I don't remember a lot about this commercial. I think the reason is whenever I saw it, I either muted it or changed the channel.

Some kid and his father are sitting somewhere eating burgers. The kids says, "So Dad, did you know that [So and So Burger Company] [blah blah] with the meat in these burgers? And, did you know…"

I'm not sure what the specifics were. But I do remember the gist. The kid was a corporate shill, hired to convince his Dad that going on a diet was wrong, and he should eat more burgers.

That ad has a hidden Part II that nobody knows about, set outside, a few years after Part I. In it, the father clutches at his chest, and falls to his knees. Burger wrappers waft by in the breeze. The son watches the life drain from his father. It starts to rain. The son pulls an umbrella out and opens it. A man in a black trench coat approaches, and hands the kid a big yellow envelope. The kid opens it. There's money inside.

That's the vibe I got from the initial ad. It seems incredibly blasphemous, in a family sense. I mean, we've all heard about "Super Size Me." We all know that fast food is bad. And here some kid comes spouting off corporate brainwashing info to his Dad. "So Dad, let me enlighten you. Eating fast food isn't bad at all. Your doctor was wrong about your cholesterol, too. Live large!"

It sickens me. And not because I'm against burgers. I like burgers. It's just one of those ads where they try and pass off something completely wrong and unrealistic as casual and good. Maybe someone will comment in defense of it. That just makes it worse, because they've already gotten to you!

I like "The Daily Show." Occasionally, I'll tune in to watch a new episode as soon as it airs. It's fun to find out about something the same time as everybody else watching.

When it finishes up, my brain gets to thinking:

"Ha ha, what a great show. Oh, it's over. Well, at least now I can enjoy some relaxing theme music as I watch the credits. Na, na na na na na na Na, na na na na… Hey, is something wrong with the screen? It looks like there's a problem… is that a Phantom Image?"

When I was younger, I remember having seen a problem with the TV signal more than a few times. One channel would be showing its programming mostly fine, but you could also see faint images of another channel trying to intrude. They were almost transparent, but the action they revealed was cohesive enough that you could recognize the source of the image by switching channels a bit. Usually the intruder's origin was one or two channels above or below the one you were already watching.

I noticed that a similar thing seems to happen on Comedy Central during the credits. A black background is shown on the left half of the screen, with the credits in white text. Meanwhile, the right half of the screen is divided into two (more or less square) areas, top and bottom. The bottom area shows the name of the program that just ended, or the program coming up next. The top usually shows some content from the ending show, like an extended Moment of Zen.

It is in that upper right-half area that I noticed the Phantom Image. But what channel was it coming from?

Initially I thought it was actually a lingering image from earlier in the show. Part of my reasoning for this conclusion drew on another thing I'd noticed. When I was watching Comedy Central credits, as soon as they ended I'd usually see a quick flash of a still image, which appeared to have been a piece of the pre-credit broadcast. So like if Stephen Colbert was saying hello on "The Daily Show," and then the credits aired, they'd finish and for a split second you might see Colbert frozen in mid-wave (as opposed to a still shot of Colbert introducing a new "Colbert Report"). That image would then be immediately replaced by the next show, or a commercial. So it seemed like data from within the previous show was "spilling over" during the credits. That must explain the Phantom Image… problem solved… Right?

Wrong.

I noticed something else recently. Something far more sinister.

I don't know the name of the show that had just ended. But I do recall that I was paying greater attention to the Phantom Image during the credits. Again, it seemed to overlay the upper right quadrant of the screen, but just barely enough so that you would probably dismiss it if you weren't paying attention. This time I was lucky enough to get a good look at the enigma.

It appears that the Phantom Image is really a near-transparent textual ad, fading in and out, that reads something like "ComedyCentral.com".

My original guess had given the network the benefit of the doubt. "Oh, it's just a data transmission error." But now, it seems apparent that the network is trying to fool its viewers into feeling oddly attracted to the Comedy Central website.

Will they deny this issue, as the Food Network denied having intentionally placed a screenshot of a McDonald's logo directly into the middle of their program?

Will Comedy Central remove the offending transparency and claim that I, the writer of this post, am insane?

Will anybody even care?

Stay tuned next week for an all new episode of "South Park!"

A friend of mine works at a TV ad agency, and he recently came across some research material describing ad placement techniques during television shows. You know, those annoying, intrusive blocks that obscure your favorite programming? Here's the text:

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We have come to the conclusion that there are further steps that need to be taken in order to maximize ad effectiveness during television broadcasts. Seeing as how this is a fairly new market, overlay ads have many options that need to be considered.

Firstly, placement. Our research indicates a pattern which has been holding consistently for the past eighteen months. While most people tend to look away or ignore an ad when the programming area is compressed, and the ad is shown in the new empty space, they have less propensity to do this when the ad is instead placed over the viewing area. To be clear, we should not simply squeeze a television broadcast (i.e., a show) to make room for an ad. That gives the viewer incentive to limit their perception to just the program viewing area, and they completely ignore our advertisement. Instead, we must leave the show on 100% of the screen, and simply lay our ad over a portion of the entertainment content. Testing has produced evidence that the bottom portion is best. We can technically get away with doing this, since at the most we're only obscuring 20% of the viewing area.

In addition to the "where" issue, there is also the matter of "when." When is it best to show an ad? When viewers are paying the most attention. Therefore, researchers should be requisitioned to watch programs and determine when a viewer is more likely to be curious about the area displayed on the bottom of the screen. For example, during an episode of a mystery television show, the detective discovers a note. He reads it silently to himself, displaying it for the audience to see. Most of the text is near the bottom of the screen. In order to get maximum attention, we should allow the audience the "token second" to view the note, and then obscure it with a relevant ad. That way, we've just gotten our share of eyes which would otherwise have avoided us at all costs. But this is only the half of it.

Further tests indicate that there are far more appropriate moments to show advertising, even when the audience isn't looking at the bottom of the screen. This all comes down to the moment of climax. Most television shows and movies all work toward a short, compact moment, where audience focus is at its peak. Viewers watch from the beginning, are taken for a ride, and are eventually made aware that the most important moment of the show or film is going to occur at any given moment. When it does, they are riveted. We have found that ads obscuring show content during these intense climax moments are, on average, clearly perceived up to 300% more often than those overlaid during non-climax moments. What's more, due to the emotional intensity of these moments, the sales message of an ad will tend to last longer in a person's mind if received during the climax. So obviously, obscuring the most dramatic and intense moments with advertising is the way to go.

While these techniques do prove powerful, preliminary polling shows that audience members are becoming increasingly frustrated with having their programming directly obscured by ads, especially during the points of climax. One viewer even went so far as to say, "They ruined the whole show." But we feel that these frustrations will eventually fade, assuming we continue to effectively communicate that there's nothing viewers can do about it. Of course, even if their displeasure continues to grow, our bottom line is what matters most.

[This was handwritten at the bottom:]
If viewers think they can get away with watching content on the internet with the advertising removed, then we must make up for it by shoving our ads down their ungrateful throats.

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Just kidding. I wrote the whole thing myself. But I think I captured the general truth of the matter…