Who the heck is Oleg, you ask? He's an animated taxi driver, part of a new series of animated shorts that FOX hopes will keep viewers tuned in during commercial breaks, rather than tuning them out or skipping over them with their fancy DVRs. After the jump is a video from WSJ.com featuring two hilarious clips of Oleg, and by "hilarious" I mean, "not very funny at all."
FOX hopes that the new eight-second interruptions during the commercial interruptions (an "interruption interruption," if you will) will mean more eyes for advertisers, but my non-expert and not-at-all-relevant opinion is that a better approach is to just make commercials more interesting. For example, I skip over everything, with the exception of those Mac ads with John Hodgman and Justin Long, which I always thought were very clever and funny. I'm not against seeing commercials, I just don't want to see the same ideas over and over again. It seems that these days a commercial needs to be approached in the same manner as a television show: you have to make it stand out from the crowd or no one's going to bother with it.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-03-2007 @ 2:28PM
Wild Bill said...
Wow, and I thought the guy who sits next to me in the office did the worst Borat impression on earth...
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4-03-2007 @ 3:27PM
erroneous_nick said...
Okay, if those were supposed to be amusing then I'm not easily amused, and yet I *am* easily amused. I'd consider those shorts just another reason to skip the commercials.
Adam, you've got it right when you say the commercials just need to be better. That's really the only way to keep a viewer watching. This tactic of shorts in between commercials is just idiotic, especially when they're as un-entertaining as those were.
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4-03-2007 @ 3:32PM
Bill said...
Yikes. I think I'd rather watch a "Head On" commercial.
http://popculturejunk.blogspot.com/
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4-03-2007 @ 3:55PM
erroneous_nick said...
ROFL, Bill!
But, you know, I think you're right.
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4-03-2007 @ 9:31PM
Chet said...
1. Having to watch a commercial before seeing the news bit about a TV network trying to get me to watch commercials -- I am fully through the looking glass.
2. Not only are the Fox spots not funny, they seem to play upon racial/cultural stereotypes. So it's stupid and insensitive. Nice going, Fox.
3. "Make commercials better" isn't enough. That's like demanding that schoolbooks be fun to read. The commercial-broadcast model depends on commercials being compulsory. When a significant portion of viewers (and by viewers I mean consumers) stop watching commercials, free programming won't be free anymore.
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4-04-2007 @ 10:40AM
Big Dave said...
This reminds me of the
Mainzel-Männchen in Germany. As a kid in 70's Germany I would watch the commercial breaks just to see the short Mainzel-Männchen cartoons that one of the networks ran.
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4-10-2007 @ 3:22PM
Joey said...
Dude, at least these spots show that someone down the line is trying to be original. There's an edge to these spots that most advertisers tend to stay away from.
Plus, the animation is awesome.
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4-10-2007 @ 5:18PM
Em said...
Have any of you actually seen the fox web site yet? I cant wait to see how Oleg, his family and freinds develop. Your going to be hooked!
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4-24-2007 @ 11:16PM
dingo said...
I like it. A few years ago, I used to see guys like this in nearly every cab in town, and they were great. Nowadays, a lot of the drivers are mostly from Nigeria, Mauritania, and Congo, and they seem less effective. Oleg's cool by me. A lot depends upon the movie or show. If the show is about action, you should have more action-oriented cartoon spots in between to hold the guys watching. But a cartoon is better at holding the audience most of the time, especially when we get wondering what's about to happen next.
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