A few days ago I was driving across the snowy Midwest (don’t ask) and watching the View (don’t ask again) while I was getting ready to check out of my St. Louis hotel room. The View has daily giveaways, and they vary wildly in quality. It’s basically like old-school radio-hour sponsorships where the ladies hawk a product and give it away to the audience and everyone cheers, but it’s really all a paid-for ad.
Monday’s give-away was brought to you by Yahoo. The ladies were touting Yahoo mail as the best way to keep in touch during the Holidays for, you know, all those people who don’t have email already. Since mail accounts are already free, they gave away a purple “Power Stick” to upload your holiday photos into your mail account instead. As far as I could tell, it was just a purple USB drive.
Sherri Shepherd tried her best to make this sound exciting and the dutiful audience cheered. But the View panelists couldn’t conceal their lack of enthusiasm and general confusion. Joy Behar asked one of the ladies what a Power Stick was, Barbara Walters just sort of shrugged and Whoopi Goldberg asked if it worked in a vibrator. Whoa, TMI, Whoopie. T. M. I.
The whole thing was so uneventful, I couldn’t even find a clip of it online to embed. Poor Yahoo. It isn’t only losing cred with tech-elites, it’s losing the ladies of the View too.