A Visit to the World of Daytime TV, or
An Interesting Advertising Demographic
By John Ross
Copyright 2007 by John Ross. Electronic reproduction of this article freely permitted provided it is reproduced in its entirety with attribution given.
I’ve been sedentary lately. A recent checkup and subsequent stress test revealed an “abnormal” heartbeat, so my doctor wanted me to get a cardiac catheterization to see what was going on with my heart. They put a dye that shows up on X-ray into your bloodstream and see if arteries are blocked. I had a ton of important stuff (like the NRA show, exhibiting my new .500 I helped design) coming up shortly, so we scheduled the cardiac cath for a few weeks later, in case I needed open heart surgery which would take months of recovery.
To get past the boring medical stuff, I had one artery that was partially blocked, and they did an angioplasty and installed one stent. Google it if you’re interested. The whole procedure took maybe a half hour and involved no discomfort whatsoever. I dozed off right before the surgeon put in the stent and didn’t wake up until he said in a loud voice “All done.” Others have complained of the recovery period where you must lie still with a sandbag on your leg for 6 hours while your femoral artery heals, but my doctor used a collagen plug that cut the time to 45 minutes, with no sandbag. I feel fine now, and I’ve felt fine all along.
The point of all this is that in the weeks before the cardiac cath procedure, I was told to take it easy and not exert myself by lifting ammo crates etc., in case all my arteries were almost closed and I would risk having a heart attack loading my van or shooting my 4-bore. So I ended up lying around and watching a lot of television for a while, a lot being several hours a day instead of my usual two hours or so a week. And this time I was watching daytime television, not the news, The Shield, or Nip/Tuck.
Where to start…
First of all, the ads. I noticed that almost all of the ads on daytime TV fall into one of three categories, and the target market for all of them is people with money problems.
The first category is law/financial firms. These people promise to get you money from an injury you’ve suffered, wipe out your debts with a bankruptcy, or give you a lump sum of cash for a structured settlement you are currently receiving.
I’ve often said that an aggressive plaintiff’s bar is what keeps companies honest, but it’s getting absurd. One prominent St. Louis firm ran a barrage of ads for a few days soliciting people who had recently gotten sick after eating a certain brand of peanut butter.
Did I miss something? Has there been a rash of hospitalizations and emergency liver transplants on kids who keeled over after their afternoon snack? Has the Peter Pan company (or whoever) changed their secret formula to include not just smooshed up peanuts, but also Death Angel mushrooms, for that extra bit of flavor? Or is it a case of some people getting an upset stomach or diarrhea for a few hours?
In reality, this strikes me as one of those deals where the potential damages to any one person are so low that if your time is worth more than 50 cents an hour, you’re wasting it. The law firm shakes down the peanut butter company for some dough, and all or nearly all of it goes to cover the legal fees. Yes, this keeps companies honest, but the peanut butter (or the ketchup, mustard, orange juice, etc.) company already has a powerful incentive to make a good product: If their peanut butter gives people diarrhea, those people will stop buying it from them. Duh.
The most over-the-top PI ad featured a vaguely menacing, gruff spokesman urging you to call Leonard Neumann if you’d been injured in a car accident, and he’d get you money. In the background was film footage of cars launched upside down through the air, through a wall of flame, then crashing to the pavement, like something out of a Jerry Bruckheimer film. Print at the bottom of the screen informed us that this was an accident simulation (and thus not actual news footage, apparently.)
I wanted to rewrite the spokesman’s script: "Have you been injured in a car accident at a burning oil refinery? Call Leonard Neumann. He has years of experience with clients just like you, and he’ll get you money."
Apparently even Leonard thought his ads were a bit much, and he’s since switched to an ad campaign showing cheerful actors (with no limbs missing) standing by cars wrecked so badly as to be unrecognizable, saying “Leonard turned this wreck…into this check.” Whereupon the lump of twisted metal morphs into a piece of paper in the actor’s hand. Then Leonard himself comes on to make his pitch. It’s quite a change from the gruff, jowly spokesman, as Leonard resembles Stan Laurel with a double dose of Botox, and he gazes off to the side as he speaks in a nasal monotone about what he’ll do for you.
I miss the old ads. I was waiting for some footage of a NASCAR pileup at Daytona or a Top Fuel engine explosion to run behind the tough-looking guy.
I won’t say much about the bankruptcy ads, as a good friend who is a bankruptcy lawyer explained that the majority of bankruptcies are not people who have a chronic shopping or gambling addiction (although there are certainly some of those.) Rather, most bankruptcies are ordinary people who have always paid all their bills on time, but then suffered a one-time catastrophic financial event, such as an uninsured medical emergency that also made them unable to work.
It’s the firms (I think they’re financial firms, not law firms) that want to give you cash for your structured settlement that really have me scratching my head.
A structured settlement is what you get when you’ve suffered an injury requiring an ongoing set of expenses. Say your car was hit by a semi, you’ve had a spinal injury, and now you’re paralyzed from the neck down for life. Your lawyer sues the trucking company, and their insurance company ends up paying a bunch of money. Your lawyer gets you enough money to pay all your hospital bills, some extra for your pain and suffering, and a structured settlement to pay the ongoing expenses that a quadriplegic requires. Perhaps this last is $20,000 a month for life. Possibly your lawyer negotiated that this figure be adjusted periodically for inflation.
The entire purpose of doing it this way is to make sure you have a steady income for life to pay for the things you need as a quadriplegic. Perhaps the injury is not quite this catastrophic; losing a hand, let’s say. Maybe losing a hand is only worth $1500 a month for life. You still need constant compensation for the fact that you have lost the ability to do any job that requires two hands. You need that compensation every month for the rest of your life. That’s what your personal injury lawyer got for you.
The cash-for-your-annuity firms I’m seeing (four, that advertise several times an hour) want to undo this for you. They want to buy your monthly income stream and give you one big, one-time check. The amount they pay you is based on the size and expected life of the income stream, and the discounted present value of future money. Then they take out their profit of 30%-50% and give you one check that has to last you for the rest of your life.
Depending on your age, a $1500 per month structured settlement might get you a $100,000 lump sum. Great, hunh? Well, maybe--if you’re planning to live less than 5 more years. "Times change, and your financial needs change with them" and "It’s your money, use it when you need it" are two taglines repeated ad nauseum by one of these firms. Translation: "You’ve gotten yourself into debt again, or you want to buy something you can’t afford. Let us take all the money you’ve got coming to you in the future, give you back a fourth of it right now, and we’ll keep the rest for ourselves. When you burn through your fourth, well…good luck!"
As someone who has spent much of his adult life in the financial industry, I find the "cash now for your structured settlement" ads abhorrent.
An interesting and apparently little-known fact about structured settlements is that they are a contractual arrangement between (in the above example) the trucking company, and an insurance company. The recipient (the guy who lost a hand, I’ll call him Bob Smith) is a third party beneficiary. That means the checks have to be made out to Mr. Smith, once a month, for life.
Why is this important? Because the only way the financial firm can get those monthly payments for themselves is to get Mr. Smith to instruct the insurance company to mail the checks to a different address (that of the insurance company), and also have him sign a Power of Attorney authorizing the insurance company to endorse the checks and deposit them in their own account. The checks are still made out to Bob Smith, and will be, as long as he lives.
So what, you ask? Well, if Mr. Smith signs the power of attorney, takes his $100,000 check from the financial company offering him “Cash now for his structured settlement,” and in the next couple years runs through that money and has to declare bankruptcy, something very interesting can happen, if his lawyer is on the ball.
In a bankruptcy, all debts (with a few exceptions, like Federal income tax) are discharged. If Mr. Smith’s lawyer is smart, he will have Mr. Smith write a letter telling the insurance company to once again send the checks to him. The “Cash Now” firm will be listed as a creditor in the bankruptcy filing, but that’s it. Mr. Smith gets $1500 a month for life again.
I should caution that selling your structured settlement with the intention of blowing lump sum, filing for bankruptcy, and then getting the monthly check again is fraud. However, there are plenty of people who have run through the buyout money without planning to (which happens in most S.S. buyouts), and are on the verge of bankruptcy. These people are unaware of their right to have the checks once again sent to them.
I wonder when a bankruptcy lawyer will run an ad pointing this out…
The second category of ads that run on daytime television is for auto credit and "affordable" auto insurance.
Apparently there are a lot of people out there who cannot qualify for car financing anywhere they’ve gone. They’ve managed to miss the ads running every 10 minutes for companies (operating in a parallel universe, apparently) who tell you that "Everyone qualifies! If we don’t qualify you, we’ll give you a free car!"
And distraught drivers lament on-camera that "I need a payment plan that I can afford" and "I want insurance that will cover what I legally have to have." Translation: "I can’t afford $800 every six months, but I can afford $250 a month for one month, get my car licensed, and then let the insurance lapse until a year or two from now when I have to show proof of insurance again to renew my plates."
My favorite opening pitch is from the Missouri Insurance Exchange, obviously a devotee of the Keep It Simple school of advertising. A handsome, friendly-looking, well-spoken black guy, dressed in slacks, sport coat, open-necked shirt, and black cowboy hat, says earnestly "You need car insurance. We sell car insurance. We’ve helped thousands of people stay on the road, and we’ll do it for you. We’re the Missouri Insurance Exchange."
I’m waiting for the ad that says "You need food. We sell food. We’ve kept thousands of people from starving to death and we’ll do it for you. We’re 7-11."
The third ad category on daytime TV is education for a career.
One very well done (in my opinion) ad has a slender young man in a crooked baseball cap demonstrating all the different ways to procrastinate by lounging on a couch, finally saying “This couch is not your friend. Come on, make that call. You spend all your time on the phone all day anyway; make the call that can give you a future!” He explains that at Allied College, you can go to school before work, after work, whatever. They’ll work with you to get you started on a career. He points out that everyone talks about a dead-end job, but you never hear of a dead-end career.
The ads, while well done, give no clue whatsoever as to what kind of career Allied College intends to prepare you for. It may be in the fine print at the bottom, but I have a 32” screen and 20/13 vision and I couldn’t read it. For all I know, Allied College intends to train you in the burgeoning field of accordion repair, or give you the skills you need to make big bucks as a drawbridge oiler…
Other schools, however, tell you exactly what career path they intend for you, and a large majority of them are pitching the same two products. From the content of these ads, I can only conclude that America suffers from a massive shortage of people capable of giving massages, and our hospitals and doctor’s offices are woefully understaffed with employees who have the requisite skills to do medical coding and billing.
Come on, now! How long can it take to learn how to rub someone? I realize that you have to have a license in this state if you want to call yourself a “massage therapist,” but how much is there really to learn? Circulation issues, cramps, numbness? What else?
And even if you didn’t have to pay a bunch of money to the school to get your license, how great is the demand? Unlike car insurance (or food), how many people need a massage? Or want it badly enough to spend money on it instead of buying something else? If you had an extra $100 to blow, would you spend it on a massage, or would you rather take your kid to a baseball game, buy 500 more rounds of ammo, or take your wife or girlfriend out to dinner? Here’s a radical concept: Tell your girlfriend you’ll take her out to a nice dinner if she’ll give you a massage first. You get the massage and a nice dinner for the same $100! Where are all these people clamoring (with hundred dollar bills in hand) for average-looking strangers in blue scrubs to rub them?
And just how “hot” (their word) is the career of medical coding and billing? Isn’t this something that’s similar to data entry? I would think that anyone who can use Microsoft Office would be able to pick up the skills for medical coding and billing pretty quickly, like maybe two weeks. And remember, the school wants you to pay them for this instruction. Wouldn’t it be a shrewd move to go to a doctor’s office and offer to work for six months for free if they would teach you how to do medical coding and billing? At the end of six months, if they don’t hire you, and no one else will, either, at least you’re not in debt for the $20,000+ that a year of tuition costs at one of these schools. It’s only cost you six months of time and no out-of-pocket money to find out it’s not a “hot” career, instead of twice as long and $20,000.
My favorite “career training” ad is one offered by a local business college for Fashion Merchandising. It features a cartoon drawing (one step above a stick figure) of a young woman squealing about the exciting world of FASHION!, again promising to give you the training to succeed in this hot new career.
What, I wondered, were the prospective students expecting? To go to classes and then all become buyers for Macy’s? To open their own women’s clothing stores? (Talk about a saturated market!)
What skills does the school teach you, so that you could properly merchandise different fashions? How to put price tags on women’s clothing? How to display the clothing in an efficient and attractive manner by putting it on a mannequin? Then I thought of all the things I would need to learn about how to steer women towards the fashions that would best work with their physical features.
If a woman was slender, they’d teach me to steer her towards more tailored, form-fitting styles; if she was concerned about the large size of her posterior, they’d tell me to suggest she tie a large scarf in a “busy” print (such as paisley) around her waist, so that the scarf would cover her backside.
And if the woman had one of those shapeless, soft, and dumpy-looking bodies, with a face only a mother could love, the Fashion Merchandising instructor would explain that I should suggest she try a loose-fitting half-sleeve top, in a color that matched her eyes, with detailing on the hems, and tightly woven embroidery on the front that spelled out in three-inch block letters I GIVE HEAD ON THE FIRST DATE.
My friend the bankruptcy lawyer told me that he’d had quite a few graduates of these “career training” schools come in his office to declare bankruptcy. These schools are all set up as 501C3 not-for-profit corporations, just like Harvard and Princeton.* And student loans from not-for-profit schools are Federally guaranteed.
The schools are selling empty dreams, and as such are basically scams. The way it works is the schools offer to take back a note for the entire tuition amount, say $25,000. The student pays nothing up front, and the 9% interest doesn’t start accruing until after graduation. The school then immediately sells the note for $20,000 to a bank. The bank gets a $25,000 9% loan for $20,000 instead of a $20,000 3% Treasury bill. If the student defaults on the loan, the federal guarantees kick in, so the bank is covered.
It doesn’t matter if the graduate can’t find work in his hot new career field. The school makes money, the bank makes money, and the only people hurt are the graduate and of course all of us taxpayers that ultimately pay most or all of the bill.
* I wonder if alumni of Fashion Merchandising, Medical Coding & Billing, Massage Therapy, and Truck Driving schools have class reunions or get solicitations for Annual Giving or Capital Fund drives…?
John Ross 5/24/2007
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