Cross Promotion
Feb/092
Dear Channels Seven and Nine,
I love sport. I love how I can watch your sport programming. I love it enough that it even appears preferable to attending the live event. I hate some of the things you do though – delaying telecasts is annoying. Tony Greig’s endless memorabilia flogging is redeemed only by wealth of material it provides to the 12th Man. Seven’s attempts to hype a simple tennis match into an epic, nation-gripping drama is tiresome, but blissfully restricted to only two weeks of the year.
Truly though, these are mere trifles. Only one thing inspires anything stronger than moderate annoyance – cross promotion. Cross promotion is the bane of sporting coverage. I am not an angry person, but cross promotion invokes something primal in my blood. It is rage.
Mark Nicholas just dropped in some vacuous plugging for the only horse Nine has left to flog – Underbelly. Apparently it’s popular. I don’t give a shit. I am trying to watch the god damn cricket. I have never watched this over-hyped show. I have no intention of watching it. I’m sure it’s entertaining, but giving Nine one more viewer can only encourage their inane cross promotion.
It’s probably the emptiness of the comments that inspires so much feeling. Nine employs experienced commentators to provide insight (Greig excluded), colour (except Chappell) and expert opinion (except for Simon O’Donnell, who now isn’t even allowed in the commentary box. The only thing he gets to plug is his Cricket show, which is more desperate promotion rather than cross promotion, so I don’t mind). I hesitate to claim that it’s an insult to their intelligence, as they were sportsmen rather than rocket scientists. Richie Benaud is the exception to this – he’s brilliant, and seems to be exempt from participation in the dross – but all the rest have to blandly mutter whatever promotional drivel is pushed in front of them.
The worst I’ve heard was Jim Courier trying to come up with something to say about All Saints, a show he’d clearly never seen. The best he could manage was that he’d try and bring some DVDs home.
I should note here that I’ve focused on Nine thus far only because I was sitting right in front of the cricket whilst typing*. Seven’s constant promotion was actually far more irritating – nearly every ad break was bookened by some form of plug for Desperate Anatomy Practice or Private Grey Housewives Packed in the Bondi Vet. The aforementioned Courier aside, the commentators are less interesting on the whole anyway, so any moment of commercial pandering was significantly more grating.
*Adam Voges’ catch was the best thing I have seen this entire summer. Hell fucking yes.
So – Seven, Nine – here’s the thing. I love sport. I do not love your crap television shows, and I do not intend to watch them no matter how often you mention them. I get that the sport coverage is popular, and thus an extremely lucrative market for promotion. I get that it’s really important to compare penis size – excuse me, ratings – with the other execs. Why don’t we see the TV shows plugging back to the sport? It’s because people want to watch sport, it already rates highly, and doesn’t need propping up.
So you have TV that people don’t want to watch, promoted during sport which they do want to watch. The solution is simple:
Put more sport on the TV. Cross promotion can get fucked.