How to make good use of commercial messages

I am sure that the world’s advertising agencies go to great trouble to make commercials that will make us all sit right up and pay attention for thirty seconds, a minute, or however long it is that ads run. I don’t suppose they are as long as they seem. If they were, there wouldn’t be any time left for regular programming because there are at least eight of them during a half-hour television show.

None of that is anything you didn’t already know, but even if the ads are only thirty seconds long, they are long enough to put me to sleep. When regular programming is on, I can stay awake. When an ad comes on, my eyes fall shut.

Ironically, the worst kind are the ones that promote sleep aids. The background music is restful; they feature people lying in comfortable-looking beds; even the colors and images are calming. Add all of that calmness to the fact that this same commercial has already aired six times during the last half hour and ended the same way every time—with the subject falling asleep—and hmmm, I have direct access to the thirty-second power nap.

And I don’t have to worry about missing any of my program because I always wake up at the end of the commercial during the enumeration of the product’s side effects. Now that part of the promotion is a little jarring to the nerves. Especially when they say, “in rare instances, this product may cause heart attack or stroke.”
That’s enough to wake me up and get me thinking about the possibility of having a stroke, and I further think that if I were going to have a stroke, I wouldn’t want to have it during a pharmaceutically-induced sleep session. I might miss “my program.”

After a few of those kind of commercials, I have resolved that I don’t want to take that kind of product ever, which is also ironic.

Who needs to take anything? You could just record a couple of commercials to play when you get in bed, making sure to edit out the parts about the side effects.
So, after a good night’s sleep plus or minus a few power naps, I might be found in my car going here and there. When I am driving, I listen to talk radio. Believe me, it has it’s share of commercial messages as well. Given the effect that television commercials have on me, I need to be careful about listening to radio commercials while I am driving—power naps and all notwithstanding. So far, my radio station is judicious enough to refrain from advertising sleep aids.

On the contrary, they often air “paid announcements” that serve to wake me right up. One of those is paid for some entity called “Save Our National Parks Foundation” or something like that. Obviously this commercial has failed to drive home to me what the name of the organization is, but their message I got: our national parks are in disrepair because they are underfunded, so please send money to improve them.

So, this is a little jarring to the nerves, and I think that commercials like this might give me a stroke. When Bertha, who is not well-known for her rationality but sometimes has a lucid thought, analyzes this commercial message, it comes out like this:
Say you own a really nice house. Someone more important that you are comes along and takes over the care and upkeep of your house because you might not know how to do that. Their rationale is that they have more resources and can do that better than you can. They pretend that you still own your house, but you don’t; in fact, you will have to get in line to visit it, and you will have to pay a fee to use it, You will have to pay not to use it also. Besides that you will have to pay for upkeep and expenses on it. But the party soon gets tired of spending the money that you give him on his house, and he wants to buy jet airplanes with it instead.

Consequently the repairs and maintenance have fallen behind. He implores a third party to beg you to send more money to fix up the house you don’t own so you can pay more money to visit or not visit a house that you don’t own that this time we are going to fix up. Promise.

And by the way, some of the money will be used to pay for this commercial message which you can record and play back whenever you need a non-pharmaceutical jolt to keep you awake.