So, for the past several weeks (nearly two months now) I've been living nearly 1,000 miles from my home to attend a training course with the Military. Lots of pros and cons to this, but one of the biggest pros is that the apartment I'm living in has the Hub Channel. Which means that every week I've been able to wake up on Saturday morning and watch My Little Pony live. No low quality streaming sessions, no waiting a couple hours for Youtube uploaders. I sit down with my gyrobowl, eat cereal and watch my favorite pastel colored little marshmallow ponies. Life has been good.

However, watching MLP live, you must sit through the Hub commercials too. There are approximately 8 minutes of commercials for each episode. Each commercial is about 30 seconds long, so I have to patiently deal with 16 different commercials every time, give or take. Here is a little something I've learned:

The Hub Channel is very quick on recognizing their new demographic. The Bronies. Or specifically fans of the show outside of the originally targeted demographic of 8 to 12 year old girls. However, they just haven't effectively tapped into this new market well yet. They seem to be using the "mud approach" right now. What is that you ask? The mud approach is like a shotgun blast. You take a handful of mud and throw it against the wall. Sure, most of it will fall off, but some will stick. That is what the Hub Marketeers are doing. They are taking a lot of weird and unusual types of commercials, types you would never previously see on Saturday morning cartoons and play it during my Pony hours.

I call to your attention, the Hip replacement lawsuit commercial. I don't think I have ever seen an 8 to 12 year old girl having to undergo a hip replacement or rather had one and then had to have another one later since the first one was failing. This is a commercial aimed at 60 to 70 year old folks. Now Bronies do vary in age. However, I personally do not know many older then middle 40. That seems to be the upper end of the spectrum from my observations. The median age is around middle 20s. Not too many 20somethings out there are having hip replacement surgery either.

I dunno who the ad rep was for Hub that sold that time to the law firm doing that commercial, but I am sure he/she is laughing to the bank. Its about as effective of a ad campaign as selling bacon ads in Israel.

This was a wordy journal today. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.