> Well, I'm not sure if it counts as a trend when I've only seen it in two adverts, but anyway:
>
> For the last month or so a major supermarket chain has been running adverts focused on the usual "prices dropping down to new levels of amazing cheapness" schtick. What made it different, however, was that there was absolutly no indication that these prices applied to any individual product. They were simply numbers that changed.

That's a bit of an extension of an advertising scheme that I remember from years ago (which has since dropped out of sight, thereby causing me to think that it didn't work so well). The company in question (and this was used very widely) displayed a bar graph. The red bar would be its product, and the green bar would be "the competition." Naturally, the red bar would be way longer than the green bar, but since the axes were unlabelled, it didn't mean a bleeding thing. All the graph came down to was "hey! Our bar is way longer than the competition's!" - there was no actual data involved.

Dar "My bar is way longer than the competition's" ien