On 13/12/2011 08:08 PM, Warp wrote:
> ... then we would have long ago gone extint as a species, because even
> the simplest of tasks are exceedingly difficult to perform properly.
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08xQLGWTSag

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that most if not all of these 
are American. Occasionally you see American adverts on UK TV, and you 
can always spot them very easily. The appalling narration is usually the 
first clue. The curiously poor picture quality is the second. And the 
utter ineptitude of the people shown is the third. And yet somehow, by 
brandishing some product which /clearly/ doesn't work and is nothing but 
wildly overpriced junk, the task in question suddenly becomes trivial.

"Do YOU have TROUBLE finding your SOCKS? You BUY THEM IN PAIRS, and yet 
somehow when you hang up the washing, there is ALWAYS ODD SOCKS. 
[Picture of middle-class woman tearing her hair out of her scalp.] What 
YOU NEED is the NEW machine-washable SUPER SOCKY CLIPIT MAX-PRO!!! With 
CLIPIT MAX-PRO, you clip your socks together as soon as you take them 
off, thus GUARANTEEING that they REMAIN A PAIR. Thousands of women 
across America have HAD THEIR SANITY SAVED by the SUPER SOCKY CLIPIT 
MAX-PRO! [Picture of same women looking euphorically happy.] So, to 
order your SUPER SOCKY CLIPIT MAX-PRO, call this number. Remember, SUPER 
SOCKY CLIPIT MAX-PRO is NOT AVAILABLE IN STORES. That's SUPER SOCKY 
CLIPIT MAX-PRO." (Presumably in case you suffer for some sort of 
undiagnosed attention deficit disorder and cannot remember a product 
name unless it is repeated at you 25 times per second.)

I would assume - or at least dearly hope - that most normal Americans 
find this as ridiculous as I do.

Come to think of it, I gather UK adverts used to be like this - FORTY 
YEARS AGO. :-P



So what are UK adverts like today? Well, it depends on what it's an 
advert for, of course. Mostly it's like watching a bad acid trip. 
Talking furniture, flying pigs, and so forth. Stuff that would have been 
laughably impossible before CGI, and is now unfortunately trivially easy.

As an example: At some point comparethemarket.com decided to run an 
advert featuring a talking meerkat directing people not to confuse the 
real website with comparethemeerkat.com - because, if you say it in a 
Russian accent, "market" sounds a bit like "meerkat". I kid you not.

Absurdly, this fictional character now even has his own Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Orlov_%28meerkat%29

I also noticed last time I was in a book shop that there was a very 
suspicious quantity of books in no way affiliated with 
comparethemarket.com who's covers feature real or drawn pictures of 
meerkats, and who's names somehow feature the word "simple" somewhere... 
How absurd is that?

Then again, the advertisers are trying to sell car insurance. In fact, 
hell, it's not even car insurance, it's a car insurance price comparison 
service. If you're trying to sell a car, you can at least show a picture 
of the car. But when you get to something as intangible as a service for 
processing intangible services, it's not at all obvious what you could 
possibly show a picture of.

For this reason, banking adverts tend to be rather vague. Most seem to 
center on trying to subliminally create emotions of "safety", 
"stability", "trustworthiness", and so forth. Which was probably 
significantly easier before the thermonuclear banking meltdown ruined 
everybody's lives...

Another example: Fabric conditioner. Now you /could/ have some 
fast-talking guy in a bad suit demonstrating how much softer it makes 
your clothes. I get the impression that in America, you probably would. 
But here in the UK, we get [from one manufacturer] CGI characters living 
in a CGI world where everything is made of fabric, and fabric 
conditioner is therefore a kind of facial beauty product, which also 
makes flowers bloom and tired old cars transform into supercharged 
sports cars.

Let me just repeat that: A world made of fabric. A chemical that makes 
everything it touches turn happy. If that doesn't sound like some sort 
of chemical-induced delusional episode, I'm not sure what does.

Sure, you can see where the advertisers are going with this. It seems a 
reasonable idea. But if you sit and watch 20 minutes of adverts like 
this, you almost begin to feel your grip on reality starting to slip. 
It's kind of frightening, actually. One of the reasons I don't watch 
much TV. (The main one being the almost complete absence of anything 
worth seeing, of course.)

The really /annoying/ ones, of course, are the ones laced with 
psuedo-scientific technobabble to try to make the product sound more 
impressive or "sciency".

"Introducing the latest development in hair repair science: New Danix 
EquiRestore Pro-Revive Max conditioner. It features an expertly-balanced 
formulation of micro-nutrient complexes and amino acids serum to restore 
your hair to its natural, youthful shine."

Oh yeah? Pull the other one, it's got bells on it. Basically, what 
you've done is to grab a bunch of sciency-sounding words like 
"formulation", "complex", "amino acid" and "serum" and jammed them all 
together into a sentence. Even the product name- well, it isn't a name, 
is it? "Jordic" is a name. "EquiRestore Pro-Revive Max" is a desperate 
attempt to subliminally say "restores equilibrium", "revives your hair", 
"professional-grade", "maximum strength", and so forth.

Best of all is when they break out the statistics. "95% of women saw 
improved results". In tiny print, which was actually unreadable before 
digital TV came along, it says "21 customers surveyed". So let me get 
this straight: of the people who chose your product as opposed to 
anybody else's, and chose to keep using it rather than switch to 
anything else, 95% of them thought your product was the best? HOLY COW! 
THAT'S AMAZING!! You mean 5% of women found no difference and kept using 
it anyway?! :-P

Also: Why women? Do men not use hair conditioner then? WTF?

Of course, usually you just get "8 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskers". And 
I'm left wondering exactly HOW THE HELL they measured that. Because 
there's no obvious way to determine that. You can't fit an experimental 
protocol into small-print.

[IMHO, it shouldn't be legal to put legal messages in print so small 
that you actually cannot read it. Digital TV makes print readable at 
smaller sizes, of course...]

OK, I'm just ranting now.

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