How to advertise at me: Buy Podcasts and Hulu. And giant billboards, huge ones!

If you want to send an ad message my way, if you need my ass to get up off whatever it's on and to a store or a show or a website ... you gotta buy podcasts and Hulu. And of course giant billboards. Who, after all, can resist giant letters telling you to do stuff? (see above)

See?

Of course when I'm indoors billboards don't work. But don't advertise on a network or cable show and expect me to sit through the ads, especially since the days of Chuck Woolery's "we'll be back in 2 and 2" are long gone. Ad breaks can be almost 5 minutes sometimes.

In fact, there was a TV Guide Network show called Stand Up in Stilettos and I found that if you hit the right key on the cable remote to advance the recording five minutes you could actually jump from the end of the last comedian's segment directly to host Kate Flannery introducing the next one. Five full minutes.

I don't watch anything live. With about nine minutes of ads in a half hour show it seems foolish.

The ads I do hear and see sponsor podcasts and shows on Hulu. Even Hulu Plus has advertising. You can't fast forward through the ads for your $7.99 a month, that just gives you the power to push the stuff to your big TV (via Roku, your smart TV, Google Chromecast, etc.).

I wonder what it would cost without advertising. Anyone?  Just an estimate is all I need.

Most of the shows I watch on Hulu have only four ad breaks a minute or shorter. VERY doable. Not frustrating at all.

Sometimes if I HAVE to watch a broadcast or cable show live as it airs I actually forget what was going on in the program because it was SO LONG AGO. 

(Yeah, I'm getting older too.)

The other place you can advertise at me is on my favorite podcasts. Sure, you can fast forward through those ads too, but usually they're read by the show's host and they're so integrated with the program that you ... uh, you just don't.

In fact, some of my favorite WTFpod moments have been when Marc Maron does the big sell for AdamAndEve.com. Very very entertaining. His tone is perfect. Check one here, click this link and then go to 12:35 on his recent Ben Sidran episode. Perfectly executed.

My Hulu membership in fact started from a podcast ad, from Comedy Bang Bang.

Of course I'll always have love for giant billboards. I don't need them to dance or light up or tell me the time and weather. Just be clever and have great visuals.

If you're trying to reach me otherwise, however, you're gonna have to knock on my front door. And, uh ... don't knock on my front door.

DON'T!

Breakfast with Maron and Oswalt, Attempting Normal, patent trolls

Good morning Marc Maron and Patton Oswalt.

BTW, Maron's new set of essays, Attempting Normal, pictured here despite the lack of text to wrap around said image (editors note: I found text, it's a "win win"), is now available for pre-order from Amazon and will be at all the usual outlets April 30th, BUT ... even more important at this moment is this from Maron's newsletter this week. A patent troll is descending on the podcasting world right now:

If you all weren’t aware yet you should know that some podcasters are under attack from patent trolls. Adam Carolla is actually being sued. A patent troll called Personal Audio claims to own the patent for podcasting and is suing Adam and some other podcasts and sent letters of coercion to me and about a dozen others. It’s serious bullshit. I know you’re thinking, “How can you patent ‘podcasting?’ That’s ridiculous.” It is ridiculous, even when you look at the patent, but now someone has to pay LOTS of money to prove that.

Patent trolls are companies who don’t make anything or don’t sell anything, but own patents and use them as a weapon to extort money from businesses and individuals, usually demanding licensing fees that are cheaper than actually litigating a case in court. A patent troll uses patents as legal weapons, instead of actually creating any new products or coming up with new ideas. Instead, trolls are in the business of litigation (or even just threatening litigation). The business model works because patent litigation is so expensive—often costing well into the millions of dollars. This means that when facing the threat of a patent suit, many will choose to settle instead of fight. Of course, this just further emboldens the patent trolls.

Podcasters are uniting to figure out a course of action and help each other. The EFF has been helping us and also asking us to help them support new legislation called the SHIELD Act to make Patent Trolling less prevalent. Please go here eff.org/shield and let your representatives know how you feel.

I may need more of your help around this problem in upcoming months. I will let you know.

For more on patent trolls from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, click here.