Simply Shocking!

.
With gold prices soaring, television viewers are positively assailed by the number of advertisements encouraging people to sell their unwanted gold.

Many of these advertisements show people popping their unwanted jewellery into envelopes and later holding fistfuls of bank notes they have obtained in exchange. No wonder then that the advertisements have drawn the attention of Which?, the consumer magazine.

Researchers for Which? bought three pieces of new jewellery for £729 and were offered just £38.57 by one company. And the lowest price offered for a £215 gold bangle was a scandalous £14.57.

The Chief Executive of Which? said that the low prices paid for people’s gold was ‘simply shocking’ and correctly pointed out that the magazine’s investigation raised serious concerns about the fair treatment of consumers.

I agree. These advertisements imply that large sums of money are paid for unwanted gold whereas, in fact, the average price paid by television gold buyers was merely six percent of the retail price for gold.

Many people are under pressure in the current economic times and may be enticed into parting with valuable items for a fraction of their real value. Which? have done an excellent job in highlighting this trade which preys on people’s susceptibilities.

The government would do consumers a favour by not only regulating the television gold buyers but the content of the advertisements themselves.

[The Office of Fair Trading announced later today that it is going to carry out its own investigation into this trade to check that customers are being treated fairly. ]
.

Questions

.
My wife says that I take things too literally and she is probably right. Nonetheless, there are some things that need answers.

Like: what happens to the tiny firemen that soothe the mouth of the lady in the Gaviscom advert? Do they get swallowed and so die? What a tragic end after helping solve the lady’s heartburn.

Similarly, what happens to the little men that clean the teeth of the other lady in the Listerine advert? Are they to die in her digestive tract also? Poor little things!

And why do Homebase go to the bother of building a kitchen in the bottom of an empty swimming pool? Is the pool to be covered over with a roof and the kitchen extended to make some sort of underground house?

Then there’s the tidy Thomson Holiday representative. Do they really bother to pick out the leaves in hotel swimming pools?

Some of these questions are unanswerable. Yet one advert that settled a question in my mind, though raised others, is the compare the meerkat advert. There really is a comparethemeerkat.com website with amusing talkative meerkats.

What I haven’t discovered yet is why they appear to be of Russian descent and how it came about that they could talk!
.

Television Advertising

.
I wrote yesterday about do-gooders in government and other agencies who tinker with people’s minds and lives.

Perhaps I was too quick to criticise, though possibly not in some cases.

The thought came to me this morning when I realised there has been a tremendous increase in the number of television advertisements publicising online gambling sites and others inviting people to sell their unwanted gold and jewellery.

All these advertisements show smiling, happy people waving their bingo winnings or the wads of cash they have received for their jewellery.

They do not show the misery suffered by some of the poor souls who have logged on to gambling sites and lost their housekeeping money, or the folk who realise to their great regret that they have parted with treasured jewellery in return for a short-term gain at possibly less than the true value of the items sold.

While I am against the sort of ‘nannying’ this government has indulged in since it came into power, perhaps we do need to be protected from ourselves sometimes. And these sort of advertisements are a case in point where, like cigarettes and alcohol, maybe they ought to be accompanied by appropriate warnings.
.

The Effectiveness Of 'Meerkat' Advertising

.
Relaxing in front of the idiot-box last night, two things struck me.

The first was that many satellite channels seem to be showing more and more trailers for upcoming features in their commercial breaks. This, I assume, is due to the recession and a fall in advertising.

The second was that how many advertisements are wholly ineffective. Your eyes glaze over the pretty young women extolling the virtue of this or that and the many strange advertisements that don’t seem to relate much to the product being advertised. Indeed in many cases once the advert has finished, you are left wondering what it was all about.

Can you remember what the opera singer who floats up into the air is supposed to be selling? Or the woman wandering the park with her dog? Or the television sets that spring to life and move around town? There are many such instances where the advertising agencies have persuaded companies to invest in expensive adverts that achieve, in my view at any rate, nothing at all.

Contrast these with the ‘classic’ advertisements such as, for example, the Hovis bread boy or the ‘Bisto Kids’.

Or, much more recently, the hilarious meerkats fighting to protect their website from being invaded by people looking for cheap car insurance. How many people I wonder actually look up comparethemeerkat.com before moving on to buy insurance?

This latter shows how television advertisements can be both amusing and highly successful. And, sadly, often more entertaining than the programmes themselves!
.