power said yesterday that the company was disappointed with the ruling, but it would “not query the referee’s decision”.

“Hyundai maintains the ad is patently aimed at adults and its blatant fantasy is the foil for the literal liberties taken in the driving sequences,” he said.

The Age

So sit your under-5s here to let them absorb the message the wowsers don’t want them to hear.