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PUBLICATIONS FINANCIAL FIRMS GOVERNMENT/NGO
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AUTOMOTIVE Chrysler Motors Corp. General Motors Mercedes-Benz NA Mercedes-Benz USA Mitsubishi Motor Sales Nissan North America Volkswagen of America Harley-Davidson TECHNOLOGY ENTERTAINMENT CONSUMER PRODUCTS
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Or is it who? Is it those shady people who just moved into the house four numbers down that nobody sees except for the Lincoln Navigator that leaves at midnight in a screech of latex and slinks back in at some moment before pre-dawn? Is it the credit card auto-dialer that calls your phone every time they haven't posted your monthly payment in time to prevent the robot annoyers from letting you know how incompetent they are? Oh wait. I know. It's the eye-shadow-wearing, pasty-pale-faced-new-world-slacker-Emo-thing that sticks its pierced tongue into your doorbell and holds it there until your equally repulsive 12-year-old daughter stumbles downstairs and out the door to spawn with it in the bushes of the park across the street. Whatever it is that is causing you to peek-a-boo with the outside world, take solace in the knowledge that you are by no means alone. We are all on the lamb from one thing or another gone wrong in this booty-ass society of ours. We just want to be left the fuck alone. But none of the people we want to be left alone by want to comply with our wishes. Top on our list are the people in our business who believe in their heart of hearts that the way to get the audience to pay attention to their dreadful advertising is to just make it louder. That makes a mountain's worth of nonsense to me. Nobody is paying attention to my burger commercials so I'll stick in a guy wearing a red wig of pigtails and everything will be better. Nobody is drinking my beer, so I'll put my brand name in the urinals in every bar in town. Ummm, tasty. When will the people who market stuff for a living wake up to the fact that they are just too stupid for people to pay attention to? It used to be that the audience was just tuning them out or putting them on ignore. Now their prospects are actively taking flight to places where advertising dare not go. That would not be the local movie theater. I made the mistake of being ten minutes early to see Ocean's 13 last week and got bombarded with eight dreadful commercials in a row before the trailers rolled. The only thing worse that a bad commercial on a 90-inch plasma screen is a string of bad commercials on a 35-foot cinemascope screen in Sensaround that you just paid 10 bucks to be assaulted by. How stupid is this practice? Well, I won't be showing up early any more, which means I will probably miss the previews (which I tend to enjoy), which means I'll miss a few of the new releases because I'll be hiding from the stupid commercials that run before the trailers. And network television? I was having dinner with a programming executive last week. When the conversation came to creative, non-linear editing techniques, he said he thought that the networks would reject such techniques because the audience wasn't sophisticated enough to "get it." Thinking like that is why I've been hiding from network television programming for the past five years. In fact, the last film editor I hired I got from seeing her work on YouTube. So it occurs to me that a great many people in the audience are hiding out from just plain stupid decisions made by those who make our former mass media entertainment. Did the current incarnation of "Pirates" really have to be 2 hours and 45 minutes? Do web designers really have to set text in six point type? Do songwriters really have nothing better to write about than climbing up to the 11 th floor? How many different ways do those who create what we watch, read and hear have to piss us off before they get a clue? Personally, I find myself hiding out from more and more inbound noise and distraction as time goes on. In fact, I'm getting bored with this entire topic. Adios.
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