TV Commercials Deafen Us and We Still Can't Avoid Them

The DVR promised to save us from commercials, and for the most part it has. But if you’re watching a live event or don’t have enough programming stored up and you’re forced to watch something in its regularly scheduled time slot, you still feel the pain.

My eardrums feel the pain. Every time one comes on, I have to turn the volume down by about half, and then turn it back up when the show starts up again. Congress to the rescue! Yep, I said it. While our nation’s legislative body has failed to get much of anything done in the past couple of years (some might argue it’s a lot longer than that) and its approval rating doesn’t even crack 20 percent, federal lawmakers did manage to pass a bill at the end of 2010 forcing advertisers and broadcasters to crank down the volume on commercials. But like anything in Washington, implementation is very slow. The FCC was given one year to develop enforcement rules, so it’ll likely be until sometime in 2012 before I get my hearing back. And I’ll believe it when I see, er … hear it.

Even if the government enforces what is known as the CALM Act, advertisers will always find a way to annoy us. For example, up until recently, companies have been fairly sly at how they place products in TV shows and movies. Maybe a car involved in a high-speed chase comes around the corner and you see a Mercedes hood ornament. Or perhaps an actor is pouring breakfast cereal at a table and you can see a slightly out-of-focus Cheerios label in a wide shot. But anymore, it’s a full-frontal assault of products. And technology seems to be leading the way in what I think is a discouraging trend that is unlikely to go away, ever.

Tablet computers are ubiquitous on television these days, and it doesn’t matter what profession you’re in. TV doctors, cops, garbagemen, soup-kitchen volunteers – everyone has them. I watched an episode of “NCIS: Los Angeles" a couple of weeks ago. I can’t remember what it was about, but I can sure remember the Cisco Cius being carried around everywhere. “Fringe" is one of my favorite shows, but I can’t get away from Sprint’s smartphones, which seem to appear in every episode, often highlighting video-chat capabilities. Things have gotten so bad, that I actually watched a show the other night where one actor mentioned three specific products/companies in one sentence! I thought, OK, there’s a joke coming about product placement. It never came. That same Mercedes that once appeared only fleetingly now stops right in front of the camera and sits there for three or four seconds.

So I was happy to see someone take a critical look at this product-placement phenomenon – and who better to do it than Morgan Spurlock, the documentary maker who made us all nauseous a couple of years ago when he ate nothing but McDonald’s food for a month. In taking a satirical look at product placement, Spurlock last month debuted “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold" in U.S. theaters, a documentary that was supposedly paid for entirely by product placement.

But maybe it’s just me. Maybe I watch too much TV.

And no, Mercedes-Benz, McDonald’s, Sprint, CBS, FOX and General Mills did not contribute financially to this blog. But hmmm… that gives me an idea …