RANT - Advertising

I can't believe it's been this long, armed with a blank blogging canvas and an internet connection, and I haven't yet vented against one of life's most despicable intrusions.

To go some way to making up for this lapse, here's my partial list of advertising tactics that get my goat.

1. The way American advertisers describe a good price as "A SAVINGS OF 50%". A savings? That's no typo, it's just an affectation. How does "a" (singular) go with "savings" (plural)? Only in an addled advertiser's head, that's how.

2. The way that American advertisers lazily use "European" when they can't properly describe anything that makes their product special. As if by magic, a dull, featureless sofa is "European-inspired", and a crushingly dull Chevy glitters with a "European-styled" interior.

3. The way American companies can't advertise jack without including a bargain price. Does no-one buy anything based on quality, or features, or beauty? To have a company talk about a life-enhancing medical compound, proven effective in 99% of cases, guaranteed to alleviate whatever it is that's affecting you, and then, the all-too-predictable parting shot "and available for just 99 cents, while stocks last". If it's the right drug for me, and it's going to cure me of whatever it is I suffer from, why the hell do I care if it's on some kind of special offer? 

4. And having mentioned "guarantee", when is a guarantee not really a guarantee at all? When an American advertiser issues it, that's when. Here, it's a get out of jail free card. You can claim whatever you like, make extravagant claims about "guaranteed results", knowing that the vast majority of customers will never complete the course of treatment (for example), and whether they do or not most will have lost the receipt, or never get around to returning the product for their "guaranteed money back".

5. CNN is the worst offender in this next category, and it concerns broadcasters who can't just play their freaking material. OK, so several stations insist on having their logo permanently on screen, and some logos are more intrusive than others. Many channels use annoying animations or swoosh in and swoosh out with an ad for some other program in their exciting, all new lineup. Most news programs like to have a ticker-tape news or financial market strip running across the screen as an annoying but apparently essential addition to whatever the newscaster is covering. But CNN, oh CNN, you insist on having everything: the ever-present and larger than life logo, two (count 'em) streaming lines, top and bottom of the screen, the swoosh in and out, the pop-ups, the pop-outs, all to mask the fact that the news is better covered by the BBC or NPR.

6. In order to show I haven't just thrown this list together, and echoing that "all new line-up" mantra from advertisers like CNN, I groaned last night when I saw Burger King touting its "All new" breakfast line-up. Gimme a sugar-frosted, deep-fried break. Are they trying to tell me nothing I could have bought last week, should I have been desperate enough to try a Burger King breakfast, is available this week? Because that's what "all new" means. BK Bullshit! 

7. My final gripe concerns the unavoidable measures taken to mug web surfers with pop-ups that ask them to 'Digg' something, 'Like' it, rank it, hype it, pump it up and pimp it. Anything but get straight to the target material. Shabby.