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7 Comments

news

Dollar Worth Lots, Ad Space Worth Lots, And The Ottawa Citizen Makes A Boo-Boo

By Christopher Bird

loonie.jpgDollar rises to 29-year high. At 91.58 cents U.S., it hasn’t been this high since 1978. Also hasn’t been this high since 1978: Gene Simmons, who totally found himself some amazingly killer bud last week.
The CRTC permits television networks to air more commercials per hour. Because you know who’s totally victimized in this country? Television networks—the guys who make a fortune airing TV shows the Americans make and slapping their own commercials on ‘em. Now there’s even less incentive for them to make Canadian TV shows! Hooray for the CRTC.
Green bins in condos? It’s in the works. Along with additional plans that will see Toronto diverting 70 percent of garbage from landfill in three years.
Toronto police spied on members of the city’s gay community in the 1980s. In fairness, those citizens under surveillance probably should have figured it out after comments like, “Would you like to go to the park for a sexual encounter while under the influence of illegal drugs? Please speak into my enormous lapel carnation to indicate yes or no.”
And finally, one man this week learned a valuable lesson: do not have almost the same name as a rapist if you live in Ottawa, because the Ottawa Citizen makes very silly mistakes sometimes.
Image via Wikipedia.

Comments

  • Hamish Grant

    I think it must have been amusing to have a bunch of detectives staking out the St. Charles Tavern, surrounded by men wearing fetish cop outfits… It would have given them a good dose of just how sexualized men in uniform are by BOTH sexes.

  • Sherry Giles

    Ah, the Ottawa Citizen — continuously raising the bar.

  • GH

    So, fewer commercials increases the incentive to produce Canadian TV? I would think the opposite – less revenue = more incentive to reduce your risk and air US shows that you know will be wathced.

  • rek

    Fewer commercials means your show has to be even better to attract higher paying advertisers to fill the space. That has no impact on where the show originates, but American networks seem to be airing more commercials so the CRTC must follow suit or risk becoming relevant.

  • David E

    Typical of CanWest Global Media. Never can get aything right. Go to the BBM ratings pages on the web and try and find Global National News and see how few viewers it actually has. One person mentioned that working for CanWest and their micro-managing style is like “death by a thousand henpecks”.

  • Disparishun

    On advertisers having to pay more for each commercial, when less commercials are available, and therefore needing higher ratings to justify the spend: if anything, this would make it less risky to air Canadian productions, whose production budgets are much lower.
    The issue, I think, has more to do with scuttling the system put in place a few years ago whereby stations airing “high-quality” Canadian drama (i.e. above a certain level of production dollars) became entitled in return to up their advertising minutes per hour. This neuters any such policy.
    On the CRTC following suit with 14 minutes: I do not think that this has anything to do with relevancy or irrelevancy — the mismatch has been around for a very long time, and they have simply mandated that the other 2 minutes be filled with trailers and other non-advertising promotions.
    Rather, it has to do with the current CRTC chair’s goal of bringing competition based rules into the broadcasting environment. There are enough TV stations, and they compete with enough other media, that the risk of losing viewers alone should discipline them against showing too many commercials. That, at least, as the idea, and is why the 14 minutes is a convenient part-way step to deregulating advertising caps altogether

  • rek

    The other media Canadian TV stations are competing against are also owned by the same companies. A handful of corporations run television broadcasting and newspaper and magazine publishing in Canada. Even the major internet providers are owned by the companies that bring you CTV, Movie Central and YTV, and Maclean’s and Alliance Atlantis. The only thing that would really promote competition, and ‘discipline’ broadcasters into creating and supporting more good Canadian shows would be if they didn’t have all their other properties to catch viewers.
    “…or risk becoming relevant” was just a jab at the CRTC: they don’t seem to be interested in doing anything stop Americanization (affiliation) or consolidation in Canadian media.
    Completely deregulating advertising caps would mean more ads and shorter shows, that’s all. There would be no incentive for Canadian media giants to make better or longer shows — not when American stations are providing the majority of sitcoms and dramas already, and they just have to fill the rest of the time with news and whatever else it takes to just barely qualify as CanCon.