Children’s TV programming and junk food have been tied since the beginnings of the medium, as in the above video of an early Mickey Mouse Club, sponsored by “your friendly neighbor who bottles Coca-Cola.” Now, however, the Disney corporation plans to kick ads for many sugary and fatty foods off its programming (including ABC Saturday …
Advertising
Dead Tree Alert: Law & Order: DVR; or, Confessions of an Ad-Skipping Thief
My latest column in TIME (now free from the paywall!) is about the uproar in broadcast TV over Auto Hop, a new feature on Dish Network DVRs which takes commercial fast-forwarding one step further, allowing viewers to …
Madonna, Clint and the Rest of Super Bowl XLVI Halftime
I went into last night’s Madonna Super Bowl halftime show expecting to hate it: yet another performer whose appeal can charitably be described as “nostalgic” (see The Rolling Stones, The Who, etc.) blasting out a set of oldies …
The Best and Worst Super Bowl Commercials of 2012
Animals, beer, women in bikinis, aging actors — all the things that one would expect from Super Bowl commercials were present and accounted for this year. TIME grades the ads of Super Bowl XLVI.
Campaign Video: Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em for Herman Cain
Can this insane campaign ad help keep Herman Cain from inadvertently getting himself nominated?
Plenty of Chances to Meet Fox’s New Girl
Fox is deeply convinced that you will love Zooey Deschanel this fall in its comedy New Girl. But if you are not thus persuaded yet, then by God, Fox is going to help you learn to love her by any means necessary. To that end, Variety reports, the network today will begin previewing the show’s pilot in various forums online, two weeks …
Robo-James' Time Machine: They Were Still the One
It’s almost fall, which means that promos for new fall shows are starting to reach a crescendo. But one thing that we’ve lost amid all the multimedia advertising is what used to be a network staple: the fall-season promo reel. Above, see an example from the ABC “Still the One” campaign in 1977.
What’s most notable about this …
The Morning After: Am I Blue?
Last night in Los Angeles, my fellow TV critics who have already arrived at the TCA press tour attended a party thrown by the Playboy Channel at Hugh Hefner’s mansion. I sat in Brooklyn and watched America’s Got Talent. Not bitter! Because it meant I had the chance to see possibly the most awkward, degrading product placement I have …
Pardon the Interruption: PBS Planning Ad Breaks Within Shows
The major difference between PBS and commercial broadcasters used to be, well, commercials. For-profit TV relied on ads, PBS didn’t. OK, maybe it had sponsors, but nothing so crass as commercials. Then, OK, maybe it had “enhanced” sponsor messages, which looked a lot like commercials to the layman, but at least they didn’t interrupt …
Groupon: We Meant to Do That
So as I wrote this morning, Groupon seems to have alienated much of the football-watching world with its commercial last night, which began as a seemingly earnest plea about the plight of Tibet and ended with Timothy Hutton describing the awesome deal he and others got at a Tibetan restaurant thanks to the online-coupon site.
Today, a …
The Morning After: Super Bowl Ads, the Light and the Dark Side
Thanks for my kindly masters, this was the first year in several that I did not work through the Super Bowl and into overtime reviewing every single ad for time.com—I divvied up the game with colleagues Steven James Snyder, Feifei Sun and Josh Sanburn. I had the second quarter, which included personal fave from Volkswagen (above), …
The Morning After: Second Skins
The MTV drama Skins is shedding advertisers faster than its cast shed shirts in their publicity photos. The past week, when controversy over the show’s sex-and-drugs content was compounded by purported fears that the show could constitute child pornography, saw a half dozen sponsors leave the show, including Schick, Taco Bell, GM, …
eTrade Baby Curses Jets Once More
I can sometimes take the pulse of the Universal TV Watching Mind by noticing when there’s a sudden spike on traffic for a year-old post on my blog. Judging by this morning’s logs, a bunch of people are coming to Tuned In by Googling the terms “James Brown,” “eTrade Baby” and “shame” or “embarrassment” or “ew” or something like …
