There’s a commercial for hearing aids on tv right now, but the sound keeps cutting out.
Are you sure Beth? Have you checked if anyone else can hear it OK?
Buy, Buy, Buy. 
Marketing studies show that hearing aid commercials with sound that cuts out are 14% more effective than ones with quality sound.
Pardon…
Sure, why not cut out the sound, that way some viewers will have doubts about their own hearing, then run out and get a hearing test, to see if they need a hearing aid. Good trick, good marketing!
MarkB
It might have been more effective if the picture hadn’t been cutting out as well.
Do we have an optician on the board?
The ultimate in television irony is that people who are registered blind only have to pay half the fee for a television license:
http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/information/blind.jsp
money-grubbing weasels… 
Edited to add: It’s the TV Licensing ba*stards who are the money-grubbing weasels (they’re weasels employed by the BBC to extort money out of people whether they need a license or not) … not registered blind people… (just in case anyone got the wrong end of the stick).
In the US we don’t have to have a TV license, but lots of people subscribe to either cable or a satellite dish network. I have a friend who is blind who has a dish, and he has to pay full price. I think he should get it for half price since he’s not using the video!
There are some real gems coming out for tv ads right now. Unfortunately, many are edited or banned outright here. Many commercials from Quebec have explicit sexual overtones that we are not allowed to receive in the rest of Canada. Fortunately, there’s the internet. Lots of people are forwarding some very funny commercials via email.
One that was banned by Fox in the US, is for a Canadian beer that extols its virtues as being the one to reach for for refreshment when chasing beaver (the beaver is one of Canada’s totems). It is filled with an office that has live beavers all over the place, on the floors, the desks, in the bookcases, etc.
One I received from Europe is for the VW Polo. It shows a smartly dressed guy pulling up into a crowded European market, with busy outdoor cafes, etc. The camera angle changes to the windscreen, where we can see the driver pull out a triggering device. Its a bomb, of course. He presses the trigger. The camera angle changes to the side of the car, where we can see the flames of the blast fill and rock the car, but they are contained within the car. The caption comes up, “VW Polo - tougher than it looks.” ROTFLMAO! 
djm
I thought I heard that VW sued someone over that “commercial” being released, claiming it was unauthorized.
As I recall, one of the selling points for cable was no commercials. People weren’t about to “pay” to watch TV when their antenna worked just fine.
Of course now we pay out the nose for 400 channels of nothing AND 20 minutes of commercials per hour.
I wouldn’t have it if my wife wasn’t a TV nut.
I dunno, I have a friend who got a fancy new HD TeeVee. For some reason, he had to put up an antenna on his roof to pick up the local broadcasts. So now he has a satellite dish and an antenna hooked to his chimney. Full circle.
Maybe he’s too cheap to pay his cable/satelite provider for the receiver upgrade required to pull in the HD signals.
djm
As far back as I can remember basic cable had commercials, and it was “pay channels” such as HBO that did not have commercial advertising, though, the earliest cable we had was only local stations and WTBS. In cases such as that, the selling point was that we were too far away from major population centers to receive a clear signal otherwise. Presently, we can get twelve local stations, by antenna (7 commercial networks, 2 state-owned educational stations, and 3 religious networks), besides stations that we also get from Kansas, Arkansas, or Missouri.
As I understand it, in some major cities cable is also about the only option, for television, due to interference in broadcast signals.
That’s funny Beth. Of course, is the person really needing the hearing aid going to be capable of properly hearing a hearing aid advertisement in the first place? Those folks are really going to panic when the sound on their TV starts doing stuff like that. ah! I must be totally deaf Maybe they should just stick to paper flyers.
(OT mode on) Cable and such just isn’t worth it (well, not for our family anyhow). We’re just finishing a “trial” period which we aren’t going to continue. It really is just “fifty more channels of nothing/crap” as hubby puts it and the few things that are worth watching aren’t worth the price they charge every month. It seems a waste to actually pay someone to pump that amount of garbage which we don’t want to watch into our home. Thought it would be fun to let the older son stay up late and watch Star Trek on Friday nights (from ten to twelve) a show which we all usually like, but the commercials in between! Heavens! Couldn’t do it because of what they were running in between. (Porn video ads.) A typically PG rated show with X rated stuff in between. I’d rather NOT have to explain to my child why the girls were jumping around naked/ripping their clothes open, french kissing and groping each other, etc.. Grrrrr! (OT mode off)
Sara
That’s the truth. The commercials are worse than the shows. I often wonder why they run raunchy ads for That 70’s Show during The Andy Griffith Show. On a positive note, I have noticed that ABC (owned by Disney) makes an effort to run ads appropriate to the program. I noticed this when watching the new Little House on the Prairie miniseries on Wonderful World of Disney.
Isn’t it interesting that you can get a FREE hearing test from hearing aid companies? What do you think they will find?
Ron
Your money.
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