Sunday, March 16, 2008

Proud as a Peacock

I know the TV Ad people don't have it easy. There's pressure to have a clever catchphrase, you compete with massive competition, and it's pretty rare to be truly memorable. When it works, though, it works well.

Somewhere in the world is the person who came up with the phrase "Must See TV". That person is pretty proud of himself.

Inexplicably, I still remember this 1977 ABC "Still the One" campaign even though I was practically a zygote when it came out.

And this 1982 ditty still sorta stays with me, too.

But, sometimes, the campaigns are a little less than successful. In this [not so new] era of the internet, the ad peeps also have to find new and exciting ways to grab our technologically-maxed-out-ADD attention spans.

And sometimes they fail.

PhotobucketOn NBC's Website, I stumbled upon the fact that they are offering up old "The A-Team" episodes online. With all due respect to Mr. T, I don't really care, but further links promised other vintage shows, so I was pysched. However, this promise of more retro programming landed me on this link entitled "Way Back Wednesdays", containing possibly the most random assemblage of tv shows ever, including The A-Team, Battlestar Galactica, and Emergency! Don't forget the exclamation mark!

And so I'm trying to picture how this meeting went: Ok, so this is all we could scrape up the rights to. How do we brand this? How about one of these: They all have people! At least two star Dirk Benedict! Some start with the letter B!

PhotobucketInstead, they landed on...Way Back Wednesdays, not because you can, like, only view them on Wednesdays (though that would've actually made more sense to me) but I am assuming it's because they all shared that dreaded mid-work week slot back in the day. Which i guess means that like 20 years from now you can watch Supernanny on this very site.

Anyway, I guess thanks to me, now you know. And that's... One to Grow on.

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