Boring TV
Television programs are boring. I don’t have cable, but when I’m at other houses I turn it on, flip through the channels, and turn it off.
Why aren’t there any good programs on? Is it because writers can’t write good programs? While pondering this, I suddenly realized that television programs won’t appeal to me. They’ll never appeal to me. TV programs aren’t written to be good in themselves, they’re written to bring in advertising dollars (or at the very least happen to do this).
I am practical and my purchases are unswayed by advertising and entirely swayed by research. I have never bought a product as a result of seeing, hearing, or reading an advertisement. Every purchase I make is through research, reviews, etc. I am not the type of person networks want watching their shows. There’s no income in attracting practical viewers.
Who do the networks want to attract?
Well, judging from the ads, networks are trying to attract people who:
- are young
- are single
- have poor sex performance
- are going bald
- don’t like the car they drive
- think 500 payments of $10 is better than a single payment of $200
- like junk food
- are overweight
- care about their image
- overpay for insurance
- don’t know how to use a computer
- have colds and headaches and heart attacks all the time
Why marketing won’t appeal to me
Television marketing fails because people like me know the advertisements are lies. We recognize the divide between engineering and marketing. If an advertisement truly appealed to us it would be written by the person who designed the product. We want to hear from the engineer, not the person who’s trying to make a sale.
A good example is an advertisement for a car such as the Mazda3. Ads will probably say something like: This car out accelerates, out-performs, out-maneuvers, gets better mileage, and has a lower monthly payment than the competition. But then you’ll see an ad for the Honda Civic and the Toyota Corolla that say the same thing! The only way to determine the truth is to test drive all the cars and read lots of reviews (which is what I did).
The Mazda3 does outperform the other two cars by a long-shot, but what the advertisements and salesmen fail to mention is that if you actually drive the car the way it’s advertised (Zoom Zoom Zoom) you’ll get horrible mileage and will warp the brake rotors. When you point out that the brake rotors warped because they weren’t slotted and obviously should have been because the advertisements mentioned short stopping distance the service people won’t care. The Mazda3 brake rotors that came with the car simply weren’t designed for heavy braking and it’s not their fault marketing got it wrong.
This is why I would like advertising to be done by the engineers. Engineers don’t concern themselves with sales as much as they do facts. I would like an advertisement from Toyota to say, “Our car is more reliable than all the others but acceleration and handling is poor.” And Mazda should say, “Our cars outperform all the competition but the mileage is lower and we put on really cheap tires and brake rotors.” But they don’t ever say that. This is probably why engineers are never allowed to sell the car directly to the consumer—they’re too truthful. But this is precisely why people like me distrust advertisements and don’t purchase things as a result of them.
So advertisements only work on dumb people. Ergo television shows must attract some dumb people to remain profitable. If they don’t attract enough people that buy stuff, they fail. This is what happened to Firefly. Firefly is a show I would have watched (if I had known about it) because it was well done. But it was canceled despite being one of the best Sci-Fi series (evidenced that a movie was made from it because of the growing fan-base after the TV series was canceled).
So few good programs make it on TV that people like me don’t watch TV. The only way for this to change is to move from an advertising model to a paid model. Well… no. That wouldn’t work either. I wouldn’t actually pay money to watch something.
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