Reuters ran a story yesterday on “adlets”, also known as “blinks”, also known as extremely brief audio commercials that radio programmers can sprinkle into blocks of content. It’s a format that seems to be catching on with the studios–Fox has apparently bought a lot of adlet space to promote The Simpsons (ostensibly, these short bursts of brand identification would work equally well to promote both the series and the movie), and Paramount went the blink route in promoting Stardust (perhaps that’s why we blinked and missed it at the box office? Ha ha.) I only listen to NPR (yeah, I know) so I haven’t heard these, but apparently the prototypical example is the voice of Homer Simpson saying “Doh!” popping up in between songs.

Idolator connects this “advance” in marketing techology to Blipverts — ie: the micro-commercials that somehow caused an aggressive local news man to get trapped in the machine, resulting in virtual media sage/Coke spokesman Max Headroom. I was a big fan of Max Headroom as a teenager (thanks to Sci-Fi Channel reruns), but I couldn’t remember exactly why Blipverts were so dangerous. So I went looking for clips from the show, and stumbled across the entire 48-minute pilot, which I’ve embedded above. And for my paranoid rantings on the insidious connection between Clear Channel and Max Headroom, click the “Read More” link.

It turns out Blipverts were invented by Bryce, a preteen prodigy working for a vague cabal of corporate overlords, and were intended to condense 30 seconds of commercial into 3 seconds worth of airtime. Unfortunately, Bryce didn’t foresee a certain “side effect”: Blipverts cause an acceleration of neural response that can in turn trigger something something in a whatsit, thereby causing unusually sedentary television viewers to spontaneously combust. The shady corporate types obviously want to keep this a secret, but they’re not all that concerned about their commercials causing people to explode–after all, as one board member puts it, “The only people that inactive are pensioners, the sick and the unemployed.”

Max Headroom may have predicted the future of advertising, but nowadays, there’s another segment of society that sits in a chair all day staring at a screen: BLOGGERS. You know what that means: Clear Channel is turning to Blipverts to destroy the blogosphere! As devastating revelations go, it’s not quite Soylent-Green-is-people, but it’s something.