John Linton
It needs some considerable amount of mental effort to take any of the advertising claims seriously and I often wonder how the people who dream up the claims and statements live with themselves in 'real life' based on what they 'say' in the various advertisements they dream up. Annette and I went to the movies yesterday afternoon and before the start there was an ad for TPG broadband which was unremarkable except that I had not seen TPG advertise at movie theatres before (that visual/audio pollution being occupied by iiNet for so many months) and that the content of the ad was so specifically mis-leading that only someone who had had their conscience surgically removed could have written it. Then, a minute or so later came a very similar ad for another ISP with almost identical claims which were identically misleading and identically 'phrased'.
......which is really sad now that Exetel is doing some advertising and it jolted me in to re-considering exactly what we were doing.
Earlier in the day I had noticed the identical misleading method used by Unwired in an ad in the weekend newspapers and I am beginning to think that there is some new virus attacking only people who work in advertising agencies or advertising departments of Australian communications companies. What I'm referring to is the "1,000,000 gb for 2.5 cents per month style ads that (in the case of the TPG ad at the movies) might have said that 40 gb of the huge HEAD LINE ALLOWANCE was in the early hours of the morning but for a casual observer I didn't get that 'message' until I checked on the TPG web site when I got home. Similarly the Unwired 3 gb for $15.00 although written took a few seconds to realise that it was 1 gb for most of the day with the other 2 gb in a similarly less than useful period.
The other thing that applied to so many similar ads, from even the largest companies, are increasingly burying the 24 month contract 'poison pill' almost always associated with these special offers deep in the ultra small print and passing it of as if it was a quite normal contract period. Perhaps it is - I didn't think that contract periods over 12 months (and that's pushing it) were in any residential customer's interests in any way at all. So the combining of a highly restricted "off peak" allowance with a smaller or similar "peak" allowance is now 'normal' as is a 24 month contract for at least three of the less salubrious comms services advertisers.
I am wondering why they would be doing this? It isn't as if no-one (including the prospective buyers) aren't going to notice when they get around to going to the various web sites to order these 'bargain priced' services is it? Are people so dumb and blase about lying advertising that they just say to themselves - "oh well - knew it was too good to be true - but I'll buy it anyway"? It's the only conclusion I can come to. So, as I always thought, advertising is the exclusive preserve of the unscrupulous preying on the stupid and vulnerable - not something anyone with even a basic understanding and belief in reasonableness in dealings with others would ever stoop to.
So does that mean that if you run your life along ethical and reasonable lines you can't use advertising because, virtually without exception, communications advertising is just plain lies for the most part and because it has gone on for so long it is obvious that the ads are written and designed by people who lie as a matter of course and have got away with lying by using every syllable on a standard key board to withdraw the most obvious meaning of all the statements made in the ad they write? If you took the trouble, as I did yesterday evening, to go to the web sites of the sleazier ISPs you will not find a single 'offer' that doesn't have at least 3 'qualifiers' attached to the main aspects of the 'offer'. My record was a major carrier's page where there were 14!!....and, after over five minutes of studying the text of the offer, I actually couldn't understand what it was I had to commit to to buy the single service I was interested in.
Is it time for the relevant authority (ACEMA?) to ban the sale of keyboards to marketing and advertising personnel that have any thing but letters and numerals on them? Could any of those people actually write an advertisement without the use of asterisks, number signs, tildas etc?
You know what? - I bet they couldn't.
Which leads any logical observer to the inescapable conclusion that the vast majority of communications advertising is designed to mislead the reader of the "head line" statements - what sort of people run companies that take for granted that they will use advertising that has the principal aim of misleading possible buyers in to false impressions about the capabilities of what they are buying?
What other explanation can there be?