Annoying Habits Part 7 – Advertisements

I love watching television commercials when I am in the United States. In fact, it is one of a handful of things that keeps me glued to the television, often keeping me up at nights as they can sometimes be more entertaining than the programs they are sponsoring.

And though commercials are there to transmit a message to their viewers in a scant thirty seconds, they sometimes overdo it.

Take children’s toys as an example. Once upon a time, toy commercials were loaded with enough special effects to make the Transformers movie look like a cheap television series.

Laser beams, teleportation, flights in space, you name it and children’s toy commercials had it. Unfortunately, these heavy special effects raised children’s expectations to unreachable levels. And when the toys could not do what they were advertised, it caused quite a stir.

Children’s toy commercials are more realistic today. Instead of all those special effects, you will typically see a child carrying a toy to mimic flight. They will even be caught on camera making noises or causing enemy damage with their own hands.

While toy companies have learned their lesson on commercials, this isn’t so for other products.

Shampoos

Shampoo commercials are typically the same all over the world.

It normally starts out with a long-haired girl frowning at the terrible state of her hair. It can be messy, frazzled, damaged, thin, dull, or even the wrong color.

Then in the next scene, I’ll see their hair being shampooed or undergoing some miraculous transformation with that magic line that shows bad hair on the left and great hair on the right.

Now while the transformation process may be interesting and eye-catching, they are still tolerable as I understand they are special effects.

But seriously, has anyone actually seen hair that behaves that way? I mean, how many people in your lifetime have gotten hair that floats on air? How about hair that shines like that brand new car you were eyeing on the lot? How about watching that comb slide down unimpeded from the root to the tips of extremely long hair? And all of this just because of shampoo.

Well, if you answered yes to even one of these questions, they you are a very lucky person because I haven’t seen such a phenomenon yet.

I’d probably have a better chance of finding Big Foot than seeing hair like that because of a shampoo.

The only time I have seen such beautiful hair on a girl is when she comes out of a parlor or salon where her hair is subjected to a series of treatments over several hours.

Even photographers and commercial directors know that their models have to undergo special treatments before going under the lights. Then when that is done, the still and moving pictures are turned over to a special effects team for enhancement.

Thank goodness I am not the type of person that loves to look at my hair on every reflective surface because then I may end up buying more shampoo just to lose my hair because of all the chemicals they stick in.

Plane Tickets

Picture this, you’ve already talked to your friends or relatives about staying over for the weekend at their summer home and all you need now is cheap transportation. So you comb the internet and finally find a Dollar or Peso plane ticket to your destination.

Is it too good to be true? You bet it is; this is as real as the sighting of the Loch Ness monster.

Just last week, I came across such an advertisement saying that the airfare to Palawan would just cost me PhP1.

Being the naïve person that I am, I gathered the entire family around our dinky little screen right before placing my order.

Lo and behold, after pressing a button to compute, it cost me a whopping PhP18,000 for tickets!

It turns out that the fuel charges, baggage charges, and other miscellaneous fees were not included in the PhP1. And that didn’t even include the airport fees!

Now don’t get me wrong; PhP18,000 for round trip tickets for five people is quite reasonable, especially since it costs double that to go to Palawan from Manila.

But a difference of PhP17,999 is kind of tough to swallow when you are advertising PhP1 for a plane ticket.

Now I don’t know what the definition of false advertising is for ads like these. For all I know, there is an advertiser’s code that says it is alright to fool people.

Luckily I called in my family for the final round of button clicking or I would have ended up tacking on unwanted charges on my credit card for a wanted trip.

Multi-level Marketing

This was extremely popular in the 1990s where you could find every other person trying to recruit you for their company.

During their heyday, you’d see billboards littering major thoroughfares, listen to radio announcers trying to recruit you for their network, and even watch television commercials on primetime.

Come on, how many real millionaires have you met? In my case, I have met just a handful of so-called Gold or Platinum members in all the companies I have joined. And I joined a lot in my younger days.

Now I’m not saying they don’t exist, it’s just that they are so rare that Unidentified Flying Object or UFO is more widespread than these creatures. Even the people directly under them don’t earn a fraction of what they claim to have made in a month.

But then these subordinates won’t admit that because if the truth were to get out, you wouldn’t fork over your hard-earned, life-long savings over to them for money they promise will be easy to earn.

The secret to making money is to join the multi-level marketing company early. You either are a founding member or are in the top tier in the organizational chart. This makes it possible for everyone that follows to contribute a portion of their efforts to your bank account.

If you end up joining the company late, you end up signing up with something that may be fully saturated already. And no matter how much work you put in, your chances get slimmer if you and your buddy, who happens to be the guy that recruited you, are fighting for the same slice of the market.

Thankfully, the Securities and Exchange Commission has come down hard on these companies.

Unfortunately, I have seen a resurgence of these types of companies with the start of the new decade.

They are more conservative when putting out advertisements, preferring to send over a better trained warm body to do all the explaining. Unfortunately, it’s still the same promises in a slightly different advertisement.

As far as I am concerned, I’m done with all multi-level marketing companies. I have lost quite a bit of money and a lot of precious time on them.

I never got rich and many of them literally disappeared with my money by either filing for bankruptcy just simply disappearing into the night.

 

Come on people, let’s break these habits and actually put something of value out there!