Advertisements are everywhere these days. In your email, on your cell phone, you just can't escape them. I can understand that. It's annoying as hell, but from a business standpoint, I understand bombarding potential customers any conceivable way you can conjure up makes good sense.
There is one place where advertising never, ever, ever belongs. Kids home videos. Being home with two children who are spectacularly attached to Barney, the Wiggles and Dora the Explorer, I can tell you that in order to keep their viewing habits fed, I own quite a large library of children's DVDs and VHS tapes.
Any parent out there knows that when your child asks to watch the 'Dora tape' they want instant gratification. Any parent also knows this instant gratification can sometimes abort a temper tantrum before it goes nuclear. Why then must I sit through TWENTY minutes of commercials for cartoons my kids don't like before the actual episode of Dora starts? On a VHS tape, that's irritating beyond belief. There have been a number of times where the kids get completely pissed off and disinterested before the show ever starts. I don't blame them.
What's unconscionable is that this persists even on DVDs. I stick in the Wiggles DVD and get ads for six or seven other shows, and often these ads are impossible to skip or fast forward.
I'm sure the mentality was to expose the kids and parents to a whine-fest to entice them to purchase the other titles. That's only logical. The problem is, it just results in a whine-fest as the kids are chanting the name of the show they want me to play for them while I struggle frantically to get it playing as quickly as possible. Whoever thought putting twenty to twenty-five minutes of ads at the beginning of kids movies should be forced to sit in a room full of toddlers and show them nothing but ads for an hour. Or shot. That would actually be preferable.
