Marketing professor Deborah Mitchell recalls watching a hushed, serious scene on NBC’s “ER” that involved a stricken victim and the clicking of a dialysis machine. After the scene faded to black, she was surprised by a sudden change in tone, from soothing to stentorian, as an ad blared forth for snack food.
“How inappropriate! It’s one thing to have your creative be relatively upbeat, relatively perky, and you hope it’s not going to come right after a scene like that, very somber,” said Ms, Mitchell, a senior lecturer at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business. The sound is jarring, she said, but it certainly grabs the viewer.