The commercials that annoy me here in Canada are not really commercials so much as "public service announcements.
Our premier sattelite cable companies- Shaw and Bell- respectively, offered a package deal for their customers. At the time it was pretty decent. However, by the next year, they cut many of those channels out and replaced them with dead PPV space and about thirteen incarnations of the sports channel. They then introduced a new package deal that included the cannels you got to keep (not many), the channels that they stole from you, and a handful of new channels for ONLY A BAZILLION TIMES THE COST OF THE BASIC PACKAGE! WHAT A DEAL!!!
People got fed up and began to contact those who knew a few things about pirating satellite signals. I guess it became sort of an "epidemic" up here because those same greedy companies began to feel threatened.
Soon after, they began to run melodramatic and absurd ads about the hideous evils of stealing cable signals and raping your defenseless service provider for no reason.
I think that the intention was to villify those who did so to such a degree, that they would be held in the same ostracising light as pedophiles.
Perhapse some chumps in the McMansion suburbs were gullible enough to fall for it, but by-and-large, people just laugh at them...And rightly so.
in New England COX does the same running commercials saying "it's a crime how some people watch television"
