The ads that killed broadcast: Viney & Veals wake the viewer's thumb

pivotal · B.S. (the same pre-millennial window)

• When: B.S., the cable-war window culminating in "the penultimate year of the millennium"
• What: The coup de grâce to broadcast was accidental. Viney & Veals's ultra-cheap, ultra-potent Network campaigns — the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation's excruciating paintings for Nunhagen Aspirin, the LipoVac liposuction spots, and above all the deep-focus NoCoat tongue-scraper ads (a kind of "Überad") — sold product spectacularly while being so unpleasant to watch that they roused millions of numbed viewers into using their remotes, gutting ratings for every ad and program around them. When the A.C.D.C. parlayed the resulting sponsor-flight into unrefusable bids for the marquee sports rights, the Big Four "fell off the shelf, fiscally speaking": Fox filed for Ch. 11, and within days three of the four had ceased broadcasting operations; the ad agencies (the "Icarian" Viney and Veals included) went down in the same maelstrom; and the millions in non-cable areas, left with "vast maddening blocks of utterly choiceless and unentertaining time," drove domestic-crime and suicide figures to a millennial peak. The tech-thread lesson stated plainly: an ad is engineered to "create an anxiety relievable by purchase," and here it did that "way more well than wisely."