> > 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

Ah yes. The "meaningless graph" adverts. They always confuse me, even when they pretend to give some kind of context to the graph. One I remember is for a brand of dog food. It begins with a voiceover saying how "studies show" a dog's immune system deteriorates with age (as if that wasn't obvious). Then you get an outline of a dog, with the feet being full of (presumably) "immuneness". The voice over then tells you that this particular dog food can restore your dog's immune system to "that of a much younger dog". The doggie outline then fills up with "immuneness".

I think it's more the cutsie way of representing it than any real lack of information conveyed that annoys me about this, but there are several similar adverts on British TV at the moment. Many of them don't even have this little bit of context.

winter"When I was a kid, ads were great. Now they all seem to suck. What happened?"mute