As I exclaimed on last weeks BitCast, G4 had an incredible exclusive up their sleeve by broadcasting the big three conferences live on television. What I didn’t mention, because I didn’t know, is how badly they would screw it up by doing so.

I suppose the argument would be that because this year would mark the first time the conferences were broadcast on TV that G4 wouldn’t know how to approach it.

G4 didn’t impress anyone last night, all they did was pile commercial breaks into a 2-hour conference - of commercials.

More anger after the violent jump!

Breaking to commercial during a live show where anything could be announced? Who thought that was a good idea?

Can you imagine the meeting to set this up?

Exec 2: “We should broadcast the big three E3 press conferences live on TV this year!”

Exec 1: “Brilliant! How can we fit advertisements into it?”

Exec 2: “Well the whole thing is a giant ad, we could get support from the gaming companies since we’re showcase their wares on television…”

Exec 1: “Or we can interrupts the conferences to play commercials so people can miss major announcements.”

Exec 2: “Sir, that is why you are number one! Its not like people are watching it to see it all, right?”

When the conference broke for commercial last night for the first time, I thought maybe Adam Sessler was just having fun with us. Surely they didn’t think going to commercials for reality shows and bad 30-second reviews was wise, did they?

Well, they kept fuckin’ doing it all night. If you only watched the conference on television you missed the following:

  1. The end of the Rock Band segment (cut at end)
  2. The announcement of Viva Pinata Party Animals
  3. Mass Effect’s latest trailer (cut into the end of the trailer)
  4. Scene It? details and controller (announcement made before cut)
  5. Naruto: Rise of a Ninja trailer (cut into the end)
  6. Viva Pinata going to PC
  7. Lost Odyssey Trailer
  8. The majority of Shane Kim’s presentation
  9. Games for Windows Coming Soon Montage

Some decisions outright baffled me. During the Xbox 360 Coming Soon montage the director of the G4 Coverage thought it was a good idea to break from the direct feed video and show some of the montage by pointing a camera at the big screen… for a minute it felt like I was watching a downloaded movie from one of those CAM groups.

Probably the best part - and worst offense to watchers was the CNN Crawler at the bottom of the screen.

The ticker would reiterate any point mentioned moments before it and eventually just ran the same four pieces of information again and again.

The entire program was an advertisement, and for this reason the show should have been sponsored by any number of companies and run commercial free.

If that ticker ran something like: “This Commercial-Free Media Event is broadcast live brought to you by - insert company name.”

If you must run ads, do it when they are running pie charts - not new Mass Effect footage.

When you have an exclusive event like this, one that even Peter Moore mentioned during the conference, you should think about effective advertising.

Is it effective to go to commercial and make me miss half the event to get me to watch an ad for a new show about Smart Geeks (G4TECHTV Canada) or see someone give Need for Speed: Carbon DS a decent review score?

No! Advertisements like this just make it on my list of products or television shows that I will purposely avoid for the remainder of my life because they have wronged me in some way.

Luckily there were no ads for toilet paper or Hot Pockets - or my night would have been doubly bad.