Brandy and I sat down last night to watch a movie, something we do with decreasing frequency due to the demands of a two child household that is also inhabited by an adult dependent. It’s tough to find time to squeeze in two hours for passive entertainment.

But last night, we did it. We found the time. And we used it to watch Rachel Getting Married.  At 1:53 in length, it was going to run right up until Gareth’s nurse arrived, so time was precious if we hoped to finish the movie before having our evening interrupted by yet another outside influence. With that in mind, we loaded in the Blu-Ray disc.

And waited for the progress bar.

And saw it start to play BD promos.

And discovered we couldn’t stop the promos. Or open the menus. In fact, my attempts to do so inexplicably resulted in us being dumped out to the PS3 crossbar interface. We went through this process four times before I relented and decided we were just going to have to sit through the promo.

Once the promo ended, the trailers started. In the immortal words of Will Smith in all of his action films, “Oh HELL naw!”

Menu still wouldn’t work. Stop didn’t work. So I tried Next. That worked! It… skipped to the next trailer. I had to do this several more times to get through the trailers and finally get to the damn menu!

Once there, everything was fine, but I turned to Brandy and said, “You know who made us go through all that crap? Somebody in marketing.”

The lesson here, folks, is that you aren’t going to sell stuff by annoying your consumer. So stop annoying them.

Bonus tip for marketing folks: If your customer is already in the process of consuming your product, you don’t need to remind them how great it is. Putting an ad for Blu-Ray at the start of a Blu-Ray disc is relatively pointless. The viewer had a choice to watch a standard DVD, but chose not to - you have them, they don’t need to be beat over the head with it.