WTF?!? WINDEX Ad On CDN Big Fat Greek Wedding! (1 Viewer)

[DeathStar1]

Am I the only one who's worried about this statement?

>U.S. moviegoers are already used to movie ads, he said, though cinema advertising has yet to gain a level of acceptance in the U.S. to match its well-established presence in European exhibition.
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What else can they bombard us with? Onscreen bugs and pop up movie adds? I really wish we could do away with money and work in a free society so we don't have to put up with this crap. When can I travel to the Star Trek universe .

 

[Tony Whalen]

Have you ever bought a magazine or a newspaper?

Good one Damin!

 

[David Rogers]

But, without that commercial, you may be paying MORE for the disc. If it can save a few dollars on the price of a DVD, I would have no problem with ads on there. Skip over them.

No no no

I pay for DVD, in large part, to avoid marketing being attached to my content. Advertisers have responded over the last three decades (particularly) by making marketing more and more intrusive, and placing it in places it never used to be. I respond by ignoring them more and more frequently. I enjoy DVD because I should get only what I want; *the* *content*.

Watching Sopranos is quite a bit of fun, but the cherry on the creamy sundae of mobster family values is HBO understanding the monthly fee I pay them means they've got theirs and nine o'clock means an uninterrupted episode of Sopranos.

DVD Players are programmable by the disc where VHS players weren't. If manufacturers would code their players to menu the contents rather than accepting the other coding (i.e., forced play coding the advertisers are taking advantage of), this thread wouldn't even exist. Maybe I need to make a few more hacker friends.

They're double dipping by pushing ads on a disc that has been paid for by the consumer. I would much rather pay the extra amount than have adverts on my discs. That's as plain as I can make it. If the choice is US$15 and ten minutes of ads on the disc, or US$19 and content only, here's my nineteen bucks. If the difference is more, making the US$15 become US$21, even US$25, I still pay more.

Why? Because I want to reward content producers for producing good and enjoyable content.

The last thing marketing people need is encouragement and reward. You send angry letters and all they react with is "ah ha! He saw the ad, excellent!" We definitely don't need to give them actual fiscal encouragement as well. That'd just egg them on to no end.

It'd really just be a lot nicer if content producers would stick to the tried and true manufacturer-consumer relationship, and not some massive multi-armed tentacled Org Chart of descending relationships with the lowly consumer at the very bottom, almost off the page.

 

[nousername]

I don't object to ads as long as you can skip over them, and as long as there are not so many of them that they begin taking up precious space on the disc, thereby robbing the main feature of the maximum bitrate possible...

 

[Jesse Skeen]

The first major release on VHS to have a commercial, Top Gun, was supposedly done to sell the tape at a lower price point, but anyone remember commercials on RENTAL-PRICED VHS tapes?? Innerspace had a Pepsi commercial (AND Macrovision encoding, though I copied the rented tape with my black box!) Rain Man had a Buick ad, also with Macrovision and an $89 price tag, and a number of Paramount releases in 1989 had Pepsi ads including Coming to America, Crocodile Dundee II and The Presidio. Ghostbusters II had a Coke commercial and I saw ads for Premiere Magazine on the front of some other Columbia Pictures VHS releases.
I'll only accept paid ads on DVDs if they're mailed to me for free, or included in a magazine or something else I buy. Any commercial I see on a full-priced DVD will result in an immediate boycott of whatever company put it there.

 

[Michael Harris]

I just wonder when the saturation point for advertising will be reached. How can marketers believe that more is better? With so much of it on TV I know that I can accomplish a lot of little chores during those five minute blocks. Plus, to me, it is all self defeating. I just don't pay attention to ads any more. They have become background noise.

As for the fact that we buy newspapers and magazines with ads, that is an apple/oranges comparison. I would compare buying a DVD to buying a book. The only advertising in a book is usually limited to pushing other books by the same author or similar subjects/titles which are akin, to me anyway, to trailers on a DVD. I wonder if a printed version of MBFGW has a "Windex(TM)" ad in it.

 

[DeathStar1]

>>>How can marketers believe that more is better? With so much of it on TV I know that I can accomplish a lot of little chores during those five minute blocks. Plus, to me, it is all self defeating. I just don't pay attention to ads any more. They have become background noise.
>>>


Exactly. I watch so little syndicated TV now, because there is more of a chance that it will be interupted by an on screen add. And forget watching movies on TV for mostly the same reason, let alone edits.

It's interesting. Compare the running time for the second episode of Next Generation, and then compare the running time of the same show from the final season, or from Voyagers first season. How many minutes of adds have been put in in just that short a decade?

That's why I'm hoping someone starts a pay channel that will syndicate the most popular shows, show them commercial and bug free, and that will be the only reason to have cable these days .

 

[nousername]

I'll only accept paid ads on DVDs if they're mailed to me for free, or included in a magazine or something else I buy. Any commercial I see on a full-priced DVD will result in an immediate boycott of whatever company put it there.

What about the ads for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Disease, whose ads appear in the Back to the Future DVDs? I certainly hope you won't be boycotting this organization...

 

[MichaelPe]

What about the ads for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Disease, whose ads appear in the Back to the Future DVDs? I certainly hope you won't be boycotting this organization...

Very good point, Allan. But a non-profit organization isn't motivated by greed, which is what Jesse was probably referring to. I'm not really sure how it all works, but, do non-profit organizations have to pay to have their commercials shown (or included on a DVD)?

 

[nousername]

Okay, but what about movie trailers, especially those which are hawking new releases on DVD and upcoming theatrical releases? Are these not "ads" as well, and motivated by greed/commercialism? I don't see too many people objecting to these ads...

 

[DeathStar1]

Are these not "ads" as well, and motivated by greed/commercialism? I don't see too many people objecting to these ads...>>>

Probably because these are things we'd automatically be interested in. For instance, lets say you went to go see MAtrix two, and saw a world premeir preview for the Back to the Future DVD. You'd probably get a standing ovation if it was kept under wraps untill that moment.

Adds for cars, soft drinks, paper towels, and what not is just pure and utter greed, and shouldn't have to be put up with.

 

[Francois Caron]

Now, if they had set it up so that you could NOT FF or skip, but were FORCED to watch the ad... THEN I'd have an issue with it.

That's exactly what happened on the French Canadian special edition of "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain". Before the menu even comes up, you're FORCED to watch a couple of minutes worth of commercials. This is why I've become very cautious whenever I buy Canadian manufactured DVDs these days.

 

[CraigF]

I have mixed feelings. Put it this way, I much prefer ads that I can skip over, compared to the ridiculously huge amount of product placement advertising that's going on in so many movies (and I don't just mean cars, which are tough to hide) and series, HBO a big offender. I'd prefer no advertising anywhere, but even when I was a kid I thought it was stupid when products were obviously "turned around" so you couldn't see the labels, or had the labels removed. And then there's the way it was done in a movie that slips my mind (damn!) where they made fun of product placement and everything had fake labels.

As long as I can skip over the ads, and content quality isn't reduced, I don't care, use the space up, no need to leave it blank. MBFGW was obviously marketed to be out by Valentines Day, and they sold tons from what I saw in stores on release day, so they probably had no additional content ready, not that much is needed for this type of "fluke" hit movie. I mean, it's not big art, just entertainment. You wouldn't learn anything...

In fact, I *will* be buying some of those Windex wipes, I'm tired of idiots at work who spray the Windex on their screens/computers instead of on the cloth and then wipe. MBFGW could be a very clever modern style infomercial for Windex, it's no less sneaky than lots of other infomercials.

 

[Dan Rudolph]

I don't have an add oon my copy. Are there multiple versions? UPC on mine is 2635919932.

 

[Dan Hitchman]

Dan, you probably have the U.S. version which does not have the Windex ad.

(another) Dan

 

[Dave_P.]

At least you can fast forward/chapter skip out of the things.

And what happens when the times comes that we won't be able to skip over them, like the FBI warnings? You don't think that as soon as one of these advertisers offers the studio an extra million to program the non-skip onto their commercial, they won't jump at that chance?