Animated ads durring TV shows are getting way out of hand

[leebo]

I expect this crap to get worse, not better.
I believe they're "testing" this type of advertizing to combat the probable proliferation of "Tivo" like recorders that let you skip the commercials.

[solarfox]

It's gone well beyond merely "testing"; they've been doing these animated ads for a couple of years now (here in the US, anyway) on certain cable channels.

The bitch of it is, I saw this coming a long time ago... first, it was station-ID logos that came up every 10 minutes or so over the programme you were watching, then came the stationary every-present "bug", then the "bug" started giving me the local time and temperature... once that happened, I knew we were on the road to something like these bloody animated ads all over the bottom half of the screen.

Fortunately, since I use ULead Media Studio Pro to capture and encode most of my DVD's, I can do my own pan-and-scan-and-crop to "fix" this in my permanent copy. It takes a little extra work and patience, but I find it curiously satisfying to undo the evil they've done...

[leebo]

What I meant by "testing" is that so far these ads are limited to TV show advertisements, AFAIK.

Eventually they'll be advertising shampoo and Coke that way - during the show you're watching!

[SatStorm]

The first time I saw animated logos and adds, was about 8 years ago, during football matches!
Then, the last 3 years, we have here in europe this TV terror called: SMS messages.
And finally, the last year, we have those permanent infromation adds on screen, like "Later: We **** your Brain, a new series for mature oriance like you"
Expecially on channels like the music ones, the situation is more than extreme.

I don't know... I don't think that this gonna change anytime soon. I think it's gonna be there for the next couple of years. The first year the channels using this crap gonna see that they loosing viewer and the next year gonna analyse why they loosing viewers. The third year, and if they are smart, they gonna eliminate this new "advertising" methods.
Untill the next crap thing came in town..

And yes, I too filter logos from TV if I want to store something for later viewing. Not simply cropping, this sometimes is impossible to be done (there are also vertical logos on the screen, how to crop that without loosing the picture?). I mean heavy antilogo filtering! Not perfect results, but sure better than the transmission....

[sterno]

Here's the gradual evolution I saw on the Sci-Fi channel. First, they had the little alpha-blended logo in the corner. Small, unobtrusive, and they used it for years. It was also in the letterboxing when they showed widescreen movies and TV shows.

Then they switched to their current logo. It's a little larger, and more importantly it's opaque, bright white, and on widescreen movies and shows they move it up high enough to be in the picture.

After that they started putting ads for the prime-time shows and miniseries they were trying to push in the other corner. Then the ads just kept getting bigger and more obnoxious. Animated, 1/3 the height of the picture, bright colors, etc.

Interestingly enough, they've actually started cutting back a little bit. I think they've been getting less obnoxious. It could just be the times and shows that I watch, though.

TNN/"America's Network for Men"/SpikeTV/whatever-it-is-this-week has also started making their logos and ads a little less obnoxious. They stopped using that banner all the way across the bottom of the screen, they cut back (maybe stopped?) the really big animated ads and just have the logos and little banners. FX also seems to have toned down their animated ads, they used to have some of the really irritating ones with sound effects. Hopefully this is the start of a trend back toward something reasonable.

[leebo]

http://www.logofreetv-usa.com