You have until kickoff time for Sunday's Super Bowl to cast your votes for one of two versions of Channel 58's repetitive, "just 10 minutes, just 10 minutes of your day" jingle.
The CBS affiliate doesn't need to promote the game to pull in viewers -- huge ratings are guaranteed for what is the biggest TV event of the year. Instead, that huge audience provides a promotional platform for Channel 58's main product -- its local newscasts.
That's where the "just 10 minutes" earworm comes in. It's the effective (if sometimes annoying) branding effort by Milwaukee's CBS affiliate.
In the Super Bowl competition, you can choose between the two finalists by going to Channel 58's Web site -- one a conventional a capella version, the other using sign language. Votes will be accepted until Sunday evening's kickoff, and the winner will be announced during the game broadcast.
After you've voted, you can watch them both, over and over if you still haven't had enough of that "just 10 minutes, just 10 minutes, just 10 minutes ..."
Watching the Super Bowl together: I'll be watching and live-blogging the game on Sunday night, focusing on the best and worst ads of the night. Feel free to join in offer your thoughts on what are supposed to be the best commercials of the year, right here at OnMilwaukee.com.
On TV: Comedy Central's Jon Stewart is sitting down for a conversation with Bill O'Reilly that airs over two nights on O'Reilly's Fox News Channel Show at 7 tonight and Thursday. It's Stewart's second visit.
- The L.A. Times' "Company Town" blog talks about talk at ABC that Oprah Winfrey's slot could be filled by "The View," when Oprah leaves broadcast TV next year.
- Speaking of Oprah, her final months as a syndicated talk show host next year in "Oprah's 25th Season," a weekly prime-time series on her new OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) when it launches in January.
- HBO has signed Zooey Deschanel to star in a pilot for a half-hour show based on 1960s groupie Pamela Des Barres' "I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie."
- ABC says Virginia Madsen will star in a summer dramedy, "Scoundrels," based on a New Zealand TV series called "Outrageous Fortune." Eight episodes have been ordered.
- If you've been wondering where Ellen DeGeneres is, she's joining Fox's "American Idol" next week, when the Hollywood round begins.
That darn Mel Gibson: It looks like Mel Gibson didn't like the questions about his past troubles from Dean Richards on Chicago's WGN-TV last week. He first suggested, "Let's move on, dude."
Ultimately, Gibson let his true feelings out, apparently after he thought the satellite interview had ended (be warned of some rough language):
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
