Seeing through adspeak’s smoke and mirrors

SEVERAL readers have commented on my remarks about the words advertisers use to sell their products. Niel Hanekom mentioned the slogan on a brand of instant mash. It says: “Made with real potatoes.” He asks what other kind of potatoes there are. Then there’s that strange label – “genuine leather”. Surely there is leather and other stuff, which is not leather. It shouldn’t be necessary to say “genuine”.

We don’t talk about “genuine wood” or “genuine glass”. It’s just wood and glass.

The world of advertising is becoming increasingly sneaky and it’s up to us to see through the smoke and mirrors. There was an interesting feature by Professor Edzard Ernst of Exeter University in a recent issue of The Spectator magazine, highlighting some of the tricks the “alternative-medicine pedlars use to sell their snake oils and other miracle cures”.

Clinical trials, it points out, are very easy to design so they “prove” whatever you want them to prove. When science doesn’t support your new therapy, there’s no problem. You just design a trial that can’t fail. “Nine out of 10 doctors “doesn’t mean 90% of all doctors. It simply means that 10 selected medical practitioners were asked, and nine of them approved. The way they were selected isn’t mentioned.

Perhaps the nine were all shareholders in the manufacturer’s business. Maybe the 10th one was totally horrified by the product, so he was included to show there was no cheating.

I use a toothpaste that claims to have been “clinically tested”. I have no idea what that means. Maybe the manufacturers have a washroom marked “clinic” where they get their staff to clean their teeth after consuming a canteen meal of real potatoes off genuine, clinically tested, real farm plastic plates, not tested on animals.

None of this is new, of course. The ancient Romans said it all in just two words: “Caveat emptor”, Let the buyer beware. It’s up to every one of us to sort out the truth from the “manure of male cattle”.

Stink Think

I was intrigued to tune in to a radio conversation in which the announcers were trying to decide whether it was true that women could smell what men were thinking. Apparently some erudite study had decided this was true.

Frankly, I don’t think it has anything to do with women’s sense of smell. Ever since Eve moved in with Adam, women have had no trouble knowing what men were thinking. The stink comes later.

Last Laugh

An innocent farm girl went to university in the big city, and her mother kept worrying about her being corrupted. When the mother called her, she reported happily: “Last night Charlie wanted to come up to my room, but I remembered what you told me about not having boys in my room, so I told him he couldn’t come here.”

“That’s good my girl. I’m pleased you listened to me.”

“Yes, I decided to go to Charlie’s flat instead and let his mother do the worrying.”