Instead of being loud and flashy and hard to ignore, this type of TV ad will have very low volume sound and feature a strange intermittent staticky noise in the background, and include pictures which are blank or pixelated on one side of the screen.

The viewer, wondering whether there is something wrong with the television or cable box, will naturally flip to another channel and back again, adjust the volume, turn the power off and on, and finally conclude that the strangeness is actually part of the TV commercial itself. But by the time the viewer has come to this conclusion, he has absorbed nearly a complete advertisement. Ha!
-- phundug, Apr 24 2011

Wouldn't this distract the viewer from the content? If it did, would that maybe make it subliminal and therefore more effective?

Wondering whether it would work on both flat screen and CRT TV sets though, because they presumably go on the blink in different ways.
-- nineteenthly, Apr 24 2011


Fake closed-captions could be added, also. The viewer would sit through 3 commercials in a row before figuring out how to turn them off, and then realizing that they were already off.
-- phundug, Apr 24 2011


[+] for deviousness.
-- gisho, Apr 25 2011



random, halfbakery