“iO TV has what you want to seeee. Hundreds of channels and the HD is freeee…”
As soon as I hear the jingle, I know what’s coming next. My 8-month-old son, who moments before was playing quietly playing on his blanket, whips around toward the TV like he just heard someone scream, “Free boobies!” For the entirety of the commercial, he is in a trance. Go ahead and try to distract him. Not happening. The first time this occurred, I thought it was a fluke. But this same same scenario plays out every single time the damn commercial comes on – and that’s pretty frequently.
For those of you not living in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut, iO TV is a local cable service provided by Cablevision, which apparently tries to woo subscribers by playing some of the most annoying commercials ever made. There’s a series of them, but my particular favorite is the one where this fat dude raps – with a hint of calypso – while tacky mermaids chant the company’s phone number in the background. After seeing this about 30 times, I really regretted not having one of those old picture-tube TVs because, you know, if you’re going to smash your head through your TV, it would be much more of a spectacular way to go than banging your head into a flat screen.
“Okay, maybe my son is just weird,” I rationalized. Not a totally unreasonable conclusion given his lineage. But then I noticed some of my Facebook friends mentioning that there kids were having the same reaction. I took my search to YouTube, which confirmed my suspicions that something strange was indeed afoot.
There were a lot of videos of kids watching this advertising annoyance in a zombie-like state. So now I’m beginning to wonder if there was something hidden within the commercial – maybe a subliminal message that hypnotizes babies into being cable customers for life.
Are businesses now marketing to babies? I ponder this as I change my son’s Pampers, which he specifically asked that I use, and get him ready to chow down on some Gerber baby food, which he picked out…
