There's One Born Every Thirty Seconds

For the third year in a row, American Idol, Fox's ratings winner, will command the highest advertising prices on television, with a 30-second spot going for $500,000 to $700,000, Advertising Age reported Thursday. The network will charge the most during Tuesday night's performance show, with Wednesday night's results show remaining the second-most pricey hour of TV. This estimate doesn't include, of course, what advertisers will end up paying for 30 seconds of commercial time during Idol's finale. Companies ponied up $1.3 million for spots this year.

It's hard for me to imagine that marketers are getting their money's worth out of a half million dollars for an advertisement. During the commercials, I'm imagining most people on the phone to their friends complaining about the one who didn't advance or cheering about the one who did. Watching a Gap ad may be the last on the list of priorities that may include:

A bathroom break (for purging of some sort)
A refrigerator break (for as much alcohol as it takes to get through the show)
Switching over to check the score of the baseball game
Checking E! to see if Clay Aiken has another new hairstyle
Whining to your wife/girlfriend, "Do we have to watch the rest of this?"

If I'm going to spend that kind of money, I want to get something out of it. Such as:

HELSINKI, Finland (Reuters) - A fee of 25,500 euros ($32,000) is way too much for a woman to charge a man for fondling her bosom, a Finnish district court ruled. The court jailed a couple in their twenties for more than a year for charging a 74-year-old who suffers from dementia a total of 25,500 euros to enjoy the woman's breasts on 10 occasions.
"Based on general life experience alone, it is indisputably clear that a 25,500 euro charge is disproportionate to the compensation in question," Judge Hasse Hakki, who heard the case, told Reuters Friday.

Aww - what does he know? After all, it's only $3,200 per grope. Besides, the guy is suffering from dementia. Do you think anyone in their right mind would pay that for handling boobs? What do you suppose the Bush's pay the White House Chief of Staff? I'll bet it's a lot more than $3,200!

Besides, what if it was her boobs? Wouldn't that be worth a few bucks? That might qualify as a "general life experience".

As you know, there is no end to the ways in which people can be separated from their money. Witness the Pete Rose baseballs, detailed here a few days ago. They were scheduled to go up for auction, but ESI Entertainment Systems Inc., a British Columbia company that provides gaming products and services, offered $30,000 for the 30 balls. They paid $1,000 each for them, even though identical baseballs are offered on Rose's web site for $299 each. Those whacky Canadians!

Meanwhile...
For the first time, Forbes magazine's list of the 400 richest Americans consists exclusively of people worth $1 billion or more. As a group, the people who made the rankings released Thursday are worth a record $1.25 trillion, compared with $1.13 trillion last year. The rich are indeed getting richer.

Now we know what they're doing with the money:
Squandering it on near-worthless advertising...
Squeezing breasts... well, OK, so it's not all wasted!
Buying baseballs for $701 more than the market price...

and
...buying these goofy-ass things for twice what they will be selling for in about a month. Now I know what Elmo is laughing at. Listings on Ebay tonight ranged from a laughable $25,000 to 99 cents, with most falling into the $50 range. The list price was $34.99, but they were gone quickly, and one assumes that the Ebay sellers scooped up most of them. They're probably Wal-Mart employees who met the truck at the loading dock.
That's right, one listing for $25,000 (or $80,000 if you care to "Buy it Now"). It's listed here. Plus $7 shipping, which takes some nerve. Yes, Elmo, we're all laughing at that one. How much would a shotgun cost to blow your fuzzy little head off?

It seems that intelligence and money are not necessarily made to work together. As we know, no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the general public.