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The US House of Representatives has approved a bill which aims to limit the volume of television advertisements. The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (CALM) was approved by a voice vote in the house...

TV timeout? Blame the guy in the red hat Saturday, September 12, 2009 3:26 AM By Tim Feran THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH If you become irate over a long TV timeout during tonight's game between Ohio State University and the University of Southern California, there's a good reason to see red. A person called the "red hat" is to blame. Known officially as the TV commercial timeout coordinator, the official stands on the sidelines, wears a red hat and is responsible for when to stop and start play on the field for commercial breaks. "It's not very easy," said Oliver Dizon,...

The parties have each released new commercials, so we can have our fun with them. First up, the Dems. They would like to use the Palin resignation for their advantage, so they tried to shoehorn a couple of other scenarios to make it look like some pattern by Republicans: [both commercials posted after the jump]

Television commercials are too loud, as most viewers know, and members of Congress want broadcasters to turn down the volume. A bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., would require the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to "preclude commercials from being broadcast at louder volumes than the program material they accompany." That idea is hard to resist, but it might be difficult to mandate. "Many different entities are responsible for producing and distributing the content consumers see and hear," U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., said Thursday at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Telecommunications Subcommittee.

Commercials against Hilary Care were absolutely essential for its defeat. Now, Obama is talking about pushing through a huge national healthcare bill by August! The stories I read make it clear the plan will be a frightening blow to our health and economy. Do we know if anyone is working on an ad campaign to expose the obvious dangers of socialized medicine? We need the House dems from conservative districts to be scared away from this awful nonsense. My wife, a cancer survivor, literally keeps telling me they are going to kill her. Apoparently she has heard reports of how...

ABC Television has slashed the cost of commercials during today’s Academy Awards broadcast. In 2008, 30-second commercials went for as much as $1.8 million. This year, they’re going for as little as $1.4 million. Once considered invulnerable to economic ups and downs, the Academy Awards has discovered that it can’t get away with jacking up the ad rates every year. Especially in a year when all five Best Film nominees have been ignored by movie-goers. Here’s a tip for the Oscars’ nominating committee:

In case you might have stepped away from the television during yesterday's Super Bowl -- here is a website that contains all the commercials. Enjoy! (Samples below -- more at the website at link.)   Bud Light Office Meeting Audi Transporter Pepsi Forever Young Doritos Snow Globe Bud Light Conan Columbia Year One Toyota Venza Bridgestone Mr. Potato Head Universal Fast & Furious Castrol Grease Monkeys Universal Land of the Lost Doritos Bus GoDaddy.com Shower Budweiser Fetch  

Riveted by the Steelers' thrilling comeback? Heartbroken by the Cardinals' late lead slipping away? Then we won't begrudge you missing a few of the Super Bowl commercials. In fact, we'll help you out. Go back and watch any commercial you missed, as we list the 10 best ads, 10 worst ads, and provide you with a quarter-by-quarter breakdown of all the commercials.

Some 250 teenage boys will pile onto the carpet of the Islamic Center of Passaic County on Sunday to catch the Super Bowl on a big screen. But when the much-buzzed-about commercials come on, they won't be watching. A youth leader manning the projector slaps a piece of paper over the lens, blocking out images the center considers inappropriate, such as beers and bikinis. "The purpose is to keep them away from bad influences," said Emad Hamdeh, the youth committee director. "The beer commercials show people happy while drinking; that's not reality." During the self-imposed blackouts, the boy fans don't...

"For all that is in the world the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life is not of the Father, but is of the world." (1 John 2:16) I was watching TV last night with my family (if you are curious, it was The Smoking Gun presents: The World's Dumbest). The show is a "countdown" of video clips of accidents or mishaps invovling a common theme, punctuated by commentary from a bunch of B-list actors and ex-celebrities (Danny Bonaduce from The Partridge Family, Leif Garrett, Tonya Harding, Gary Busey and some others(*)). It...

To my Conservative Friends: As a Conservative and a capitalist, I understand that free-market enterprise and profit are integral to a thriving and growing economy. That being said, I must say the broadcast Networks, in cahoots with the advertisers, have gotten waaaaay out of hand with the downright inappropriate commercials for the kids... Now the networks have chosen to move a lot of the sports programming at night to increase their revenues because they can charge more for ads... Fine... But they should be forced to curtail some of their explicit advertising so the kids can watch... I am not...

The latest British Airways commericial "the aquarium".. The song is "the good life" sung by Julie London ..just one of those things I had to look up..enjoy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBwrmEpikPI

I have an idea for a commercial .... opens with CHANGE, CHANGE, CHANGE, CHANGE, CHANGE, CHANGE ..... then you see someone hold out their hand holding some CHANGE (nickels, dimes, etc) talking about how obama plan would worsen economy and small business .... then at end coin toss ... end up on "tails, you lose !"

bad enough that parents have to shield their children from what Hollywood calls entertainment. Now they have to be equally vigilant with the messages and visuals put forward by the advertisers who sponsor that filth. Parents can become discouraged by the sheer intensity of the commercial manipulation of sex. It's everywhere. Reporter Matt Spector of ABCNews.com recently underlined how the hypersexualization of teenagers in advertising is intensifying. A Greek print ad for previously owned BMW autos features a clearly teenage-looking girl shot from her naked shoulders up, her blond hair splayed around her head across the page. The ad's come-hither...

You’ve seen him plenty of times on sitcoms; he’s the dumb, bumbling, idiot dad, husband and boyfriend who appears useless at everything but bringing home a paycheck. The message: Guys are dumb and women have to lead them around. This, of course, cues the laugh track. Yet a survey from an organization called Children Now found that two-thirds of kid respondents described men on TV as angry, while respondents from another group’s survey said men were portrayed as corrupt on TV by a 17 to 1 margin. Clearly, this is no laughing matter. To highlight companies pushing anti-guy messages, we’ve...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwCyVku1HvI Video: 5 Reasons Not To Go To Work By Rizzuto Mon Apr 14, 2008 - Apparently, this is what passes as a government PSA in Canada. This has got to be one of the most disturbing group of videos I've ever seen, I just had to share it. The screams in the first video are blood curdling. Enjoy!

CHINA, AS EVERYONE KNOWS, IS A BIG FORCE IN THE extraordinary boom in commodities. Its voracious appetite for everything from corn and wheat to copper and oil has helped push up U.S. commodities prices by some 50% over the past 12 months. But China is by no means the whole story. Speculators -- including small investors -- are also playing a huge role. Thanks to the proliferation of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds tied to commodities indexes, speculative buying has gone way beyond anything the domestic commodities markets have ever seen. By one estimate, index funds right now account for...

Democrat James Carville and former Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) star in one of Co...ca-Cola's Super Bowl commercials. Watch it here before it debuts during the game.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - There are so many negative vibes around "Cavemen" that at least one TV critic is taking bets that it won't even get on the air. The ABC series based on Geico insurance commercials has gone beyond being just another stupid sitcom. Questions are being raised about whether the Cro-Magnon characters will reinforce racial stereotypes.

Some Beatles fans in the US are angry that the 1967 Beatles hit 'All You Need Is Love' is being used in a new ad campaign for disposable nappies. “For people who feel that political connection, it comes off as kind of a callous action,” said Angela Natividad, co-editor of adrants.com, a marketing commentary site. “You’ve got the Beatles, which draws like, religious feelings, and you’ve got the war [Vietnam].”

Introducing...the Swedish Bikini Team Published: 16th April 2007 16:03 CET Online: http://www.thelocal.se/7014/ They might be as Swedish as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but they have been flying the blue and yellow colours for more than fifteen years. This week's Introducing... gets up close and personal with the Swedish Bikini Team - Who are they and why are they famous? The Swedish Bikini Team stepped out of the sea and into the limelight in 1991. Once accurately described as 'vixens of beerdom', the swimwear Swedes quickly skedaddled off the scene and were last spotted dancing to rock music in a...

The funniest one is the definately the #1 one.

No commercial that appeared last night during Super Bowl XLI directly addressed Iraq, unlike a patriotic spot for Budweiser beer that ran during the game two years ago. But the ongoing war seemed to linger just below the surface of many of this year’s commercials. More than a dozen spots celebrated violence in an exaggerated, cartoonlike vein that was intended to be humorous, but often came across as cruel or callous.

I have neither started nor maintained a thread for football commercials in the past...

Half the FUn (maybe more) of watching the Superbowl is seeing the commercials. Remember, the ad agencies try to put their most creative commercials on during the Superbowl. Therefore, the purpose of this discussion thread will be to analyze today's Superbowl commercials: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. There seems to be a concensus that the best Superbowl commercials were the 1984 Apple commercial introducing the Mac and the original Budweiser frogs commercial. In the hours leading into tonight's Superbowl, feel free to post your fave (and most hated) Superbowl commercials. Once the game begins, let us have an...

If you go to the game, you'll miss the show By DAVE BARRY It's Super Bowl Sunday at last. Finally -- after all the hype, all the parties, all the talk -- we will get to see what the Super Bowl is really, in the end, all about: the TV commercials. There will be a lot of them, because the total Super Bowl broadcast package runs longer than the administration of the late Gerald Ford, having begun two weeks ago with the pre -pre -pre -pre-pre-pre-pre-pregame show (Peyton Manning: The Early Bowel Movements). You will not want to miss a...

Watch and join in the laughter as these all-time favorite Super Bowl commercials entertain you all over again. People have voted for which of their favorite classic commercials should face off against perennial Super Bowl commercial favorite “Mean Joe Green” for this year’s title. The most voted for commercial will be revealed during the Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials 2007 special and east coast viewers will be able to vote online to determine the final title holder. Will it be “Mean Joe Green” or the “challenger?” Don’t miss the Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials 2007 special for your chance to vote for...

Members of the European Parliament are threatening to derail attempts to introduce product placement in television programmes, amid opposition led by German MEPS. Ruth Hieronmyi, the German MEP acting as rapporteur to the revision of Europe’s Television Without Frontiers Directive, said that there was no consensus in the Parliament on liberalising the rules. The MEP told The Times: “Product placement, and any other advertising-related topics, are still controversial. Members believe there should be anything from no regulation to 100 per cent regulation — we shall have to see what achieves a majority.” On Monday, the Parliament is to form its...

The school board race in Rockingham County, N.C., has produced imagery including, from left, Pink Floyd, “Star Wars,” and the Wild West.The election season is getting punchier in places far from the national political spotlight — even in Eden, N.C., where 16 candidates are slugging it out for the five available seats on the Rockingham County School Board. One of them produced a television advertisement suggesting that the school system turned children into automatons. It is shot against a backdrop of a Pink Floyd video showing children coursing through an assembly line to the lyrics: “We don’t need no education....

Washington, DC— Donald Rumsfeld confirmed reports the Pentagon would begin using Dr. Scholl’s commercials as a psychological resource in the war on terror.

David Zucker, the producer and director of "Airplane," "The Naked Gun" and "Scary Movie 4," embraced the Republican Party in 2004 and voted for President Bush, largely because of security concerns. Once a liberal activist and campaign adviser to President Bill Clinton, he made a low-budget anti-Kerry ad that ran mostly in Ohio and kept his political change-of-heart largely under Hollywood's radar. Not now. Zucker sees threats to America and Israel mounting, and he believes the Democrats are unable or unwilling to confront those challenges, so he has decided to go public with his belief that the Democrats have lost...

LONDON (Reuters) - Niche men's channel FX plans to show what it calls the first UK advert specially designed to combat viewers using digital recorders to avoid commercials. The advert for its new drama "Brotherhood" will show a single image on the screen for the entire 30-second slot, and therefore retain its "sales message" when viewed even at the 12-times speeds enabled by Sky+ and other digital recorders, also known as personal video recorders, or PVRs.Advertisers have been racing to find ways to get messages through as higher numbers of consumers watch TV programs when they want using such recorders,...

Only one commercial can top the sheer hatred our readers have for the winner of this year's worst-commercial contest. Yes, only creepy, toenail-snapping Digger the Dermatophyte is more hated than the horrendous repetition that is this year's winning loser, the HeadOn headache remedy commercial. In case you haven't seen it (you can find it on YouTube, but really, why would you want to?), the commercial is as insanely simple as it is annoying. A female voice repeats "HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead!" three times as a blissed-out smug woman rolls what appears to be a Bonne Bell LipSmacker on...

What’s next, a “Dateline NBC” sting operation to snag Toucan Sam? Basing her story on a July 19 study by the liberal Kaiser Family Foundation, ABC’s Lisa Stark offered the audience of the July 26 “World News Tonight” a look at the “Wild West” world of food marketing on the Internet geared to kids, complete with flashy games on company Web sites. Yet Stark’s expert is no dispassionate medical professional. The Yale doctor signed a petition circulated by the left-wing Center for a Commercial Free Childhood that attacked “purveyors of junk food” for using “public schools as a platform for...

Philips technology could let broadcasters freeze channel during commercial SAN JOSE, Calif. - In this era of easy ad skipping with TiVo-like video recorders, could television viewers one day be forced to watch commercials with a system that prevents channel switching? Yes, according to Royal Philips Electronics. A patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office says researchers of the Netherland-based consumer electronics company have created a technology that could let broadcasters freeze a channel during a commercial, so viewers wouldn't be able to avoid it.

A couple of weeks ago I was felled by a particularly nasty flu. Too sick even to read, I listened to radio and watched television for long hours every day. What I heard and saw was not conducive to recovery. I admit to being a little "out of the loop" as I almost never watch entertainment television on the major stations. But the level of vulgarity that now seems utterly ordinary is just unbelievable. Bud Light has a series of radio commercials that celebrate "Real Men of Genius," a very tongue-in-cheek tribute to the ordinary guys whose greatest accomplishment, these...

If anyone hasn't seen the hilarious new VW commercials, here are all three of them. Admin mods, please move if I posted it in the wrong place. http://www.leftlanenews.com/2006/02/22/vw-strikes-again-un-pimp-my-ride-videos/

I always enjoy watching the Super Bowl, but it usually feels like I’m watching a foreign film without subtitles. This year, I thought Super Bowl XL would be a perfect opportunity to learn some football terminology by applying it to the part of the game I already know and love: the commercials...

TiVo Announces Top 10 Viewed Super Bowl AdsBy Nino Marchetti Staff Writer, Designtechnica News Ameriquest's two commercials lead the pack, based upon DVR company's post-game analysis of user viewing behaviors. TiVo’s annual post Super Bowl analysis of viewer reactions to the commercials today revealed that, of the dozens of multi-million dollar spots that aired, Ameriquest’s two ads landed at the top of the pack. Also revealed, according to user viewing data, was how a controversial call in the second quarter put actual Super Bowl viewing time on par with some of the commercials. TiVo, the company said, did their annual...

Sometimes they're the most entertaining part of the Super Bowl--the ads. Big money might equal big profits--if they can get our attention, make us laugh, etc. Will we remember the ad but not the product, though? Link is to a site that will have the ads available for viewing after they've run on TV (or maybe before, too?) FReepers, if you liked--or hated, hated, HATED--an ad, tell us about it here.

Destiny's Child In a first for Wal-Mart, the retailer has recruited celebrities like Garth Brooks and Destiny's Child to appear in holiday television and print ads. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. started its holiday campaign Tuesday, the first time the world's largest retailer has run ads this early in the season, company officials said. It's the first time Wal-Mart has used celebrities in an ad campaign, which will also include country singer Martina McBride, pop star Jesse McCartney and actress and singer Queen Latifah. The ads will feature each of the celebrities at their actual homes to fit with the theme, "Home...

New radio commercials support war effortMove America Forward releases spots, praises TV ad thanking U.S. Posted: November 11, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com A national pro-troops organization has unveiled three new radio ads meant to bolster support for the Iraq war effort and encourage Americans not to give up on the fight against terrorism. Move America Forward says its radio ads will run first in the Sacramento, Calif., market in hopes of getting the City Council there to rescind a resolution passed last week that called for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops and bases from Iraq. "We...

Is it simple selling or selling out? We report on a band at odds over ad revenue THE drummer of the Doors has infuriated his former bandmates by turning down nearly $20 million to use their music to sell computers and cars. John Densmore has a legal right to veto the use of the band’s music for advertising. And that is exactly what he is doing. He says that he is holding out to honour the memory of the band’s lead singer, Jim Morrison, who died in Paris from a suspected heroin overdose in 1971, aged 27. “People lost their...

Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski recently traveled to Hollywood to meet with studio executives and talk about ideas to increase production in Oregon. The Governor and a bipartisan group of legislators created "GREENLIGHT OREGON," a package of incentives that will help make Oregon a serious player in the competition for major film and television productions. This will create jobs in Oregon, in the United States, and generate millions of dollars for the ecconomy. I fully support this bill since it will help to keep "Hollywood" in the United States instead of major studios going outside of the country to shoot in...

Trying to fend off increasingly tough competition from other states and foreign countries, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to announce a plan soon to grant tax breaks for film companies to help them meet production expenses and stay in California. J. Scott Davis

WASHINGTON — Pentagon police on Wednesday turned away family members of troops killed in Iraq who wanted to confront Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the reasons for the war in Iraq. The group of about 20 was stopped before entering Pentagon property by about a dozen officers, who told the protesters they did not have the proper permission to enter the building. Organizers said they have been petitioning for the meeting for weeks, but department officials are ignoring their requests. “The man who was too busy to personally sign the Killed in Action letters these families received is apparently...

Skipping TV ads illegal in Japan? Ok, everyone's joked at one time or another that the TV commercials during some show or other (probably the Super Bowl) were better than the actual programming. But we didn't actually mean it, did we? In the U.S., broadcasters and advertisers have long been worried about the effects of TiVo and other digital recorders on ad-watching. That anxiety is spreading to Japan, where broadcasters are now saying that skipping commercials is actually a violation of that country's Copyright Law . To combat the ungrateful public's growing ad-skipping, the country's National Association of Commercial Broadcasters...

Well...we are 37 minutes into the supposed "global concert of a lifetime" and MTV has managed to show 12 minutes of commercials for reality programming,interrupted 3 performances,and have shown a highlights package from the UK with the biggest names of the day already performing. Yep. MTV has found a way to not show music on a day where music is all around them. So away with the Live 8 thread....

Please forward this message to your family and friends! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Action Today! Networks Set To Begin Airing Condom Ads In Prime Time CBS and ABC have said they are seriously considering airing condom ads during prime time and daytime television. NBC and Fox and other networks will follow their lead. I hope this concerns you as much as it does me. The condom companies say their purpose in airing their ads is to help stop the spread of disease. So, why do their ads promote products like "Warm Sensations" and "Twisted Pleasure"? Don't be fooled by their double-speak. If...