What Corporate America is selling?

A colleague teacher with whom I worked at the school told me long ago of a simple method he did for decades to answer this question that was so important to him. He added he gathered good information about the society and the country’s situation each time he did it.?

Supposedly, he watched a 1- hour TV show during the prime time slot (8:00 – 11:00 PM) from one of the biggest cable networks. Then, he wrote down each of the commercials that appeared until the end of the program. Then, he combined the commonalities into different categories.?

Well, a few weeks ago I did it with my favorite show which that coincidently was on prime time and is broadcasted from a big TV cable network. The results can be seen on the pie chart above.

Let me explain the info in more detail:

1)?????The Health commercials were mainly pharmaceutical prescription drugs. They were long and very well done with personal stories. They usually ended with a suggestion to ask your Doctor about the medicine. Personally, I think that my primary Physician spent almost 10 years of his life learning that stuff. I’m not going to do his job.

The rest of the commercials in this category were a few addiction treatments, home for the elders, dental implants and some Medicare supplemental private plans.

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2)?????The second portion was for the Insurances companies; many of them. That’s expected considering we always need them for our homes and our cars. And now, we also need insurance for wildfires or flooding that could occurs nearby, or if a tree branch suddenly enters our living room uninvited. Additionally in this category, there were lawyers firms specializing in car accidents and workers compensation cases.

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3)?????The Miscellaneous section was for commercial that appeared once or twice and can’t be related together. There were restaurants, candies, furniture, upcoming movies, ?travel agencies, cars/trucks dealers, toilet paper and reverse mortgage.

After doing this exercise, I’m going to have to agree with my old friend about how interesting and valuable it is to collect all of this information. I think not just the amount but definitely the type of commercials we see are telling us many things about the present circumstances we’re living in now.

Personally, I have to say, I realized something after seeing that my favorite show has more than half of its advertisements dedicated to health issues, I’m definitely old. ?