In a media buying world gone mad...

I was watching a Yankees game recently and in between innings the YES network showed an anti-smoking commercial in which a patient is told by his doctor that he has cancer. The physician is appropriately grave and the patient appropriately glum. "I'm only thirty-seven," he says. There is no music, and even the voice-over announcer sounds funereal. In thirty seconds, this ad manages to completely destroy my baseball-induced hypnosis and shatter my escapist illusion in which death is on the 60-day DL.

It's the most incongruously somber commercial placement I can recall. But it got me thinking: What would happen if advertisers hired completely incompetent media buyers? We might see juxtapositions like the following:

"Every day, three million children die of starvation. In Darfur, Afghanistan, Zaire."

CUT TO: "And now, Every Day with Rachel Ray."