Cable-Satellite Mudslinging: Difference between revisions

No matter the company that provides your television service, at some point they will run commercials advertising themselves. The problem is, a fair majority of these commercials are aimed at discrediting the other format.

 

 

Incidentally, these commercials are usually seen as amateur and filled with bad acting, even though they come from big-name companies such as Comcast or Time Warner Cable that should be able to afford better production values. An example is a Time Warner commercial that showed pictures of a cheetah, rabbit and snail and told you to "pick the fast one". Apparently, rabbits are faster than cheetahs. (At least at [[Animal Stereotypes|doing one thing]].)

 

 

One of the things Americans don't notice, of course, is that cable companies don't go after each other. That's because cable companies will not wire an area if there's an existing cable operator, almost like a [[The Mafia|mob]] staying out of another's territory. This is why the City of Los Angeles has 11 companies licensed to provide service anywhere in the city, but ''none of them'' operate in any area where there already is a cable company operating. So why step on the toes of someone who isn't actually a competitor? (The bigger cities have some compeition, but the "overbuilders" are much smaller companies.)

 

 

Note: if you live in an area which is not serviced by ''any'' cable company (such as a rural area), seeing the anti-satellite ads on your satellite TV can get really annoying. The anti-cable ads annoy people who cannot use satellite because they're renting from a landlord who doesn't allow satellite dishes or have no clear view of the southern sky (the latter can be caused by trees or, in mountainous or hilly areas, high land blocking the view).

*** This advertisement has resurfaced. It was originally targeted at [[Direc TV]] and is now targeted at ATT UVerse, which is the phone/DSL bundle package for <s>[[Direc TV]]</s> AT&T.

* DirecTV somewhat subverts the trope, with a series of commercials where B-list or better professional actors such as Danny DeVito lend (somewhat [[Large Ham|hammy]]) energy to actual DirecTV customer letters. However, it has the actors reading it in a featureless studio without so much as a chair to sit in. All their budget went to the actor, it seems.

*** It's gotten worse. They're now portraying the executives as complete morons.

** Recently, DirecTV has been doing ads that involve famous horror movies with some actors faces badly photoshopped so that he/she talks about how much better the service is to cable.

* Comcast does the same thing, recasting Clean-Cut Verizon Guy as a whiny, intrusive pest who harasses customers with breaking-and-entering, disturbingly-specific personal information ("I'll just start signing your name here, Doris...") and, of course, Verizon's [[Blatant Lies]] about the Comcast Cable Master Race. In one recent ad, Clean-Cut Verizon Guy is caught clutching the paw of a basset hound with pen in hand. ("I'm afraid the dog signed the contract, ma'am.")

* In the UK, there was a brief but bitter war between Virgin Media and Sky, after a falling out meant that Sky withdrew some of their channels that had previously been available on Virgin. So instead of saying "You can watch this on our service", Sky's ads for the next few months all said "You can't watch this on their service". ie- their ''[[Lost]]'' poster read "Answers are coming... but not to Virgin Media"

** Also with Virgin, they used to run adverts claiming that their internet connections were better than ADSL, despite their network having huge issues with latency and overselling of capacity, and the 50mbit service they advertised having very low national availability. The Advertising Standards Agency recently told them they can not run the adverts again in the same form.

* [[Direc TV]] has a series of ads with celebs describing amazing sports moments, just to have the screen black out - "you missed it, because you have cable". This despite the fact that that people could catch them over and over in a less time-consuming distillation on ESPN's Sportscenter... at 9pm, 10pm, 11pm, 12am, 1am, 2am... That's what NFL Network is for. Combined with the basic cable channels, '''all''' of the games every week are easily accessible.

* Through most of 2009, Canadians got to witness a variation of this where cable carriers and over-the-air broadcasters were in a propaganda war over [[wikipedia:Fee-for-carriage|proposed new government regulations]] changing the relationship between OTA broadcasters and cable. Broadcasters, trying to convince the public that the new fees cable companies would have to pay could be used to fund "local TV" and without it smaller centres would lose their affiliates, started a "Save Local TV" ad campaign. Cable companies, insisting that they would pass this cost onto their consumers at the behest of government policy (this is less scary, of course, when you remember the entire industry is highly regulated) started a "Stop the TV tax" ad campaign. For most of the year, this was the majority of the ads aired on television. The ad campaign only died when the government tabled the decision.

* Recently this has shifted to fighting internet-based services like Netflix. If a movie is offered pay-per-view, the satellite or cable company must remind you every other sentence exactly how many days earlier you can watch it with them instead of seeing it on Netflix.

* As of October 2011, Buckeye Cable of NW Ohio ([[And Zoidberg|and parts of S Michigan]]) is currently running two different commercial campaigns. The first one involves a pair of Dish Network salesmen trying and failing to sell existing Buckeye customers satellite TV. The second one involves talking computers that are so happy with Buckeye's internet speed because of how quickly they can load up games or hit shopping websites (the latter includes a trio of computers that all sound like [[Sassy Black Woman|Sassy Black Women]]). A couple other campaigns were less subtle about decrying the problems of satellite TV and included such things as a list of dish complaints set to 'March of the Toreadors' and [[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?|a man's plight with rain and his dish]] set to [[Ominous Latin Chanting]].

 

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[[Category:Advertising Tropes]]

[[Category:Cable-Satellite Mudslinging]]