When I went down the stairs to go to work this morning, I found that someone had dropped a flyer through the mail slot. This is what it said (I am retaining all the capital letters used in the original):
WATCH THE HOUSE GUESTS SLEEP?
WATCH A PARALYZED WOMAN WALK?
THIS IS REALITY TV
DIRECTV CHANNEL 365 EVERY NIGHT AT 8.00PM-ET
watch online at: www.god.tv/realitytv
As usual, the conservative evangelical Christians seem to be well ahead of religious liberals in their use of new media. Won’t some nice liberal religious philanthropist step forward to fund a Unitarian Universalist online video series that’s also shown on cable TV? No? You say they big ads in dead tree publications like Time magazine? Oh well….
Were you remotely tempted to watch?
I’m sure not.
Doesn’t seem like an effective ad to me.
CC — Yeah, I was tempted to watch, in the same way that I’m tempted to slow down and gawk when I pass a really bad accident on the highway.
Yeah, it’s a sucky ad in the sense that the only people who will pay much attention to it are the people who would watch god.tv anyway.
Even so, here are some things I think about:– (1) They raised enough money and they are organized enough to put together a series of videos. Wow. (2) I thought the “Left Behind” books really sucked, too, but millions of people have read them. ((And please don’t say that Philip Pullman’s trilogy is “so UU” because personally I thought those books pretty much sucked too, and I don’t see much in the way of UU values in them.)) (3) Being both a UU and a Web geek, I would love to be able to say to my friends, Hey check out the cool online video series that just happens to be based on UU values. But all I can say is, Hey, did you see the ad in the New York Times? No? How about Time magazine? No? Yeah well I don’t read those publications either, but that’s all I got.
Ok, that makes sense.
Amen! Good UU video for local cable TV is our church’s need too.