| Editorial May 2004
Adspeak: Things We Don’t Want to Hear Anymore
If you’re like me, you can pick out marketing
propaganda a mile away. Shouldn’t we all be able to spot "ad copy"?
After all, we stare at it in one form or another during most of our waking hours.
We’re used to seeing it on TV, in newspapers, and hearing it on the radio. Now we
have pop-up ads on the Internet, flashing billboards, planes pulling banners across the
sky, and people painting colorful company logos on their cars so that anytime they’re
driving, the advertiser is getting exposures. Advertising even intrudes on what I
used to consider my personal space: Some of the golf courses I frequent have ads placed on
signs at each tee box. Recently, I visited a restaurant where there were display ads
placed at eye level over the bathroom urinals. When is enough enough?
With all this ad copy everywhere, is it any wonder that the
folks creating it sometimes run out of things to say? Some of it is just plain stupid,
after all. You’d think intelligent people would see through it to the point where
some of these companies would learn. What’s really disheartening, though, is when the
worst of the ilk seems to be effective.
The home-theater industry has seen its share. Examples of
ads, labels, and tags abound that -- thank goodness -- you just don’t see much of
anymore.
The worst I can remember is Digital Ready. You could
make a case that, for certain components, the addition of a digital input made the item
"digital ready," but I saw this tag mostly on speakers. That’s right,
boatloads of speakers, mainly sold through big-box stores, bore huge shiny letters that
read Digital Ready -- which, applied to speakers, means nothing. The products I
speak of were a far cry from Meridian’s powered speakers, with their internal D/A
converters; at least that aspect of their design could be labeled digital. But
these pretenders at the big-box stores, usually crappy-sounding at best, contained no
digital switching amplification. Were the makers referring to increased frequency response
for handling the DVD-Audio and SACD formats? A quick look at the specs showed that that
wasn’t the case. So what were we supposed to think? Or were we supposed to think at
all?
If you put certain words on a product, it seems to
instantly give it more credibility. One of the most recent is upgradeable. But
isn’t everything, in a sense, upgradeable? It might cost you ten times what the
product cost in the first place, but I’m sure you could upgrade just about anything
you bought if you were committed to it. I saw a Volkswagen Beetle the other day that would
blow the doors off a Corvette -- when that bug was purchased, it was upgradeable, right?
I’ll give credit to a handful of companies that have
supported their products via software and hardware updates in a timely fashion at
reasonable prices. Anthem is a case in point. But just as many manufacturers have touted
"upgradeability" for just about everything they make and, a few years after a
product’s launch, have simply replaced it with a new model. The substance of one
company’s upgradeability program was that dealers would guarantee a certain trade-in
value to the original owner, to be applied to the price of the original component’s
replacement. Am I the only one that finds this misleading? This is not an upgrade but a
trade-in. But slap that Upgradeable sticker on those boxes and, sure enough,
you’ll sell more of ’em.
How ’bout that EDTV plasma screen you’ve been
dreaming of? I know people who have been duped into thinking they were getting an HDTV,
only to find out that enhanced definition and high definition aren’t
the same things. Ever heard of CD-Quality sound from sources that can’t
technically be of CD quality?
I don’t want to come off as a curmudgeon here. After
all, I’ve been using the term universal to describe disc players that can play
SACD and DVD-A when packaged with a typical DVD player’s functionality. I could poke
holes in that one, too, but I won’t. At least not today.
...Jeff Fritz
editor@hometheatersound.com |
