from MSNBC
It was Saturday morning, we were idly watching MSNBC, and at first we just sort of found the commercial below amusing. Then we realized that, while Microsoft was explaining to us why its CRM system was flawless and wonderful and somehow thinking we wouldn't notice that they were trying to pass off danishes and cheese buns as blintzes, we were reading about how Sinbad wasn't really dead and about some trucker convicted of murder at the bottom of the screen. The crawl was still on! Weird. And weirdly fascinating. We followed the trucker story into the next commercial, which featured Lance Armstrong running, all intense and breathy and sweaty. We would have enjoyed it had the crawl not informed us that the trucker, Wayne Ford, had been arrested in 1998 when he'd walked into a police station holding a severed breast. He was convicted of the murder of four women. Mmm, blintzes are delicious! Watch it here:
So what was the deal? Was that an accident or did they intentionally marry Microsoft with news of the grody and horrific? Well, both: "We started running the crawl during commercials last week," confirmed MSNBC spokesperson Leslie Schwartz, who said they were "trying it out." Both Schwartz and her colleague, MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines, declined to comment further on the reason behind the initiative (since it's new), though Schwartz confirmed that it was the regular newscrawl, unedited as it scrolled into commercial (which means that Microsoft and Lance Armstrong came by their association with Wayne Ford by chance — can you imagine, though, if that story had crawled during a commercial for the brand Ford? Synergies!).
Keeping the crawl on during commercials is an unusual move, but not unheard of — crawls have been used to that effect during times of big news/crisis, and at CNBC and Bloomberg, the tickers run straight through the commercials (and recently, networks have taken to running promos along the bottom of the screen while the action is going on — we're thinking of a promo for "The Closer" featuring Kyra Sedgwick and a distracting flashlight). In this case, MSNBC has hit on a formula that works for advertisers (keep viewers watching during the commercial, to see whether Sinbad is still alive or what the trucker did) but, unwittingly, on a pitfall of the system as well (what if the crawl underneath the Microsoft ad had been about how iPods sales were going through the roof?). Commercial time is expensive and advertisers have the right to be picky, but either way it's too soon to tell which way this crawl will crwumble. Yes, we know that makes no sense. But did you try the blintzes?
Check out what Jon Stewart once had to say about CNN's crawl to Wolf Blitzer after the jump! Yeah, we know what makes you click, tough guy.
From "The Daily Show" circa 2004, as excerpted on CNN's "American Morning," July 13, 2004:
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: You like that crawl at the bottom? You like that?JON STEWART, HOST: I love the crawl. I love the fact that the crawl has nothing to do with what's going on the TV.
BLITZER: No. It confuses me, too.
STEWART: My favorite one?
BLITZER: Yes?
STEWART: The bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein were being displayed and underneath it on the crawl it said, "Beyonce doesn't like the word 'bootylicious.'"
Awesome crawl-ism! But even better is the sligthly challenging, vaguely sexy way Wolf is all, "You like that crawl? Yeah? You like it? Tell me you like it, baby. Awwww, yeah." Or, um, maybe that's just us.
