The radio ad blocker: Shoddy Goods 103
1I think if there was a system where I’d only ever see an ad one time, I probably would actually enjoy watching ads. It’s the repetition, especially of terrible ads, that’s so painful and makes me want to block everything. I still have fond memories of the most bizarre local ads, furniture stores, carpet & tile stores, the Tik-Tok shop (whatever that was). Got any favorite quirky local ads? Let’s hear ’em (or even see ’em if you can find a YouTube link) in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.
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Ads for a local(ish) auto dealership, where the cartoon cars literally worked to sell themselves. There were some really funny ones that I wish I could find, like the one where the cartoon salesman was giving a sales pitch, and the cars kept nudging him out of the way to get their faces/front ends on camera. This is a sample:
@rockblossom that keeps making me think of the Kars for Kids jingles
/youtube cal Worthington and his dog spot
There were lots of different spots in his ad
@Cerridwyn The full song:
/youtube Go See Cal
Runner up for those in SoCal: Paul’s TV. One small store in La Habra but for many years, was the nation’s #1 seller of big screen TVs. While TV manufacturers had a minimum advertised price stipulation, stores can still set their own prices – so Paul’s TV did. They were almost always cheaper than everyone else.
@narfcake Cal Worthington is famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page, but that’s not much these days a lot of people have Wikipedia entries
I looked at the schematic for the radio ad killer and thought it was clever. Maybe more clever than most would realize, since he opted to open the antenna circuit cutting off reception.
He didn’t go for the radio power supply that I think most would attack today, forgetting that in the days of yore, with vacuum tubes, it took about a minute or more for the filaments to heat up and the tube to begin to work.
I suspect that the average person under 60 today would think a tube radio was broken, if they turned the set on and nothing was heard for a minute or more.
The downside of this ad-interrupter is that for the time the antenna was out of the circuit, one would likely listen to static, particularly if the volume (gain) was turned up.
A better choice would have been to interrupt the audio transformer output, me thinks.
Which now that I think of it, how many people today even know what static is or what it sounds like?
@Jackinga “static” - exactly! There are very few situations left where there could be proper static. Static has mostly gone away, replaced by digital artifacts that are quite different, such as cutting out completely, stuttering audio, and sounding like a robot,
I am old enough to remember The Golden Age of Radio, or at least some of it from the late 1940s on. Growing up we didn’t have a TV, so the radio was our only electronic diversion.
In those halcyon days, commercials were woven seamless into many programs with the radio stars and other principles touting some product or another. Jim Jordan, aka “Fibber McGee,” along with Harlow Wilcox would go right into a spiel for Johnson’s Wax, or Jack Benny would tout Lucky Strike Cigarettes, though he was a cigar smoker personally, Jimmy Durante would sell Rexall Drug time.
The afternoon serials were special in terms of the impact they had on me. I drank a lot of Ovaltine thanks to Captain Midnight, ate a lot of Nabisco Shredded Wheat thanks to Straight Arrow, Instant Ralston cereal from Ralston-Purina pushed by Tom Mix, Quaker Puffed Rice touted on Terry and the Pirates, Merrita Bread sold on The Lone Ranger Show and so on.
(As I write this, I realize now that while I haven’t had a cuppa Ovaltine is a long while, Instant Ralston, farina, or cream of wheat is still a favorite hot cereal, and puffed rice and shredded wheat my favorite cold cereals to this day.)
In that form, commercials weren’t as annoying as they are today in their slicked up, separate, and too often jammed periods between content.
Now we don’t get just one commercial but sometimes two, three, four or more in the same short break.
If it was annoying before, the 569th time you see the same damn message, it becomes so worn out that it seems to me to have lost it primary purpose to get you to buy something you didn’t know you needed.
Then there are the clever commercials, which when new can be briefly interesting. Insurance! Who would have thunk that an insurance commercial would be interesting?
AFLAC (duck), Progressive (Stephanie Courtney as Flo and her “evil” sister Janice, Jim Cashman as Jamie, and Bill Glass as Dr. Rick), Liberty Mutual (David Hoffman as Doug and an emu [real and CGI] as LiMu), Geico (Jake Wood as the Geico gecko), State Farm (Dean Winter as “Mayhem”) to name a few all have developed memorable characters or situations to keep their corporate names in front of you.
Crazy Eddie (not Crazy Yeti as the closed captions shows)
@heartny the Wiz had better prices and selections
@pakopako I totally agree, but their commercials weren’t as obnoxious
@heartny @pakopako the Wiz had set pricing, Eddie’s didn’t. thanks to them being wildly flagrant tax cheats cash was king! i remember kitting out my dorm room with a 27" TV, VCR, stereo, speakers, a fridge and a microwave for under $700.
(note that this was back in 1988 before Walmart $100 flatscreens and $50 microwaves existed)
@pakopako @visioneer_one Sounds like you got some good deals there! I paid more than half that for a 24" Sony TV at P.C. Richards & Sons. I got my Technics stereo at the Wiz on sale, but still probably paid too much.
I have never been able to find the most memorable local TV commercial I (and everyone else living in NM in 1995) can remember. It was for a local Albuquerque business called the News Stand. They didn’t sell newspapers as everyone knows. They are an “adult bookstore.” They also ran peep shows. The ad was as simple as could be and hilarious stuck between cheesy ads for local auto dealers and burger places. In 15 seconds the ad mentioned the name of the business and the address. In stop-motion photography against a black background three Barbie dolls progressively shed their outfits. No background music track. That was the whole ad. It ran for years!
Best/worst local ad:
“Liberty’s in Solon, Maple Heights, Parma Heights, Brunswick, Vermilion, Ohmmmmm”
And the VERY old and long standing Garfield1-2323
There was a radio ad in the early 21st century with a bunch of (presumably) office workers talking really fast, contrasted by the manager I think greeting them in a normal-paced voice, and one of them saying, “Hey you don’t even need to brew the coffee beans you can just eat them straight out of the bag!” that I wish I could find again
I will add:
Lately my favored ad has been for the Strike Gently blankets, with their various amusing threats at the end such as, “Buy now! …Or we’ll send mothmen to your exact location.”
1 877 Kars for Kids,
K-A-R-S Kars for Kids,
1-877 Kars for Kids,
donate your car today.
“eight hundred, five-eight-eight, two, three-hundred Empire Today!”
@Jackinga I can’t turn the radio off fast enough when the Kars for Kids commercial comes on
Drug ads, make me nuts. We’re the only country in the world AFAIK, except New Zealand, that permits drug companies to hawk their precious nostrums on public media, while charging that same public prices that are also the highest in the world.
To be legal under U.S. Law, the ads must contain a summary of major side effects. Go figure.
Ever wonder why if drug ads are so useful to the individual that one never sees an ad for a generic?
With the advent of streaming services like Pandora, Spotify, Amazon music et al, I listen to the radio much less frequently than I used to. Occasionally I get in the car and run a local errand during which I don’t connect my phone to Android auto. In those events I will frequently listen to the radio. I have found that my ‘local’ rock station has began running the same ads back to back… same ads, just repeated… sometimes more than once! That drives me bat shit… and generally prompts a dial change.
@chienfou I usually have the radio going in the background at home during the day. Mostly tuned to a non-commercial classical station 89.9 FM KQAC (also available streaming).
Except for Saturday, when they spotlight opera (most of it is just not my cup of tea). Then I switch to 89.1 FM KMHD Jazz Radio (also non-commercial and available streaming).