TNT’s Inset Ads: Even More Annoying Than Regular TV Commercials?

At around this time every NASCAR season, I go through a bit of withdrawal when the weekly Sprint Cup race broadcast switches over from Fox to some other network. It’s not that I really have any great love for Fox, but I do enjoy their NASCAR setup, and the announcers are the best. I love the cutaway car demos they do, I love that they actually give some airtime to the pit reporters. I love DW’s affable Southern charm and explosive mannerisms, and I even get a kick out of Jeff Hammond’s slightly unsettling bionic gaze. The easy rapport and conversational chemistry of this former driver/crew chief duo is unbeatable. What I’m not a fan of is TNT’s generic broadcast bots, who look like they’d be more at home narrating stock market activity on msnbc or something. Even with the addition to their team of sleepy and semi-retired driver Kyle Petty, who’s had a lot of experience watching racing from the back of the pack, they manage to miss all the important stuff during the race and carry on with the most completely insipid and generic banter. More…

But what really crosses the line is their new advertising format. Instead of breaking for a commercial, they mute the race and fill the bottom quarter of the screen with an inset ad. You’d think it’d be better that way because it lets you keep watching the race, right? Well it turns out that this mode of ad delivery is even more intrusive and distracting than the usual format. At least when there’s an actual commercial "break," you can resign yourself to missing anything interesting and go get a snack, make a phone call, or whatever. But the inset format keeps your eyes on the screen because, even though this is the part of the race you’d normally be missing anyway, now that you can see it  you’re afraid that if you take off you’ll miss something. Genius, right? I’m sure it gets the network a hell of a lot more "ad impressions," and it gives them an excuse to squeeze in more commercials (because they’re just so unobtrusive that folks won’t notice). Oh, and the announcers have been programmed to work discussion of the sponsors pretty relentlessly into their broadcast, so much so that their discussion at times amounts to little more than a custom pre-roll for the next ad they’re going to show. All this yammering about Coors Light being the perfect combo of refreshment and blah-blah-blah when they could be talking about—oh, I dunno—the race?? Guess we’ll have to wait ’til NASCAR’s back on Fox in February before we can hear about that again. Anyone watch the Daytona race tonight and find TNT’s format a little weird?