I went catching up on my “The Simpsons” over at Hulu.com on this sunny Sunday sundernoon and have some problems with their advertising setup. At first, its awesome, cuz you only have to sit through 3 30 second commercials per half hour episode and sometimes hve a choice of watching a minute and a half mini-infomercial at the beginning and then being allowed to watch the whole show commercial free, but under the surface, it gets uglier.
If you don’t get the “watch the longer thing first” option, then you get a 10 second ad announcement before your video starts instead. Mine was that “Hulu is a proud sponsor of [some charity or non-profit thats not worth mentioning]. Wait, what? What the hell is that? You can’t donated money somewhere in replacement of advertising. Who does that?
At the beginning of the next episode they tried to tell me that the show I was watching was brought to me “with limited commercial interruption, by M&M’s Premium. This was a suspicious wording because Hulu shows you where the commercials are (signified by little dots in your progress bar) in each video and there were the same amount as any other video of that length. So M&M’s didn’t do sh#t to limit the commercials for this show. they just wanted me to know that Hulu normally has a small amount of interruptions, but THIS set is brought to you by a new sub-brand of chocolate. blowhardy move. lacking in tact.
But now I want to know what the hell M&M Premiums are. What the crap could M&M’s be doing to chocolate in a shell that they haven’t already? Plain, nut, crisp, END. there are no further options. Mess with the formula any more and its not an M&M. My curiosity was so great that I was just waiting through the show until I could get to the commercial and learn more about this mystery bullsh#t product. So now the show has become the commercial… Finally it breaks and I get to see it, except I didn’t pay attention until the end and all I saw was melting M&M’s on a studio lot. Still unclear about what exactly that says about their product, I went to rewind before remembering that you can’t cuz the commercials conveniently disappear after you view them. seriously. its convenient. don’t let sarcasm steal that word from us.
Back to the “we donated to this charity” form of advertising though: wtf? You can’t do that. Commercial advertising exists to pay the bills for production cost and then profit from entertainment media. You can’t interrupt our enjoyment to tell us that you give money to some cause we may or may not give a f#ck about. Screw you guys.
Hulu tryin t—nevermind. That’s a funnier line if it becomes the title of the blog and stays that way, never to be repeated again.
Leave a Reply