Mark: Commercials

After the first class and in between my second, I would usually grab a pre-packaged sandwich from Spar and sit back and watch some television. Channel surfing is not that interesting with Irish broadcasting because you usually pass the same television show 14 times on different channels. To make surfing even less exciting the selection of programming is very limited. You can usually catch repeating shows of Big Brother, reruns of Hurling and Gaelic Football matches, the Simpson’s, Friends and a few Irish soap operas. A different game can be played though, it’s called “guess what channel has sound.” Even though a single show will be playing on multiple channels at once not all of them will have sound, or the volume will fluctuate. After the right channel is chosen for the program you would like to watch, it is usually smooth sailing from this point. Just like any other broadcasting system anywhere in the United States there were plenty of commercials. In Ireland the commercials were much different than the ones aired in America. A lot of them did not make sense, had no relevance to the product being advertised, and were random. My favorite commercial was for YOP, a yogurt drink. It is an animated piece that takes place during the dinosaur period. It had a caveman man running from two Raptors, on the bottom of the screen it gives a BC date and says “before YOP.” To elude the predators the man runs up a tree. The dinosaurs wait looking up into the tree as the branches give and the man falls down. The screen turns black as words come onto the screen that says “drink YOP in the morning.” It was pretty entertaining but doesn’t make sense or make me want to try YOP. (Just the word YOP is unappetizing.) For most products there would be entertaining skits that did not really describe or offer benefits of their product. Although I did find that most of the commercials are targeted at young adults and the comedic approach was the most popular.

This is a YOP commercial.