Some of my favorite meaningless advertising phrases
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Voted Product of the Year. The best ever was Gerald Ratner's "Because it's crap". The company soon sank without trace. :laugh:
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Scientifically formulated! Clinically proven! Laboratory tested!
For several decades, Pepsodent toothpaste was marketed (at least in Norway) as "With irium". In my childhood, I used a different toothpaste (with fluoride), but I remember friends arguing in favor of Pepsodent, as it was with irium. When 'truth in marketing' became stronger, the manufacturers of Pepsodent were pressed on this 'irium'. They had to admit that it was their name for water. The marketing trick was that they had never claimed that Pepsodent was the only toothpaste with 'irium', and they had never claimed that 'irium' had any particular properties - only that Pepsodent contained 'irium'. Contained water. That was an indisputable truth. In the HiFi world you see a huge amount of terms, usually as three- or four-letter abbreviations, used to prove the quality of the product. I have actually been thrown out of a stereo shop because I laughed right into the face of a salesman: That is bullshit - show me what connections that amplifier has! That's what I care about. He refused to: If you deny that this and this and this is essential to the sound quality, then I have no amplifier to sell you! ... I left the store with a big laugh.
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"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
Not exactly advertising, but sort of related: Norway does not accept nuclear weapons on its ground. USA very much wants to establish advance stores (or whatever the correct term is!) of military equipment in Norway for fighting The Great Enemy - including atomic bombs. We agree to advance stores of conventional equipment, but not nuclear weapons. When this was discussed in media a couple of decades ago, one town after the other declared themselves as 'atom free zones'. It was pointed out that this would make those town awfully empty.
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Scientifically formulated! Clinically proven! Laboratory tested!
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Or "New, improved, original recipe" If it is the original recipe then it is unchanged so is not ne or improved. Salt and Vinegar Crisps: No Preservatives (sorry - what do they think salt or vinegar is?)
Visiting a friend running an ice cream stand, I laughed at his cans of pineapple ice cream topping (actually, I never tasted pineapple topping on ice cream, but apparently there is a market for it), marked 'New improved formula!' The contents declaration read: 'Crushed pineapple, sugar, water'. What is there to make any great new 'improved formula' in crushed pineapple, sugar and water? My friend took my reaction as a grave insult. Maybe they had removed something. Maybe the amount of sugar was changed. Who was I to pretend to know anything about how to make a pineapple soft ice topping? Oh well. I caved in and left him with his confidence that there had been a real improvement in the formula of that ice cream topping, of great significance to his ice cream stand.
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Premium Deluxe Luxury
>64 Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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Scientifically formulated! Clinically proven! Laboratory tested!
But wait, there's more!
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment "Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst "I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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For a limited time only...
Jeremy Falcon
You call a service center at 04:00, and are served an automatic answering message: "We are sorry, but at this moment we have an extraordinary amount of customers calling in, causing as very high traffic. Please be patient." Please be patient while we try to wake up that customer service guy - he is sleeping heavily! When you get that same message (and 20 minutes waiting time) whether you call at 10:00, 14:00, 20:00, 22:00, 04.00 or 08:00, I begin loosing my faith in that 'extraordinary' number of customer requests that they claim to have.
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You call a service center at 04:00, and are served an automatic answering message: "We are sorry, but at this moment we have an extraordinary amount of customers calling in, causing as very high traffic. Please be patient." Please be patient while we try to wake up that customer service guy - he is sleeping heavily! When you get that same message (and 20 minutes waiting time) whether you call at 10:00, 14:00, 20:00, 22:00, 04.00 or 08:00, I begin loosing my faith in that 'extraordinary' number of customer requests that they claim to have.
:laugh: Same thing with the government. The message should say "We're sorry, our workers are grabbing some coffee and don't want to answer. Deal with it."
Jeremy Falcon
