This is probably what could be considered our first “request” for a review of a series of commercials.  Before I get to it, let me just say that not only am I amazed that someone is actually reading this site, but I really do encourage requests, recommendations, etc., especially if you have a sample of the ad… just makes my life easier.

That said, let’s look at this campaign from Time Warner Cable:

Now, if I remember my logic class from college, what comedian Mike O’Malley is doing here is what is called a “logical fallacy.”  That basically means that you start off with a faulty premise and use faulty logic to prove your point.  People in politics use it all the time to somehow prove that because something is caused by one person who is a part of a targeted group, then that group is all about doing that activity.  It’s kind of like saying Harry Houdini was a Master Mason; Houdini performed magic; therefore, all Masons are magicians.  Obviously, they’re not.  Trust me, I grew up around Masons and they only thing they make disappear are pot luck dinners.

Anyway, this is part of a whole series of ads featuring O’Malley that always points out that Time Warner gives away HD programming and sometimes gets into some of the old standbys of digging at satellite service, which is that it can get disrupted in bad weather, you have to put a dish on your roof, and so on.

So first, the obvious one… Time Warner Cable really sucks.  I’ve had it in a couple of places I’ve lived and I’ve never had good luck with it… or Comcast for that matter.  This is why when I moved into my own place, I got DirecTV, which works like a charm and has everything I would ever want in the form of programming.  The picture is perfect 99.9% of the time and I never see the dish because I had the dude install it on the side of the house that I never go on.

Here’s another one that a friend of mine gave me.  It’s a little technical, but it’s kind of cool when you think about it…

Well, lets look at the how Cable TV works vs. DirecTV… At the Cable HQ they have a satellite farm , they download programming and then they send that out to your city via a big thick cable, now in that cable is all of the channels that they offer, audio and video signals, communication for you Cable box (pay per view billing, your preferences , etc.) as well as the entire internet!! Then it gets to your neighborhood. Where it hits a box called a distribution amplifier, that’s a zero gain device (i.e. the level the signals come in is the level they go out only it goes out to 8 different streets in your neighborhood), well it then gets to your street, where it hits another D.A. (and remember every time that signal gets split it’s going to drop 10db’s regardless of the D.A. ,that’s just physics and I’m not even counting line loss which is hard to calculate because the type of cable can have varying specs). Anyway off of that 2nd D.A. it goes to all of the houses on your block.

OK, so now it’s finally at your house and God only knows how old the cable is in your house, is it RG6 or RG 8 (6 has more bandwith and is capable of handling highspeed as well as TV), so anyway its gets to your house and it gets split (not D.A.’d) to your front room, bedroom other bedroom, garage, and finally to your cable modem (remember thats 10db of loss at each split) so that’s what your putting into that $4000+ HDTV and sound system.

On the DirecTV side they have the same satellite farm but they are for uploads, it goes to the 8 inch (wow that’s HUGE!!!) dish and the 2 cables come down from the dish to your decoder box, that’s it. There are runs from the dish to each tv in the house so that zero db’s drop and the image is so crisp and clear that even SD looks fantastic…

What my long winded friend is saying here is that cable sucks by design and even the free HD that they’re providing is probably not even HD anymore because of all the signal loss it encounters just getting to your house.

My point here is that Time Warner Cable gives away its HD programming pretty much because it has to in order to stay competitive against DirecTV and even then, Time Warner and every other cable service provider still has the worst customer service on record.

Now, I know Mike is just effing around in these commercials and it’s not his fault that Time Warner blows goats, but these types of ads go into the category of “crazy people pitching crazy shit.”  Time Warner can’t get their act together, so the best they could do is have a comedian deliver a faulty premise and lie to your face and get away with it because we all know he’s joking, but that shit still seeps in because we’re not paying attention.

Just a like a buddy of mine said about the AT&T and Verizon ad war going on, “Hey, why don’t you two stop buying so much TV time and put the money into your damn network!”  Same goes with Time Warner… less time advertising, more time doing your damn job, providing a better product.

J.

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