h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have to hit the mute button when that Rennie one comes on.
One that's irritating me more than others(by a slim margin) is the Confused
one.
Bouncing boobs and Village People caricatures won't persuade me to avail
myself of their service.
And the golden shower????
Maybe they just don't want female or gay customers, only deviants.

Two comparison websites have latched on to the fact that their lead characters have had their day, with Go Compare doing nasty things to the singer and Compare the Market using Robert Webb to ridicule Alexander the meerkat. (My browser suggests 'marketeer' as a 'correct' spelling for meerkat, btw!) Maybe confused.com will reach the same decision, too. It can't be soon enough, imo.

On the run-up to Christmas, Sainsbury's irritated me with 'Christmas day at Sainsbury's'. Who would want to spend Christmas day at Sainsbury's? They wouldn't be open, so you'd have to sit in their car park and cook Christmas dinner over a camping cooker. Now the ads say 'Christmas days at Sainsbury's'. I'm still not sure about that one.

The Virgin Airlines advert...

Not only is it absolutely ridiculous anyway, with its whole "Virgin Airlines employees are superhuman" schtick, but it manages to be massively sexist because while the men get to be engineers and pilots, the women are cabin crew.

The Knorr Stock Pot ad irritates me. According to Marco-Pierre White, it's made with 'real ingredients'. All ingredients are 'real' - they exist, or they couldn't be used to make anything. If they mean 'natural' ingredients (i.e., no artificial colours, flavours, preservatives), then they should say so.

I quite like it. Aspirational advertising.

dammit. The Virgin ad is the aspirational one.

Reinforcing outdated gender roles is hardly aspirational.

On a lighter note though, it makes me laugh how those Knorr ads go on about local produce when the company is Dutch!

The Lenor ad makes me laugh.'They' washed some bed linen and took the bed to LA. Scenes of people lying on the bed, enthusing over the smell of the bedding, then expressing amazement that it was washed 7 days ago. Yes, folks, it was washed 7 days ago and, hasn't been slept on since! Use the bedding for a week and then check how it smells.

>>The Lenor ad makes me laugh.'They' washed some bed linen and took the bed to LA. Scenes of people lying on the bed, enthusing over the smell of the bedding, then expressing amazement that it was washed 7 days ago.

The ad is a testament to just how overpowering and enduring their stench of so-called 'freshness' is. Not suitable for many allergy-sufferers.

I'm not allergic but I never use Lenor because I don't like the smell. Ditto Ariel.

On Facebook, there now and then shows up some dating ads. Not so strange, but I feel this latest one uses a weird text. "We have a lot of women wanting to date, but they're not pretty. Join now!" Though that might be entirely deliberate.

Reminds me of the (apocryphal) local newspaper report in Hatches Matches and Dispatches. On the Herts / Essex border, there are a couple of villages, Ugley and Nasty.

Ugley woman marries Nasty man.

http://iainpetrie.typepad.com/the_four_ages_of_sand/2008/06/revisiting-nast.html

PP

Facebook adverts are ridiculous.

I lost a lot of weight recently and updated people in the traditional annoying fashion of facebook.

Before I knew it I was getting adverts telling me "Cheryl Cole lost 21 kg in 6 weeks blah blah blah"


Now the obviousness of the BS is obvious, but how is it legal for them to host adverts that are blatant lies.
I've blocked those ads now but I do still get similar ads in my junk mail occasionally that also feature Angelina Jolie and Katy Perry.

Finally of course, I really did lose that amount of weight. So I don't really need an advert selling me snake oil to do that now do I

I'm pretty certain - I wasn't taking too much notice because it was an ad for Garnier - I just saw the following.

99% of 75 women agreed.

So that would be 74.25 of the women asked then?

PP.

74 out of 75 is 98.67 percent can you really not accept that it might be reasonable to round up for advertising purposes?

I'm sure there's many things wrong with their advertising but that doesn't really seem a valid criticism. Must try harder next time

The sample size is far to small to be valid. (and my maths has always been poor).

How can you have any credibility if you try to use a percentage of a figure SMALLER than 100

PP.

Small sample, size, now you're onto something

But yes, it's perfectly acceptable to use percentages when the sample is below 100 (not necessarily in this context).
If I have a class of 40 students and 20 of them think I'm a dork then that's 50% surely.

Incidentally, it's been a long time but I do recall in A level maths that we did something on sample sizes and their represenation in large samples.
There are perfectly valid ways of getting useful stats on large samples by taking small samples.
Factories will do this sort of thing all the time to check on quality and consistency of pack size for example.
It does have to be done right and the sampling has to be done correctly for it to be meaningful though. I rather doubt that's true in this case

Statistically insignificant.

For some reason it came to me when I was brushing mt teeth. Or at least 31 out of 32 of them - That would be a rounded up 99% of them (for advertising purposes). The other one didn't approve of Colgate.

Seriously, a global company like Garnier are targeting many hundreds of thousands of potential customers around the world, probably millions - and I'm sure the same advert would be used world-wide dubbed into other languages. A sample of 75 represents a couple of afternoons with a clipboard on Watford high street.

PP.