Television advertisement

A television advertisement (variously called a television commercial, commercial or ad in American English, and known in British English as an advert) is a span of television programming produced and paid for by an organization, which conveys a message, typically to market a product or service. Advertising revenue provides a significant portion of the funding for most privately owned television networks. The vast majority of television advertisements today consist of brief advertising spots, ranging in length from a few seconds to several minutes (as well as program-length infomercials). Advertisements of this sort have been used to promote a wide variety of goods, services and ideas since the beginning of television.

The effects of television advertising upon the viewing public (and the effects of mass media in general) have been the subject of philosophical discourse by such luminaries as Marshall McLuhan. The viewership of television programming, as measured by companies such as Nielsen Media Research, is often used as a metric for television advertisement placement, and consequently, for the rates charged to advertisers to air within a given network, television program, or time of day (called a "daypart").

Super Bowl

The Super Bowl is the annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL), the highest level of professional football in the United States. The game culminates a season that begins in the late summer of the previous calendar year. Normally, Roman numerals are used to identify each game, rather than the year in which it is held. For example, Super Bowl I was played on January 15, 1967, following the 1966 regular season. The single exception to this rule is Super Bowl 50, which was played on February 7, 2016, following the 2015 regular season.

The game was created as part of a merger agreement between the NFL and its then-rival league, the American Football League (AFL). It was agreed that the two leagues' champion teams would play in the AFL–NFL World Championship Game until the merger was to officially begin in 1970. After the merger, each league was redesignated as a "conference", and the game has since been played between the conference champions to determine the NFL's league champion. Currently, the National Football Conference (NFC) leads the league with 26 wins to 23 wins for the American Football Conference (AFC). The Pittsburgh Steelers have the most Super Bowl victories with six.

Nostalgia Critic

Nostalgia Critic is an American comedy webseries created, written, edited, directed and performed by Doug Walker. The series initially launched on YouTube in July 2007 before moving to Walker's own site That Guy with the Glasses, then to Channel Awesome. The show follows Walker as the titular Nostalgia Critic, a bitter and sarcastic film critic who reviews films and television shows from his childhood and recent past, usually with comically exaggerated rage. The show often alternates the Critic's angry rants and juvenile humor with legitimate analysis of the episode's subject.

Walker briefly retired the series in August 2012 to work on other projects, even writing the character out of existence in the Channel Awesome film To Boldly Flee. However, on January 23, 2013, Walker announced the show's imminent return in a narrative video called "The Review Must Go On". The show subsequently returned with a more narrative and sketch-driven sixth season, beginning on February 5, 2013 with a review of The Odd Life of Timothy Green.

Top Five

Top Five is a 2014 American comedy film written and directed by Chris Rock. The film, which stars Rock, Rosario Dawson, and Gabrielle Union, was screened in the Special Presentations section of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. The movie follows New York City comedian and film star Andre Allen (Rock), who has to confront his past and comedic career while doing an interview with journalist Chelsea Brown (Dawson). The film was released on December 12, 2014, by Paramount Pictures.

Plot

New York Times reporter Chelsea Brown is spending a day interviewing comedian and recovering alcoholic Andre Allen, star of the hit film franchise Hammy The Bear, about a cop in a bear suit. He is attempting a foray into serious films with Uprize, in which he portrays Haitian Revolution figure Dutty Boukman, and sensitive to criticism, particularly by Times critic James Nielson, whose previous reviews of Andre's work have been negative and insulting. As the interview begins in his limousine, Andre recalls his lowest point, when he was in Houston in 2003 and met Jazzy Dee, who supplied him with drugs, alcohol and women. Yet after Jazzy refused to pay the women, they contended they were raped, leading to Andre's arrest.

Super Bowl commercials

The U.S. television broadcast of the Super Bowl – the championship game of the National Football League (NFL) – features many high-profile television commercials, colloquially known as Super Bowl ads. The phenomenon is a result of the game's extremely high viewership and wide demographics: Super Bowl games have frequently been among the United States' most watched television broadcasts, with Nielsen having estimated that Super Bowl XLIX in 2015 was seen by at least 114.4 million viewers in the United States, surpassing the previous year's Super Bowl as the highest-rated television broadcast in U.S. history. As such, advertisers have typically used commercials during the Super Bowl as a means of building awareness for their products and services among this wide audience, while also trying to generate buzz around the ads themselves so they may receive additional exposure, such as becoming a viral video.

Super Bowl commercials have become a cultural phenomenon of their own alongside the game itself; many viewers only watch the game to see the commercials, national surveys (such as the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter) judge which advertisement carried the best viewer response, and CBS has aired yearly specials since 2000 chronicling notable commercials from the game. Super Bowl advertisements have become iconic and well-known because of their cinematographic quality, unpredictability, humor, and use of special effects. The use of celebrity cameos has also been common in Super Bowl ads. A number of major brands, including Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Doritos, GoDaddy and Master Lock, have been well known for making repeated appearances during the Super Bowl.