Something's Fishy.

 

Something stinks. And it ain't just the fish.

About a year ago, I got rid of a monopoly cable and internet provider called (in my neighborhood) Xfinity which is owned by Comcast, which has a market-cap of just about $100 billion.

The service I had been paying for was non-Xistant. At that point I unplugged my television and since then have only watched about ten minutes of TV, a Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy game with my son-in-law who for some reason kept insisting the Patriots were playing.

By the way, Xfinity refused to come to my house to pick up their equipment and are now threatening to charge me $300 if I don't return it, though they were the ones who left it with me. What's more, while they had collected taxes from me, they've paid, most years, $0 in federal corporate tax. 

Sounds like a felon-in-chief I know.

Next time you hear someone say "the system is rigged," they're probably not talking about things like this, but this is rigging at its very repugnant-can worst.

A few weeks ago I got an inkling through the floorboards that my wife wanted to me to figure out how to restore TV service. My son-in-law (who is good with these things) had suggested YouTube TV (owned by another monopoly, Alphabet--they own roughly 91-percent of search). Alphabet is another company that loopholes its way out of paying billions in taxes. If you ever wonder why your taxes are so high, it's because there's are so low.

In any event, I went to sign up for YouTube TV. I found it cost $72.99/month including a bunch of things I didn't ask for, don't want and will never use. But, I figured, paying $875.88/year for commercial-free TV would be worth it.  

Except YouTube TV is not commercial free. 

And, I think the $72.99/month fee is promotional only and will rise after three months. Only I couldn't find out for sure because 
YouTube Paid Service Terms of Service legal copy is 36 pages long or 12,592 words. I couldn't even begin to make my way through it.

After all, it's 46 times as long as the Gettysburg Address, 3.5 times as long as the Magna Carta, and 2.86 times as long as the US Constitution (the document, not the ancient warship.)

This is a long overture to the opera that's about to begin:

Everything in amerika, as it is currently constituted, is a lie. The YouTube TV is a good example. 

Of the people, by the people, for the people? OK, boomer.

I grew up in an amerika where a half-hour TV show was 27 minutes of show and about three minutes of commercial. The ratio of programming to commercial was, back then, about 9:1. 

Watching that "1," gave us our TV shows without out-of-pocket costs. Today, a 30-minute show is between 20 and 22 minutes of programming and 8-10 minutes of commercials. Putting the ratio of programming to commercial at between 2:1 or 2.4:1. 

We spend between 28% and 33% of our watching time paying. Then we pay once again in dollars to get access to watch commercials.

Today, you are paying twice for about 25-percent less programming.

As much as this post is about the TV ripoff, as I said above, it's really about everything. It's about searching for a hotel in Nebraska and getting listings for hotels in California, because someone's sold my search terms. It's about service charges for no service. It's about the subscriptions you can't cancel. The resort charges you can't opt out of. The plethora of tiny cuts that wound us all, because amerika is a rip-off-ocracy.

It's the vacation days you can't use because your agency is so understaffed and you can't carry over. It's the prices that go up when commodity prices go up, but don't come down when they go down. 

As advocates for companies, we in advertising should be denouncing practices like the above--practices that are perpetrated by virtually every company and every ad agency and now, every government agency. We don't, because those who employ (and therefore control) us are profiting from them. 

Ad Holding Companies, which are largely owned the same institutional investors that own award shows like Cannes, pay the award shows to boost the agencies who then boost the award shows. Or Mark Read, when he was CEO of WPP sold Kantar, then (though he's still being paid by WPP) is hired by Kantar as Chairman. 

This is all legal of course. But it's the most venal sort of backscratching I can think of.

If a fish begins to rot from the head, we seem already to be heading quickly anus-ward at the speed of an out-of-control self-driving electric car.

You'll be charged for that, too.