Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 1:31 PM by Gene

Speaking of sponsors, yesterday we said they were doing a nice mea culpa job at the American Society of Willfully Ignorant Advertisers' conference. Seems the self-flagellation was better than we'd have thought:

Universal McCann's Jean Pool, who chairs the Amercian Association of Advertising Agencies' Media Policy Committee, said media owners, particularly the television networks, have become "addicted to the ring of the cash register" by allowing an ever growing amount of commercial clutter in their telecasts.

"It is the saddest and stupidest thing we have done to our industry," she told an opening day audience of 1,500 at the annual AAAA Media Conference and Trade Show in Orlando. "Clutter in every conceivable nook and cranny. Just why are we hell bent on irritating the very people that we are trying to sell our products and services to? We're killing the golden goose." [Actually, the goose that laid the golden egg; the golden goose is another story. We wouldn't expect ad-agency types to know. They know nothing as it is. --ED]

While stressing that she was not singling out ABC, Pool said, "How annoying is it to be interrupted every six or seven minutes when you're watching Desperate Housewives. A recent show had 24 minutes of non-program content. I'm not picking on ABC. The big [programming] successes are chock full of non-program time."

And Pool said TV is not alone in its penchant for commercial clutter. She said in one hour of the Howard Stern radio show, 38 commercial units ran. "Geez, that barely gives Howard time to get in his favorite word," Pool quipped.

Pool warned that if the media doesn't do something about clutter, they may find that the media agencies on behalf of their advertiser clients start shunning the more expensive, higher-rated programs, for lower-rated programs and dayparts, where clutter is less. "Maybe somebody would actually remember the commercial in a less loaded environment," she said.

EVERY LAST WORD IS SHEER UNMITIGATED MALARKEY. We repeat: NOTHING will change, because advertisers live in the throes of a PSYCHOSIS, a psychosis of throwing OUR money down the toilet; they have fiefdoms to protect, and names to drop, and BIG-TICKET-EVENT SEATS to fill, and as long as this holds, AMERICA'S ADVERTISERS WILL SPONSOR INDISCRIMINATELY, INDISCRIMINATELY.