After talking with a friend on Twitter the other day, it seems Channel 10 have gone batshit crazy plugging their new Secret Life of Us clone "Offspring" featuring the unfathomably annoying Asher Keddie, master of the annoying "pained yet knowing" expression. There's been extended promos for it, flash ads on the internet, themed station IDs and even those small "pop-up ads" during the Football. (Great use of chasing your core demographic there.)
Working at a "internet regulator" year or so ago, I was well versed with the Australian Communications and Media Authority and their jurisdiction regarding what constituted "spam" under the Federal Spam Act 2003. Under the act, it is illegal to:
"to send, or cause to be sent, unsolicited commercial electronic messages."
What sucks even more is that it's only limited to SMS, MMS, email and instant messaging services. I'm not the greatest proponent of government intervention but something has to be done about this. We can't just stop watching Channel 10 because the government will probably bail them out or allow them to be swallowed up by a media conglomerate with deeper pockets.
But lets say I view every commercial station for an equal duration - say each of them for two hours a day. Within those two hours of watching C10, I will have seen at least 38 minutes of ads; so a conservative estimate would mean I've seen about 35 minutes of advertising for fucking Offspring, which I steadfastly refuse to watch.
Fair enough that I choose to watch television or whatever. But advertising the same fucking thing over and over again is fucking annoying and is for the most part, unsolicited due to the ownership and production of the show by the network. I can only hope that the torrent of ads for this show means the test audiences thought it was fucking terrible beyond redemption and it's pulled after a couple of weeks. The end.