Tag: advertising

If I were a teen girl

Have you seen the commercials for One a Day Teen Advantage vitamins? I keep seeing them because we’ve gotten hopelessly addicted to NCIS and House reruns on USA. It’s a disease. Anyway, if I were a teen girl, I would be pretty pissed off. The commercial says that there are vitamins designed for teen boys and for teen girls. That’s fine – teen boys and teen girls have different vitamin needs, so it only makes sense to have different vitamins for each of them. But the commercial and their website only mention that girls want healthy skin, and boys want healthy muscles.

Complete Multivitamins for Teen Boys & Girls to Support: * Healthy muscle function with Magnesium (for Him) * Healthy skin with Vitamins A and C, Copper, and Iron (for Her)

Now, as I said, I’m not a teen girl, nor was I ever a teen girl, or a girl of any kind. But I feel I can speak for them when I say that girls need muscles, too. You know, for exercising and playing sports and moving. Does One a Day Teen Advantage really think that the only thing girls might get (or want) from their vitamins is healthy skin? That sounds like a pretty worthless vitamin.

That’s a weird place for an ad, Google

Those of you who use Google Finance to track the implosion of your stock portfolio have probably noticed that they’ve moved the graph that tracks the Dow and the S&P; over to make room for a big box of ads. I’m curious why they did that. Not only does it look a little out of place, but do people really go to Google Finance looking to buy something? If they offered a cheap way to buy stock, I could understand that. But the ad it’s showing me now is “Free Grants for Finances”, whatever that means. It doesn’t seem to really fit in with their typical strategy of unobtrusive, targeted ads. I suppose it doesn’t cost them anything, and could bring in plenty of money, but it could also backfire by annoying long-time users like me by taking up a pretty large chunk of prime screen real estate. I hope they don’t make any money off the ads and decide to remove them.

I dont know what SalesGenie is thinking

An Ad With Talking Pandas, Maybe, but Not With Chinese Accents – New York Times via Consumerist shared in Google Reader by Mike

Still, “if I offended anybody,” Mr. Gupta said, “believe me, I apologize.”

That is NOT an apology. You DID offend people, and by not acknowledging that you did, you are not apologizing.

Even more ridiculous?

Mr. Gupta said he planned to keep running the other Salesgenie commercial, featuring an animated salesman named Ramesh who speaks with an Indian or other South Asian accent.

The reason, Mr. Gupta said, was that “more people seem upset about the pandas than Ramesh.”

So, let’s summarize. These clowns made two commercials based on caricatures of ethnic groups. But people only really complained about one. So, they issued a fake apology and kept running the one that people didn’t really seem to mind.

I’m not sure what this says about American feelings towards people who are “Indian or … South Asian”. Are we still mad about outsourcing and blame anyone with that kind of accent? That’s kind of sad. In some sense I’m surprised we aren’t more mad at the Chinese, since the ‘toys with lead’ incident is more recent than the explosion of outsourcing. But I guess some people are still serving “freedom fries”, so who knows what grudges the American public will hold on to.

My real problem here is SalesGenie’s response. Anyone can say or do something offensive – it could be accidental, or poor judgment, or whatever. It happens. The real judge of character is what you do to fix it. The very first thing you do is you stop whatever you did which was offensive. They did half of that. The next thing you do is make a sincere apology. They didn’t do that. Finally, you take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I don’t know if they’ve done this or not, and I’m not really inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Is this legal?

alli –weight loss program for healthy weight loss

Take a look at the link above.  I keep seeing this commercial while the wife watches various Law and Order marathons while she pretends she’s doing work.

The first thing I thought when I saw the logo was “Google”.  I imagine that was intentional, and I imagine their lawyers have determined that they haven’t crossed any lines, but it seems like they must have come pretty close.

Not only that, but their red-blue-yellow-green letters mirror eBay’s, too.

Now, eBay doesn’t have much of a sense of humor, so I imagine if they determine they don’t have a case, they’ll let it go, just mutter to each other at the corporate office.

Google, however, ought to send a nice little note to GlaxoSmithKline, makers of Alli, and tell them in no uncertain terms that they’re a bunch of dicks.  They probably won’t, but it would be cool.

Where do you draw the line between a similar logo and an attempt to piggyback on the good name of another company?  Alli is really, really close to that line if they haven’t actually crossed it.  They aren’t competing with eBay or Google, but that’s not really the issue.

I want in on this

Coke & Nestle Sued Over Enviga’s Bogus Calorie Burning Claims – Consumerist

Enviga, the so-called “calorie burning soda” has landed Coke and Nestle in some hot water, as the The Center for Science In The Public Interest has filed suit against both for false advertising claims

I’ve written about Enviga a few times.  I don’t like it.  I don’t like their claims.  I don’t like their carcinogen sweeteners.  I don’t like the taste.

But I do like a lawsuit for false advertising.  That’s always fun.