BoingBoing reader Jeremy says:
I was watching Spike TV at my girlfriends place when I noticed something flash by right before the station went back to its presentation of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Since my girlfriend is lucky enough to have TiVo, I rewound it and discovered that there was an ad there for Sony, with a little Centrino symbol in the lower left hand corner. It lasted less than a second and I noticed it happen several times throughout the evening. Searches of the net brought up nothing on it so far, but I thought bOING bOING readers might dig up some answers.
So, what is it? Uber-sneaky advertising hijinks, or the hallucinations of yet another cracksmoking, TiVoing BoingBoing reader who probably also sees visions of the Virgen de Guadalupe in his cornflakes? Submit your answers here: Link.
Reader Tim says, " It is probably just local cable commercials overlapping the SpikeTV network commercials. Of course, I for one welcome our Sony overlords." And reader Steve Portigal says, "I see this happening all the time on TNT, but my assumption has always been it's a slight lack of synchronization in the syndication. I assume that commercials are sold locally as well as nationally, and so some markets get different ads. What I see always appears to be the tail end of another ad, not a whole piece of advertising in itself, and so I assume it's just cruft from what another audience was able to see."
BoingBoing reader Lucas Emery says, "Reader Tim is correct about the SpikeTV ads. I used to work for a TV station and, traditionally, television advertsing is sold in 30 second increments, but advertisers are allowed to take advantage of that 0 second, sometimes stretching a commercial out to what actually amounts to almost 31 seconds. Spots like this are easy to cover up when a human is operating the program switcher to shuffle between local and national advertising, but when the switching's controlled by computers (as most stations these days are) it is often the case they switch back after exactly 30 seconds, and not 30.29 (for instance), so that is why you see the commercial cruft. I, too, notice this a lot on Spike and a few other channels."
