In Association With Tiredness, Irritability, And Deep-Seated Resentment.

While fast-forwarding through the ad break of a TV programme I recorded recently, I found myself using the sponsorship ident things as a marker so that I could press the ‘play’ button in time for the next bit of the show.

Personally, I think the Joop Homme ads, which are attached to The Walking Dead like relentless zombies, are the best for this as they’re the same clip of a pissed-looking pair of models, moodily smooching about while some words and pink stuff appears.

As a parent, recorded TV is pretty much all I get to watch, so most of the sponsorship surrounding these shows is wasted on me. In my head I associate Joop (which I’ve clocked is a perfume) with the frustration of a break in my entertainment, and decomposing people.

When I have been lucky enough to watch the show ‘live’ the sponsorship idents annoy me in another way. Because they’re the same film over and over again, they soon become irritating. Eventually, after the 8 millionth viewing, they move past annoying and into the realms of invisibility.

Now some would say that the fact I remember the name and nature of the product is a good thing and I can’t really argue with that, but I would have thought that the association with frustration, irritation and undead people might not be the best use of a product’s marketing budget.

I appreciate how difficult TV sponsorship can be: we’ve done our fair share over the course of our career, and in my experience they’re always tough. For one thing, fitting a message into such short time lengths is always problematic. The simplicity, charm and whit of the Doritos ones from a few years back are a rarely matched.

Doritos embraced the small budget that so often goes hand in hand with these kind of jobs, but often there’s the dilemma of either making lots of spots that look slightly cheap, or making a small number of nice-looking ads which then run the risk of boring the viewer quickly.

God knows why, but the public consistently vote that bit in Only Fools And Horses where Del Boy falls through the bar as “the funniest thing ever.” Yet even that, if it were played constantly during Coronation Street, would get on the nation’s nerves eventually.

Added to this, it seems that more and more the programme you’re asked to sponsor often bears no relation to the product you’re advertising. In the olden days, there seemed to be a desire on the part of the programmer and advertiser to find an ideal fit; either through the product, its end line, or even the shared target market.

Nowadays that feels as if that’s all gone out of the window. Nowadays you wouldn’t bat an eyelid if you saw a pasta sauce linked to a show about embarrassing vaginas.

As an industry we need to try a little harder; increase budgets, avoid repetition, associate with relevant shows, and aim to keep the viewer entertained.

Either that, or do something really useful and just stick a big ‘FAST FORWARD’ or ‘PLAY’ above the logo, so I can perfect my remote control control.