Rename (alt titles crowner 5/14): Ad Nauseam

This trope, if you can call it that, is just "this network shows ads too often". Is that even a trope?

Also, it's very prone to recentism. Nearly every other entry has "recent" in it. A lot of these are basically first-person accounts of seeing the same ad eleventy billion times, making it hard to verify that people aren't exaggerating or mis-remembering. So many things wrong, it's not funny.

Cut.

There are no heroes left in Man.

Ad Nauseam — courtesy link. Forgot that.

I think that we can just cut most of the examples. There are some good ones. The Groundhog Day and the Swordfish ones. There is a trope there, but the examples are reading too much like Troper Tales.

edited 1st Jan '12 11:16:05 AM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Bump. Anyone else agree on a cut?

I mostly support cutting it.

As for the shimaspawn's suggestion: I think the idea behind the Groundhog Day and Swordfish examples is potentially tropeable. But it's not this trope anyway. Essentially, it's "showing ads that somehow complement the work". It shouldn't be only restricted to repeating ads – e.g., they could just show one appropriate ad at an appropriate time, etc. ...But then again, can this thing get 3 or more examples, or is it Too Rare To Trope? Methinks, it could be back to YKTTW for this one.

edited 10th Jan '12 2:42:40 AM by Zulfiqar

Agree with the cut.

Also, the pun in the name doesn't work because "ad nauseam" is the real-world term, so you can't see there's an "ad" in there.

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

This is a bad title, as it's a pun on an existing term that doesn't mean what this trope does. At the very minimum, it must be renamed to remove the confusion. As it's also a complaining trope, it can be cut without losing much.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Is it even a pun? It's just taking a very specific use of that word and turning it into a so-called trope.

I say cut. If anything, it should be a redirect to one of the faulty reasoning logic pages.

The Internet misuses, abuses, and overuses everything.

It's a pun. The original term is ad nauseam, which is Latin for "to the point of nausea". It then substitutes the meaning of the English word "ad", an abbreviation for "advertisement".

Having encountered the term as a bluelink, I would expect it to be a redirect to Argumentum Ad Nauseam.

edited 27th Feb '12 1:31:00 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I'm not sure how this is even tropeworthy as a concept. Showing the same commercial over and over? Isn't this Product Placement Up To Eleven but outside of works? I fail to see the point.

Agree with cutting.

"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer

I disagree with cutting because of the unique examples like this:

• The Twix commercial in Poland, which used a theme of "doubleness": "When you've got a break - take Twix! Double candybar - double break!" This ad was aired twice each time, one after another.

• The sneakest use ever of the A1/A2 variant was shortly after the rulings that led to Yes But What Does Zataproximetacine DO. Quite a few companies put out two different, yet very similar ads; one would mention the name of the product, but not what it did; while the other would mention what the product did, but not its name. This allowed them to circumvent being required to list side-effects. The practice died quickly.

• Bob's Discount Furniture, a local New England business with a tendency towards obnoxious advertising, pulls this a lot.
  • They use multiple variants, too. Probably the worst is a variant that technically falls under the A1/A2 variant, but the only difference between the two commercials is the color of the couch. Seriously. They start the commercial break with an ad featuring a dark brown couch/sofa/whatever set, then the last commercial of the same break will be exactly the same, only now the couch, sofa and everything else are beige. The real question is, why the hell did they make the exact same commercial twice?

I wouldn't object to cutting all the examples that are just "I was watching this one show, and they kept playing the same commercial" but there are some examples that are legitimately worth mentioning.

edited 27th Feb '12 1:45:59 PM by abk0100

Sounds fair enough. How many legitimate examples are there?

The Internet misuses, abuses, and overuses everything.

Judging by the wicks, I think it looks like there is a significant amount of misuse for ad nauseam's normal meaning and that there most uses of the trope make it out to be about advertizing overload rather than the specific trope of airing an ad multiple times during one commercial break.

It seems to me that if we are going to keep this trope, a rename to something that clarifies how narrow this trope is would be necessary in order to deal with the kind of misuse just mentioned.

edited 27th Feb '12 9:02:32 PM by LouieW

"irhgT nm0w tehre might b ea lotof th1nmgs i dont udarstannd, ubt oim ujst goinjg to keepfollowing this pazth i belieove iN !!!!!1 d

Not only is that a pretty narrow definition, it's difficult to objectively prove whether that was purposeful or not. IMHO, I've always thought that stations pick a semi-random selection of ads for a given ad break, in which case it's actually normal for a specific (or similar) ad, once in a while, to occur repeatedly.

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

I'm not sure if this counts as a pun. The Latin term is "Ad nauseam" exactly like that. A pun would be something like "Hat nauseam" (if about hats) or "Add nauseam" (about mathematics) or even "Cat nauseam" (Eddie's stance against Lolcats), but not something that is 100% indistinguishable from the actual phrase.

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

That was my thought at first, but if it's used as a pun, it's a pun, even if it's invisible. Many puns are if you don't think about them.

The Internet misuses, abuses, and overuses everything.

That's exactly what makes this pun bad.

It does not matter who I am. What matters is, who will you become? - motto of Omsk Bird

Stating facts - not complaining.

Stating facts-doesn't make it a trope.

"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer

It's not just stating facts. If it were simply any case where an ad is run more than once per commercial break, it would... well, it wouldn't be a trope. It has to have some kind of meaning, whether it's that people get annoyed by it, it's done deliberately for emphasis, it's done with a very slight variation in the ad as a kind of mind screw... something.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Personally I think that if we were to limit the examples to stuff that follows one of the criteria spelled out defintion, and change the tone a bit (and perhaps the name) we would be okay.

Repeating the same commercial twice in a row, or two nearly identicle commericials twice in a row, is a technique that is used in advertising and/or program scheduling. However, this should not be used for simple cases of "They show this commerical a lot."

edited 28th Feb '12 9:55:23 AM by Catbert

Ads come in different length categories. I can visualize the ad company combining multiple smaller ads into a single longer ad themselves (e.g. those annoying "Head On" commercials) as a technique, and I can see a case for a network choosing to show the same/similar ads next to each other — however the latter is extremely hard to prove what is actually a deliberate example.

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

I think I've seen at least one car insurance company buy a single ad space and run two similar ads in the same one.

Fight smart, not fair.

There is now a page action crowner for this trope here. Feel free to edit and add options as you see fit.

"irhgT nm0w tehre might b ea lotof th1nmgs i dont udarstannd, ubt oim ujst goinjg to keepfollowing this pazth i belieove iN !!!!!1 d