It's not your imagination. They really are worse.
After more than a decade of living in an entertainment golden age...
Filled with more and better options, with less advertising, than ever before in human history...
Are the good times over?
Almost every major streaming service has recently begun inserting advertising into its programming.
And it's NOT your imagination... the ads really are more disruptive and obnoxious than traditional television commercials.
So what's driving the sudden advertising stampede in the streaming services that we used to love? How much worse is it going to get?
And who in their right mind still thinks that intrusive advertising, inserted into something we'd rather be watching, is a way to win hearts and minds in the year 2025?
We'll discuss all this and more with world-renowned film and television critic Matt Zoller Seitz, the editor at large of RogerEbert.com (where he authored this barnburner)
Matt is a Pulitzer finalist who writes as well for New York magazine and Vulture.com. He's the founder of MZS.press, the arts bookstore of the internet, and appears in print in The New York Times, Salon, and Rolling Stone. And he's the author of a handful of New York Times bestsellers, including the Wes Anderson Collection, The Sopranos Sessions, and Mad Men Carousel.
Transcript:
Dusty Weis
A really annoying thing happened to me the other month. I was crashed out on the couch, dozing off to vintage episodes of The Simpsons. It's been my comfort blanket and my cure for insomnia for more than 25 years now, when all of the sudden a blaring advertisement for Little Caesars came on and jolted me out of my near slumber.
And at this point, you might be saying. But, Dusty, all the streaming services have added advertising lately. To which I respond, okay, but why me?
Or you might be saying, but you could just pay more money to upgrade to the ad free tier. But I'm sorry, I am not in the habit of rewarding service providers with more money because they chose to make their user experience significantly worse.
Which brings us to the crux of today's episode.
After more than a decade of living in an entertainment golden age filled with more and better options, with less advertising than ever before in human history, are the good times over? What's driving the sudden advertising stampede in the streaming services that we used to love? How much worse is it going to get?
And who in their right mind still thinks that intrusive advertising, inserted into something we'd rather be watching, is a way to win hearts and minds in the year 2025?
Matt Zoller Seitz
It was as if they knew that what they were doing was wrong.
Dusty Weis
We'll discuss all of that and more with Matt Zoller Seitz, film critic and editor at large of RogerEbert.com
I'm Dusty Weis. From Podcamp Media, this is Lead Balloon, a podcast about important tales from the worlds of PR, marketing and branding, told by the well-meaning communications professionals who live them.
Dusty Weis
Thank you for tuning in. Make sure that you're following us and tell a friend if you dig the show. Our guest today is film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, the editor at large of RogerEbert.com and a Pulitzer finalist who writes as well for New York magazine and for Vulture.com.
He's the founder of MZS.press, the arts bookstore of the internet, and appears in print in The New York Times, Salon, and Rolling Stone.
He's the author of a handful of New York Times bestsellers, including the Wes Anderson Collection, The Sopranos Sessions, and Mad Men Carousel. So, Matt, thank you so much for joining us here on Lead Balloon.
Matt Zoller Seitz
Thanks for having me.
Dusty Weis
So I've got to say, Matt, by virtue of your career as someone who observes and critiques mass media for a living, you're probably a little bit more attuned to this than the average viewer is. But how would you say the experience of watching streaming programing has changed over the last five years, and particularly over the last year here?
Matt Zoller Seitz
Oh, gosh. I mean, it's gotten so bad.
Dusty Weis
That's a very frank assessment.
And I think that, the layman watches streaming right now and says, God, it is so much worse than it used to be.
Matt Zoller Seitz
Well, I don't even know where to begin. Which part of the badness would you like to talk about first? Would you like to talk about the decline in standards of lighting and cinematography, or the fact that, it's almost impossible to understand what anybody's saying anymore because the sound effects and music are micced so loud? Or do we want to go at it from a more business type standpoint and talk about how one thing that every filmmaker had in common was they hated when their movies were shown on television and they were edited for content and broken up into pieces and there were ads put in the middle.
But here's the thing. Until fairly recently, if you watched a movie that was edited for television, they took care to try to make the experience as painless as possible. And basically, like now, the reason I think you asked me on this show, because of the column that I wrote about what they've done to my ad breaks.
You know, like Brando in The Godfather, looking at the corpse of Sonny. “They massacred my boy!”
It's so bad. It used to be that they would manufacture these little very quick fades to black…
Dusty Weis
To sort of ease you into the break to signal that it was coming. And almost as a show of respect for the fact that they were interrupting something that you wanted to be watching with something that you did not want to be watching.
Matt Zoller Seitz
Yeah. They had the common courtesy to do that. Like it was as if they knew that what they were doing was wrong. There was sort of like an implied apology and that little fade to black and that fade up when they came back from the ads. They've done away with that now.
So now you'll be watching like, Death on the Nile. And, you know, they'll gather all the suspects together at the end of it and they'll say, “Which leads me to the inescapable conclusion that the murderer is…”
And then suddenly there's an ad for diet pills.
Dusty Weis
So it is wildly frustrating because at first I thought it was my imagination. Having grown up in an era where ad breaks were inserted into movies, you come to expect that. And then we had this wonderful golden era where there were no ads in our movies, and we could watch these things on our favorite streaming service for a fee that we paid.
But we got the full experience of watching the movie, as we would in a theater without having to go to the theater.
Matt Zoller Seitz
Yeah, I mean, even then there were some downsides. Like pretty early, they started that thing where they won't just let the darn movie end. One of my favorite experiences when I go to the movies is the ending. And you sit there if you were moved or impressed or, you know, whatever, you get to sit there and listen to the end credits music and watch the credits roll and think about what you've just done.
And now you're like, you know, the lilting voice over and the southern drama fades away and it's like, “And that was the last time I ever saw my beloved grandfather...” And then…
Dusty Weis
And then they scoot it to the side and bring up an advertisement for the next piece of content.
Matt Zoller Seitz
Yeah. No, it's horrible. Horrible. But it's disrespect. I mean, there was always a bit of disrespect involved, and it was understandable that there was going to be some kind of compromise because, you know, like they say, it's not show friends. It's show business.
Like, you know, they're trying to make money off this stuff and recoup the cost of licensing it or purchasing it.
But I liked that there was this understanding between the movie, the network and the viewer that this was not natural and now what kills me is now they've traded the scalpel for like a hatchet, I guess, like, you know, the finesse that they used to have is gone. They don't care anymore.
I was asking more knowledgeable friends how it's done now, and they were saying it has to do with encoding the movie. And the problem is, there isn't one industry standard. So different streaming platforms will interpret the coding differently. And in some cases it's more precise than others.
Dusty Weis
Is it even being inserted by a person anymore, or is it some sort of algorithm?
Matt Zoller Seitz
It's some kind of algorithm. And that's probably part of the problem. And like, you know, yeah, I know the world's on fire and everything's falling apart. And, you know, a rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. This is not very high up on the list of things that we need to be obsessed with, or in the greater scheme of things, it's not so big.
But as somebody who loves art and entertainment, who makes fundamental respect for the artist kind of the center of everything that he does, it offends me.
Dusty Weis
It may be a first world problem, but it still deserves to be cataloged and commented on because if it's not called out, it can and probably will in this case get worse.
But before we get more into the why this is all happening, I hear a little voice at the back of my head and it's my wife, and she's telling me, well, if you don't like the ads, we could just pay $5 a month more and not have the ads inserted.
And my argument to her has been, under basic economic principles, we know that money incentivizes behavior. And accordingly, my moral compass points to no, I will not pay them more money to avoid watching the ads. We had a deal. The deal was I paid them a monthly subscription and I got ad free content.
And if I incentivize their adding ads into the thing, I'm essentially just creating more of the problem.
You liken the tiered approach of having an ad tier in an ad free tier to a mafia style protection racket. How do you figure?
Matt Zoller Seitz
That's totally what it is. “Nice little movie you have here. It would be a shame if something was to happen to it.”
I mean, that's kind of what it is. It's like you think it's bad. Well, maybe you should pay us a little more and it won't be bad.
I'm already here. I'm already paying you.
Why should you do this? I'm like, why? Why should I have to pay extra for the experience not not to suck?
Am I out of bounds for feeling that way? It's like, yes, I understand there's economics and, you know, the way it was priced originally where it was ad free for a very small amount of money, couldn't continue indefinitely.
Streaming is still kind of a loss leader like in the way that, you know, Uber was and I understand that. But you felt like somebody cared a little bit, a little bit. And now they don't. They don't even pretend.
And like YouTube used to be actually a pretty good place to watch things that you couldn't see anywhere else, like things that weren't distributed, that somebody had uploaded off of a VHS tape or something.
And also to listen to music like, I discovered a lot of music that wasn't major label music on YouTube that some regional singer-songwriter put up there.
It used to be that when you watched something on YouTube and listened to something via YouTube, there were ads at the beginning.
You could choose to put ads in the middle, but it seems like now the default is they just put the ad wherever.
So I'm sitting there building a couple of bookshelves and I put on Beethoven's Ninth, which is my favorite Beethoven symphony. And right when they get to the part where the oompah-pah German comes in to do a solo, there's an ad from the Army.
I'm a little too old to join the Army. I'm not sure why that was on that particular piece of music, but, you know, it's “content.” There's a word again, it's “content.”
Dusty Weis
You bring up an interesting point there, and that's the ad execs that are behind and a lot of these decisions, not just ad execs, the executives, the bean counters, the spreadsheet masters… they try to justify the experience by saying, well, we try to tailor the advertising using the data that we have about our customers. We try to specifically tailor the advertising experience to our listeners and viewers.
You, as a fellow who's past recruitment age, getting served up an ad for the Army, seem to be proving that that is not the case.
But even if it were the case, even if every advertisement were was particular targeted to you, does that logic track? Does that make the experience of having your programing interrupted by advertising better?
Matt Zoller Seitz
I mean, I don't know. And to be fair, sometimes they do seem to have a read on me. You know, I don't always get ads that are inappropriate. Sometimes I get ads that make me a little sad, like, have you planned your estate? You know, things like that.
Bladder problems. Try this medication. And then. And then I always have the list of side effects, which is longer than the ad. And sometimes there will be things in there like, “Side effects may include hair loss and death.”
And I'm like wait back up. What was the third thing?
Dusty Weis
Now go ahead and you know get back to your Wes Anderson movie.
Matt Zoller Seitz
Exactly right. Right. You know, I was just trying to watch a rerun of that western.
Dusty Weis
You tie this entire phenomenon… in an article that you wrote which I very much, enjoyed and the name of the article we'll link to it in the episode description was “Streaming Ads Are So Much Worse Than Traditional Ad Breaks.”
But you really started cooking toward the middle of that article when you attempted to tie this phenomenon of a worsening ad experience back to what is essentially the psyche of the executives who are making the decision to insert these ads.
And you brought up a word that comes up all the time in what I do, and that is “content.” And can I actually, if you have it in front of you, can I actually just, ask you to make a dramatic reading?
Matt Zoller Seitz
“This is what happens when we allow tech guys and money guys to redefine creativity as quote ‘content,’ a gross, degrading word that reduces centuries of imaginative efforts by the human race to a tube of flavorless gray paste. I first heard a tech guy refer to writing as content almost 25 years ago during a presentation at the Star-Ledger of New Jersey, where I used to write, about the brilliant idea of putting all of the daily newspaper’s content online for free and, quote, ‘monetizing it’ with display ads.”
“It's everywhere now, that word content. Even some artists have surrendered and now use the language of the oppressor. Maybe there's widespread understanding, perhaps weary acceptance, that the tech industry has never actually viewed creative effort as anything but a pack mule that could be saddled up with commerce. Whether the money is generated by selling user’s personal information to third parties, or by encrusting it with additional ads, is of no importance to them.”
Dusty Weis
Have you heard from other creatives, who have read this piece, that felt that it struck a chord with them? And what have they said?
Matt Zoller Seitz
I'm probably not going to hear from an executive who's mad at me, you know, over this, like that's not my audience. But certainly not just people who work in the television industry, but people who work in the film industry, in the music industry, in the publishing industry read this.
And they’re glad that I wrote it, because it's been bugging them, too. And I think there's a feeling that we have to make peace with whatever the world is. I don't think that's necessarily true. We can make choices. And, I think it's true that the way things are is kind of intolerable.
If you care about if you care about art at all, if you care about entertainment at all, it's just so classless.
It's so disrespectful. Even the worst movie I've ever seen in my life deserves to be treated better than the way it's treated in the streaming age. And I also don't think that it should be necessary to pay extra money not to have the experience stink, right?
I mean, I actually don't believe there should be first class on airplanes. I think we should all fly the same and the seats should be bigger. Elect me president. I'm running.
But I understand that, like, there's coach and there's first class. I get that. And that's kind of the idea of these tiers. But when you fly coach, like as miserable as it is, there's not somebody coming over and like smacking you on the back of the head every 17 to 20 minutes, you know?
Dusty Weis
Please don't give them ideas. “Pay us $50 and we'll stop smacking you on the back of the head.”
Matt Zoller Seitz
That's the no smacking ticket.
Dusty Weis
I think it speaks volumes about the industry that the executives in charge of these conglomerates, have chosen to describe the art that populates their platforms using a word that literally means “stuff that fills an empty place.”
It shows a degree of dispassion and disinterest in what that stuff that fills the empty place is and essentially puts the commerce first.
They don't care what it is that you're tuning in to watch, as long as you're paying them a monthly fee. And as long as they're getting paid for the ads that you see.
And it seems that we are not alone in our perception of these practices either, Matt. I was looking at a survey by the Video Advertising Bureau… again talking about the language of the oppressor, now we're using the intelligence of the enemy against them here.
But they found that 66% of 18 to 34 year old Americans prefer saving five bucks, and having to watch the commercials. And as of the first quarter of 2024, 85% of US Prime Video consumers had an ad supported account, 15% had the ad free subscription. Sort of by contrast, I did think it was interesting that 78% of Netflix subscribers and again, this is year old data now, but 78% of Netflix subscribers had an ad free account. Just 22% subscribed to the ad supported tier.
Is this what streaming providers had hoped for ultimately? Is it more profitable for them to get more people signed up for premium tiers, or to have eyeballs on the ads that they run when they can?
Matt Zoller Seitz
I don't know if they're really thinking about it in that granular of a fashion. And, if they say that they are, they may not be telling the truth. I think it's a question of whatever works.
There's a couple of things that seem to tie every technological change or refinement of the last 25 years in the world of computers, digital, online ad together.
And, one of them is the content is the thing that drives the development of the technology and the monetizing of the technology. And the number one job of the tech industry is to get that content as cheaply as possible, or ideally for free, which is why I included that anecdote about the time that, you know, at the Star-Ledger, 25 years ago, we had a presentation by a couple of young guys and badly fitting suits telling us that if we put all of our content online for free, that we would more than make up the difference by selling ads.
Well, we all know how that turned out. But the companies that told publications to give everything away for free, they did really well and are still around or they did well enough to sell to somebody else and they got out and they don't really care about anything that happened to the people whose content they basically took.
The other thing that I think is common about this is that former motto of, I guess it was Facebook, “move fast and break things.” We see we have a government of these guys now, you know, and the attitude is, if it's not illegal, we can do it. If it's a norm, not a law, we can do it.
If there's not somebody standing there specifically telling us, don't do this or you'll get arrested, we're going to do it. And it doesn't matter if they don't have a plan beyond get a bunch of money. Try to make this thing work over the course of maybe five years and if you can't just get out of it, declare bankruptcy and move on to the next scam, whatever it is.
I think with these folks who made the entire entertainment industry reorient itself around streaming. I think they were thinking hubristicly. Like, you know, we're going to reinvent blah, blah, blah. You hear that phrase a lot. We're going to disrupt this industry.
We're going to reinvent such and such. But they don't have a plan. They don't know what they're doing. And eventually where we've landed, my friend, is basic cable.
Dusty Weis
Right, we’re right back where we started.
Matt Zoller Seitz
Right where we started.
Dusty Weis
It costs way too much money every month, and the experience of watching it is crap.
Matt Zoller Seitz
Yeah. And you know, there's no rhyme or reason sometimes to what's on these platforms. It's sometimes it's like the dregs of what other people decided to kick out of their archives because they don't want to pay royalties to the people who made it. There’s all kinds of reasons why things end up in kind of a potluck type of thing.
And, there was a joke years ago, and it's still true. It's like, and I'm paraphrasing here, but it's like, have you seen this movie? It's on Fubo. No, wait a minute. It's on Klezmer. No, wait a minute. It's on Frumpy.
Dusty Weis
All these made up words. Yeah.
Matt Zoller Seitz
It's made up names. I don't think they thought about it. But that's why that's a joke about tech guys. Is they'll come at you with their eyes really big and go, I've got an idea for a new thing. What if we had something that was like a car, but it had 40 seats on it, and there were a certain number of stops that it made from one side of the city to the other. And you could pay a fee and you could just get on this thing and you could ride it until you get to your stop.
And you're like, you mean a bus?
Dusty Weis
You've reinvented the municipal bus system.
Matt Zoller Seitz
But at the cost of like $4 trillion.
Dusty Weis
So it sounds like what you're positing is… because my next question was going to be, is this sustainable? Do the streaming services risk pissing off their customers to the point where they start unsubscribing? And it sounds like you're positing that they don't care? It's a cash grab. They're going to loot the entertainment business for everything that they can carry out in briefcases and then leave the ashes in their wake.
And okay, that's an acceptable answer. But look, I remember watching TV back in the 90s, in the early 2000s. Ads were annoying, but they were an accepted part of the experience.
But I have kids at home, Matt, who did not grow up with these ads. And if you want to see a two and a half year old toddler pitch an absolute fit, have a Hyundai commercial interrupt Moana's big musical number and you're going to have a problem on your hands.
So maybe the streaming services, maybe Disney Plus, maybe Netflix, maybe Hulu, which is also Disney, doesn't care that they're pissing off their customers.
But what about the advertisers on these streaming services? Have they considered at all, or is there any indication that they're hurting their relationship with viewers by inserting ads into a place that used to be ad free?
Matt Zoller Seitz
Well, I think maybe the huge audience that reads me, which is, like 14 people, may be aware of the depth of the problem, but I think most of the people in these executive suites don't know what's going on. They don't know what's going on, except what the streaming platforms and other services tell them.
And what they tell them is, I'm just going to say it… Usually it's lies.
The most charitable way to say it is that the truth is getting stretched a bit. There was a lot written about the way Netflix determines viewership, what constitutes viewing, and it kind of came down to if you hovered over it and it started to play and you watched it for more than a minute or two minutes, they counted it as a view.
And now there's this sort of more sophisticated or complicated equation that they use where they sort of add up the total viewing time of a particular title and divide it by the number of people who watched it or something like that. So, you know, there's a hundred thousand people who watched less than 30 seconds of it and a thousand people who watched the entire thing.
And that's how they get the number, or so they say it is. It’s not like there's some commission that tests the veracity of what they're describing.
We don't really have an FCC with any kind of teeth anymore. There's no government agency that really cared that much about any of this stuff. And certainly they care less about it now than they did six months ago.
So we're never going to get any answers. We're never going to get any accountability.
If there are any advertisers, people who buy advertising, ask some tougher questions because you're being lied to. You're being lied to. Really. We don't really know how many people are watching anything now. You can just make stuff up.
Dusty Weis
If I were an advertiser right now, I would be very, very reticent to put my money in that bucket. For the sole purpose that I wouldn’t want people thinking of my brand when they think about annoying interruptions to content that they wanted to be watching.
And, and I'll say this as well, in an era when it feels like we are being plundered, as you've said, by the big entertainment conglomerates that are out there, it brings back fond memories that I have from when I came of age in the early 2000s in an era before Netflix, when content piracy was a common practice.
Now, certainly, I have haughtily pointed recently at the boxes and boxes of DVDs that I refused to throw away five years ago and said to my wife, see, aren't you glad that we kept hard media?
But there was an entire sub-strata of law abiding American citizens in the era before Netflix, who embraced content piracy.
There was almost this sense then when Netflix came along, that we had, as consumers, reached some sort of detente with entertainment conglomerates, where we acknowledged, hey, we see that you've killed commercials. We hated those things. We're willing to pay a little money to support that. But given that the insertion of ads is a thing again, pricing is going up for streaming services, do you foresee a corresponding rise in content piracy?
Matt Zoller Seitz
I think it's already happening.
As much as streaming platforms like to talk about what a great deal they are. You pay $12.99 a month and you have access to X number of thousands of things.
I don't know how good of a deal that really is. I had a lot of subscriptions to a lot of different streaming platforms because it's my job to know what's going on in the general sense. And also it gives me story ideas.
But if I wasn't doing that, I think I might have Max, Criterion and one other, and the one other would change every 3 to 6 months. When I've gotten tired of it, I would swap it out.
I mean, there's a lot of things that, I'm kind of shocked to find out that I subscribed to.
There will be times when I'm assigned to review something and, I'll realize, oh, I've never seen any of the other films by this particular director, and the only way to find them is by subscribing to Flibberty-Dee or whatever… There's always some platform like Mongo.
Okay, I guess I’ve got to subscribe. I’ve got to do a trial subscription to Mongo. Well, you know what happens. You forget that you subscribed and then, a year later, you get a little notice in your email. You're about to be automatically resubscribe to Mongo, and you're like, Mongo?
But, you know, one thing I do think is kind of awesome is habits are changing a little bit.
And particularly among the younger generation, there's been a fair amount written about the resurgence of cinefilia among people under 30. The rise of Letterboxd, the website where you can kind of catalog your viewing and sort of be a journaling kind of online critic. It's sort of almost like a combination of a chat board and a blog and an archive. It's pretty cool.
It’s encouraging people to see more old movies. And, I think several generations are going to be retrained to be proper movie watchers, to expect that the movie is its own thing and that, the fewer interruptions, the better. You get more out of it. If you concentrate on it and you watch it from start to finish and if you're watching in a movie theater… and repertory cinema is doing really well right now, probably because new movies are generally so stinky.
I think there's some hope in the fact that vinyl is back, these little sort of small boutique DVD labels that are putting out movies that you thought were unobtainable. So if you really care, there's hope.
There's hope if you're an artist, if you're a creative person, professional, amateur, anybody with a creative impulse, don't call your work content. Don't let the enemy's language shape how you see yourself. What you make is not flavorless gray paste. You are not a cog in a machine. You're not interchangeable.
If you're a novelist, say you're a novelist. If you're a poet, say you're a poet. If you're a video editor and a and a DJ and an action painter all at the same time, say the things that you are.
I understand why people say, “I'm a content creator.” Because it saves time.
But, I think that some distinction between the different art forms and tying the art form to an individual is really increasingly important, because otherwise we all become part of that flavorless gray paste.
This is one small way that we can push back is by insisting on our dignity as creative people, and telling the machine, I don't care what you call me. This is what I call myself.
Dusty Weis
We are not just stuff that fills an empty place. Stuff that is going to be monetized by other people. We are creatives who contribute to the fabric of society and deserve to have our work respected as such. Thank you. I think there's great wisdom in that.
Matt, I'd be remiss if, in the course of conversation with the world-renowned film and television critic, I didn't ask him what it is that he is watching right now.
What should I have on my increasingly long queue of streaming titles that I ought to be watching right now?
Matt Zoller Seitz
Well, Steven Soderbergh has released two movies, and in the span of about seven weeks. One of them was the ghost story Presence, which is told from the point of view of a ghost. And the other is an espionage thriller called Black Bag, which is really about marriage. And it's not a James Bond type of movie. It's something that's a little bit like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but sexy.
Both of those I highly recommend. And I think if you're lucky, you may be able to find them in theaters, which is the best place to see them.
As far as watching things online? I'm increasingly kind of delving back into cinema history. I like to go into the Turner Classic Movies section of Max and just see what they've got.
And, I watched the original Mildred Pierce the other night. It was great. And, the Katharine Hepburn movie Summertime. So that's kind of what I'm doing.
And I'm also reading. I'm going back to reading fiction. I've always read a lot of nonfiction, but about 10 or 15 years ago, I kind of stopped reading fiction, and I've gotten back into that.
So that's nice. I don't know if that's the sort of recommendation you wanted, but, I mean, I guess I'm increasingly looking for a commitment, if that makes sense. Whether it's two hours to watch a movie or a week or two weeks to read a book. And I'm kind of looking for that because I'm trying to retrain my brain.
Dusty Weis
Something where you can put the phone down, stop the scrolling, and focus on one thing for an extended period of time.
Matt Zoller Seitz
Yeah, exactly. Just last week I started a book and read, god like a hundred pages of it. And I looked up and it was like two in the morning and I thought, wow, this is a great feeling.
Dusty Weis
What a wonderful experience it is to not be assaulted by the horrors of the outside world for a couple of hours.
Matt Zoller Seitz
Yeah. It's great. And also, it's just good for your brain to, not be like that dog in Up… “Squirrel!”
Dusty Weis
I'm with you. It's become increasingly an important part of my daily regimen to put this thing down and either focus on the people or focus on the story in front of me for an extended period of time. Because I do… I think that it's an increasingly rare luxury to have your focus to yourself, for a small amount of time and to not have that focus interrupted by some intrusive advertising that was dubiously placed by an algorithm.
So Matt Zoller Seitz, the editor at large of RogerEbert.com. Thank you so much for these recommendations. And thank you for joining us here on Lead Balloon.
Matt Zoller Seitz
My pleasure.
Dusty Weis
And thank you for tuning in. Here on Lead Balloon, I like to think that we're kind of like Freakonomics for PR and marketing professionals, meeting the people and telling the stories that make this a fascinating field in which to work.
So we hope to see you back here in this feed again sometime soon. Follow us in your favorite podcast app.
Lead Balloon is produced by Podcamp media, where we provide branded podcast production solutions for businesses. Our podcast studios are located in the heart of beautiful downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but we work with brands all over North America to help them launch and build podcasts that work. Check out our website, podcampmedia.com
Music for this episode by Tony Sopiano. Audio engineering by Matt Covarrubias.
And until the next time, folks, thanks for listening. I'm Dusty Weis.
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