Never?

A TV ad running over here at the moment for a bank features the line

"We guarantee you'll never get less than 3.75% for the first twelve months."

Personally I find this an interesting use of the word "never".

Time warp?

I'm the first to admit that I wander about most of the time completely oblivious to my surroundings but yesterday evening I went into Birmingham on the Metro and as all the advertising hoardings were lit noticed some of them that I hadn't noticed before.

The first puzzled me because it was advertising Christmas Markets in Bilston and Wednesbury. It's February now but, fair enough, they're just a bit late in taking them down. At the next station I was moved to wonder exactly which Christmas they were talking about as there was an advert for a Gymnastics exhibition which is coming in April 2010. 

My best guess is that in the current economic climate nobody is paying for the advertising space so, rather than leave them empty, they just leave up whatever the last poster was until somebody comes along with money to replace it.

I Can't Believe It

For those who don't live in the UK there is a product here which you may or may not have heard of. It's a margarine called "I can't believe it's not butter". I believe it was originally from the United States but I have no idea if it's available elsewhere in the world under that name. I don't use it myself but I am quite taken with the linguistic aspects of the latest advertising campaign promoting the new improved version.
It uses the slogan "I can't believe 'I can't believe it's not butter' is better" which it subsequently expands into "I can't believe 'I can't believe 'I can't believe it's not butter' is better' is better than 'I can't believe it's not butter'".

Ain't English wonderful?


And for those who would like more on the subject.

What I want is

There's an advert running on TV at the moment in which a series of over-earnest people make silly pompous statements in parody of the advertising style often adopted by technology companies - statements like, "I want a new type of communication".

At the end an ordinary guy against a blank background says "I want to get a new telephone every year with a simple twelve month contract."

It's a slick enough and clever enough piece of advertising but it makes me wonder about our throw-away, built-in obsolescence world. Once upon a time things were built to last. If you bought a watch, for example, you expected to be able to hand it down to your children and grandchildren. The mark of quality was longevity. Nowadays we have been convinced by the manufacturers and their clever promotion that changing things as frequently as possible is the way to go. The new generations of products are in production before the old ones have hit the shops. Products have briefer and briefer life spans to go with our briefer and briefer attention spans.

I'm sorry but I don't think buying everything again every few months because there's a newer, bigger, brighter, brasher version out is a good thing. In fact I think it's a very bad thing from the customer point of view. Of course from the company point of view the more frequently we buy replacements the more money they make. And money is what matters.

So, what I want is a phone that I buy once and use for the rest of my life.

I doubt that I'll be hearing that on an advert any time soon.

I'll have the cannibal option, please.

It shouldn't really amuse me because it's a perfectly valid construction but I always chuckle at the sign outside a Birmingham Cafe that I pass every day.

Lamb

Chicken

or

Vegetarian

served with Rice.

Fluffy Liquid Loveliness: Redux

On the online shopping site for my local supermarket it also tells me that the water is

"VOLCANO FILTERED SO IT'S FULL OF VOLCANICITY."

Whatever that means.

Fluffy Liquid Loveliness

Another current advertising campaign has me scratching my head.

A fit and healthy looking young man says that he has accepted a challenge to drink a litre and a half of a particular brand of mineral water every day for a month. Bits of video are shown of him drinking water. Then he says his month is up and he feels much fitter and healthier than before. 

Cut to a picture of a mountain where the water is apparently filtered through the layers of rock so that when you drink it, it produces "Deep Volcanic Hydration".

Sorry guys. "Deep Volcanic Hydration" is about as meaningful a phrase as "Fluffy Liquid Loveliness". Drinking water is certainly good for you but drinking tap water, which is free, is just as efficacious as drinking expensive bottled mineral water - well it is in this country anyway. I wonder, though, just how many people buy into this pseudo-scientific stuff. By all means sell bottled water on the merits of its taste (personally I don't think it tastes any different to tap water but I'm happy to concede that this is a matter of opinion) but implying that the man in the advert feels better because he has drunk this brand of expensive water seems to me to be a bit of a reach.

Re Drowsy

Thinking about my previous post about sleeping tablets carrying a warning "Caution: May cause drowsiness", it occurred to me to wonder if homoeopathic ons carry a warning "Caution: May NOT cause drowsiness".

Drowsy

As part of my efforts to sleep I considered buying (but didn't actually buy) some herbal sleeping tablets I saw in Superdrug. I was amused to see, in large letters on the box, "CAUTION: May cause drowsiness."
No kidding? Who'd have though sleeping tablets could cause drowsiness?

Good Science makes Bad Sound Bites

There's an advertisement running on TV at the moment for a loan company. In it someone wants to borrow £70 for five days and is told it will only cost him £9.20. So he can get the £70 today and five days later he can pay back £79.20. It's pretty clear and it's up to the student whether he borrows it or not. Less clear, though stated in the print at the bottom of the screen, is that this equates to an annual percentage rate of 2689%. So if he doesn't pay back his £70 for a year it will have become £1882. After two years it would be more than £50,000. Of course it's very unlikely that the loan company wouldn't intervene rather more quickly than that.

This is an example of how language can be used to hide mathematical facts. It's actually rather unusual in that an absolute figure is being used to hide a percentage. Much more common is the other way round, especially in the press and even more especially in reporting of science.
We routinely see instances in the press of quoted figures along the lines of "eating x causes a 25% higher risk of cancer"* and this, as it is stated, is entirely meaningless. The figures are usually abstracted from scientific papers which have details of exactly what the quoted figure means and how it was derived but the newspapers very rarely bother with that because good science doesn't make for good sound bites.
What they do when quoting statistics like this is use the "relative risk increase" which is a very misleading figure. What they need to do is quote the "absolute risk" or the "absolute risk increase".

In the example above 25% sounds quite dramatic but if the sample size was 1000 and in the population not eating X four developed cancer while in the sample eating X five did then the absolute risk has has gone from 0.4% to 0.5% an "absolute risk increase" of 0.1%, or one in a thousand, which isn't even statistically significant compared to the background level.

This 0.1% is EXACTLY the same information as the previous 25% but described using a much less dramatic, and much more easily understood, figure. Words and mathematics sometimes make very uneasy bedfellows, especially when mediated by the people with a vested interest - be it the vested interest of a loan company wanting to make money or a journalist wanting to sell papers.

(*Incidentally I chose this example because one of the books I read , Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad Science, suggested facetiously that the newspapers are engaged in a process of dividing every substance on Earth into two groups - ones that cause cancer and ones that cure it, in the case of at least one of our National papers in the UK we get an X causes/cures cancer story, pretty well every week.)

Singular!

From the very same shop that brought you this, today another window-sized poster.

Nike Woven Pant

Half Price

Maximum two per customer

I've never seen a singular pant but, as it's less than the maximum, I'm tempted to go in and ask for one.

How many?

An advert I saw for Reeboks on a sports shop window yesterday.


Sale: Reeboks. Half-price. Maximum two per customer.


There are so many people out there who buy them in threes, aren't there?

(And yes, I do know that they meant two pairs, it's the wording that amuses me.)

Signs of the times

I noticed two signs in Birmingham as I was walking to the station tonight which amused me for different reasons. The first was a large advert for Ozzy Osborne's autobiography. The title of the book is "I am Ozzy". The sign was a large picture of Ozzy with the text, reproduced exactly below, punctuated as shown.

I am Ozzy. This is his story. Read it now.

This seems to be a rather schizophrenic phrasing with the "I" in the first sentence and the "his" in the second. Had the first sentence been enclosed in quotes to make it a title, I'd have accepted it, but as it is the sense is very confused.

The second sign was a small poster in the newsagents, near the chocolate shelf. It was an advert for Terry's chocolate orange. The only problem was that the apostrophe in "Terry's" had been replaced with one of those squares that display on your computer when the font you are using doesn't include that symbol. Most likely, what has happened is that the designer has used an unusual font and when the advert has gone to its computerised print that font wasn't available and it's substituted the square. What baffles me is how it ever went to print that way. Did nobody at all notice this odd character appearing? Did they notice and not care? Did they notice and care but think, "Oh bugger, nobody will notice"?

Not what I'd call great

I went to get some money from the ATM this morning. Displayed on the ATM was the message - "Great Current Account Interest Rates". This is a rather interesting message given that over the last year the interest rate on that particular account has fallen from over 4% to under 0.5% and that only a few days ago I received a letter from the bank telling me that it was being "reduced" to 0%.

They have, however, changed the name from a "High Interest Current Account" to just a "Current Account".

Apart from the need to pay things by direct debit I might as well keep that money in a box under the bed. I wonder how long it will be before they "reduce" it further and start charging me a fee to look after my money.

35 ??????????

Ah, my technophobia is back. Or so I will probably be told.
I've just seen an advert for a new electric razor. It has thirty five settings for variable stubble length. This may well be the most ridiculous technological innovation I have ever encountered. I'll just about accept that some men leave a stubble on their chins out of some strange sense of "style" but thirty five different stubble lengths? Clearly the quest for new ways to sell old things has reached new heights.

Please forgive my cynicism

You may find this hard to believe but I used to be very cynical about the world.
You don't find it hard to believe?
I still am?
You should have known me back then. Trust me in this, I used to be considerably more cynical than I am now. Sometimes that inner cynic still pops his head up and looks around (and makes an acerbic comment or twenty), but he used to be here all the time.
It's nice, however to know that he's still alive and well, even if my cynicism is less scattergun and more specifically targeted.
This bit of random musing about my personality has been prompted, in part, by an article about an advert for the Smart car showing an elephant standing on the roof of one to demonstrate how strong the roof is.
Shock! Horror! It was... wait for it... photoshopped. Well I never! Who'd have thought it? I don't know if the advert has appeared in Britain and I don't know if the US has similar regulations to our "legal, honest, decent, truthful" code. I don't even know whether or not this advertisement would comply with our code.
I don't claim to have any legal expertise whatever.
I suspect that if the claim about the strength of the roof is justified then the elephant image would be treated as just a cute graphical way to illustrate (as opposed to demonstrate) the fact.

Where this ties in to the vestiges of my cynical nature is that I routinely disbelieve all advertising, be it on television, on posters or in magazines. Come to that I routinely disbelieve anything I'm told by a salesman in a shop, a politician trying to sell me his ideas and, most particularly, anyone who knocks on my door and starts his spiel with "I'm not trying to sell you anything".
I am firmly of the opinion that people who are foolish enough to believe what they see in an advert (created at great expense and paid for by the advertiser) probably deserve to be fooled. You might think that I am suggesting that advertising be viewed with a sceptical eye, but I'm not. That isn't necessary. I'm suggesting that, like me, you should choose to disbelieve all advertising on the principle that no one trying to sell you something can be trusted to be working in your best interest.

Just in two consecutive advertising breaks tonight I've seen the following (and I'm deliberately omitting product names here)

*eating a particular dietary supplement will lower my "heart age" - whatever that might be
*a supermarket is offering "top quality" wines for under £3 a bottle
*a new shape of tea bag will give me a better flavoured tea
*a group of clearly scripted actors pretending to be members of the public want me to use a particular price comparison web site
*playing some geometric games on a hand held computer will make me smarter
*two different supermarkets are both the cheaper than the other on most products
*a particular brand of high-sugar, high-salt, high fat fast food is healthy for me

Just looking at that lot, it's easy to see why I routinely disbelieve advertising.
Legal, honest, decent and truthful they may be (within the definitions of the regulations) but I find them impossible to believe so I don't believe them.
Please forgive my cynicism.

More Terrible Advertising

What is it about price comparison websites that causes them to make such dire adverts? The old series for one such site (I refuse to advertise for them by naming them) featured as unappealing a collection of weirdos and half-wits as have ever been gathered together in one place, in a series of vignettes involving giant cardboard cut-out props. The inescapable message was that only an inbred moron would be interested in their services.
They replaced this with a group of alleged "members of the public" extolling the virtues of a revamped website but these so-called real people were even less convincing than the previous phony ones and one of them - clearly meant to be quirky - starts wittering on about having to tell the insurance company about whether or not he has a beard. In its way it's every bit as moronic as the previous version.
Now, one of their rival companies has started a series of adverts in which people discussing the best insurance deals are interrupted by an annoying fat bloke in a tuxedo who sports a highly improbably moustache and sings a faux-operatic jingle about the company that rhymes "few clicks" with "spondulicks" which is, I suppose, creative enough but the ad is just plain irritating.

Of course they aren't as irritating as the ones that have started appearing recently from various companies offering to buy all the unwanted gold that you have lying around the house, but that's fodder for another post.

Marketing? A particularly poor example

Sometimes you have to wonder at what goes through the heads of the marketing boys. In the shop today I saw the four disc edition of Hellboy 1 and 2. Now I happen to think they are both very good movies, even if the second one does veer a bit too much towards "Neverending Story". I have already bought the two disc edition of the first film but the price was low enough to tempt me to buy the full package, just a couple of quid dearer than the second movie alone. So, I picked up the box from the shelf to find out what extras were included.
To my astonishment the only information on the box was that both Hellboy and Hellboy II were "included". Nothing else. Not a single item of information. And it was sealed so it couldn't be opened to check the inside details. I'm guessing that it contains exactly the same extras as the two individual purchases would but I don't know that for sure. What's the point of producing a four disc package but not telling anyone what's in it?
My search of the internet to get the information has also been a failure beyond finding quite a few other people making the same complaint.
I've decided to save a couple of quid and buy the Hellboy II disc on its own. The marketing strategy seems to be to actively discourage purchase of the more expensive version. How very odd.

Sounds an interesting movie.

The title of an email advertising a well-known site that sells DVDs.

Sale final weekend; plus NEW Lesbian Vampire Killers and Harry Potter.

To advertise or not to advertise

What, exactly, constitutes and advertisement as opposed to, say, a news item? I ask because of an item that I saw on the BBC this morning. The charter under which the BBC operates specifically forbids them from commercial advertising but at what point does a news item cease to be a news item and become, in all but name, an advertisement?

The item in question was ostensibly about Starbucks closing some of its UK branches in response to the current financial situation. One question - do you think you expanded too rapidly in the UK - was connected. After a cursory answer the executive from the company was allowed to promote the brand, mention the prices and name some products, say that their prices were lower than their competitors' prices and talk about a new range of instant coffee products under the Starbucks brand that reproduce the "unique flavours" of Starbucks. Surely this must be considered advertising and hence in breach of the regulations.

I've seen things before - both on screen and in print - that were adverts masquerading as articles or news items but this seemed rather blatant. Starbucks couldn't have been more pleased with it if they had paid an agency to script it for them.

I sent my comments to the BBC and await their response (though with little expectation of receiving it.)