Advertisers: The more you spend, the more you save!

I am somewhat prone to gripe about and to criticize advertising pitches that I read or hear, especially on television. When an ad goes wild and crazy about something that doesn’t seem that great, I have trouble getting excited about its possibilities.

Some ads lead me to determine never to buy that product . Some advertising seems misleading; some makes no sense; some is too grandiose to suit; some seems downright offensive. Only yesterday I was watching an ad for a certain brand of interior wall paint. The paint claims to be waterproof and stain proof, so the homeowners and their guests were throwing their wine against the wall and laughing about it. That didn’t make me want to buy the paint. I’ll have to try harder now to avoid being prejudiced against that brand of paint. I feel sure it must be pretty good paint, despite the disgusting advertising.

Quite often, these days, I am hearing the pitch that I am referring to in the title of this column.

The idea being pitched is that the price is so good that the more you buy the more you are saving. That to me is a right novel idea about the meaning of “saving.” I come from a background in which saving means not spending, and putting together a fund that can allow you to purchase some needed things later. Our current advertising pitches often imply that if you buy from us, you will save so on your purchases that you will have so much left to buy other things. Often the ads don’t mention what you will be spending, they emphasize how much you are “saving” when “you buy from us.” To me, that’s not saving, that’s just spending, though maybe not quite as much as it might have been. I often notice that advertising for pickup trucks rarely mentions what the purchase will cost you, the advertising points your attention to how much you are saving because of the rebates and special promotions being offered. Actually I don’t care much about saving $10,000 on my truck purchase if the outfit is going to cost me $80,000 to buy. It most likely will mean that I continue driving my old truck for at least another year.

It is not that I am against advertising. I think people who have products to sell almost always need to advertise, and to do so as creatively and persuasively as they can. I don’t mute the ads when I am watching TV, I actually enjoy listening to them, to see what kind of an appeal they make, and how they represent their product.

One thing that puzzles me these days is that some ads hardly seem to say anything about their product, they seem to assume that if they can do something clever and entertaining, people will buy the product, even if you don’t really learn anything about it from the ad. We have an insurance company that is into a long series of ads about “only pay for what you need.” I have listened to that one several hundred times, and I still don’t get it. How do you know just what you need? I thought you bought insurance to cover risks that arise because you don’t always know what will come up, or what you will need. I do rather like the little gecko who speaks Australian. For a time it seemed that the company might be retiring him, and the directions they were moving were I thought really a deterioration. Apparently they decided so as well, and the gecko seems to be showing up for them quite often now.

One of the ads that set me to questioning the sense in advertising “the more you spend the more you save” was an ad for refinancing your debt. The ad portrayed a couple who like many couples had a heavy debt burden, multiple credit cards, a mortgage, and so on. So, with the help of this financial institution, they were able to refinance their debts, consolidate their payments, and they saved so much interest and so much on their monthly payment that they could have a new swimming pool installed in their back yard. Now where is the logic in that? You try to get your finances under control so you can go into still more debt! Go figure!

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, is vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@centurytel.net, or call 621-1621.