Everything is so delightfully low-budg here...

As Gov. Palin justifies her veto of more than 26 mil clams aimed at an energy efficient infrastructure, and I read comments about people bagging about their tax dollars being mis-allocated...I realize a cultural anomaly up here...passable is ok here...if it works, it works; even if it is mediocre. They really don't pay much in the way of taxes at all...no sales tax, no state income tax...and though the cost of living is a little higher, most people get by on less.

This leads me to the fab commercials here. People do not pay for advertising...or rather they pay for the time slot and then stick some home video schlock in there and expect it to sell...and it does.

Let me tell you- media producers not from here would be well out of their element. They woud make some well-written, nicely shot commercial, stick it on the TV, and then no one would respond because it was too well done, and is therefore for snobs, and automatically too pricey. I am not sure if this is something I find to be nice, or something I find to be horribly irritating.

I must say I love the old man from the Mattress Ranch commercials.



There are several others...all of them equally fantastic...and rediculous...

But the point is, this is something that I find to be somewhat bizzare. Grand Rapids is by no means a huge market, but it is not small either. I think the quality is pretty consistant with other media markets I am familiar with- Milwaukee, Chicago, South Bend- they all have fairly good production quality. We are not too far beyond forcasts with magneted partly cloudy slap-ons.

I don't say this to be bitchy at all...after all, does the average person get something different from a doppler image in real time than they get from magnets on an alaska-shaped white board? I don't really understand the weather patters here to get a radar image anyway...at home I do...so I see a big difference from newscast to newscast. The wider question, however, is how much added benefit do we get from spending more on fancy commercials and news production. I mean...are we paying so much more in overhead to pay for ads that its not really worth it? Clearly in Alaska the answer is yes. At home I am not so sure...I do like shiny things...but I am also kinda cheap...like a dutchman...you learn it up there in Dutchville...Maybe we are all just buying in to some cultural projection that doesn't or shouldn't exist.