Sorry, not to be a bump in the road of a good thread, but this statistic is probably related to some defenitive metric of care for heart attacks, and this varies, but most importantly it probably refers to the time that it takes them to place a stint through a catheter in your femoral artery into the blocked blood vessel in the case of a blood clot, etc. Nationally, the “standard” is, I think, something like an hour, but most hospitals average about 1 hr 20 min. So, if they do it 33% faster, maybe their average is like 55 min. An extensive amount of data supports the idea that faster is better. In a cardiac event, you have the heart’s muscle tissue being deprived of oxygen and dying. The infarcted muscle tissue is radiating out from this area of blocked blood vessel and more of the tissue will be claimed as time progresses, so it’s in your interest to get this procedure as fast as possible and that’s what they are advertising.
Now, given that ambulances do decide what hospital you go to, I don’t know why hospoitals do all of these ads.
There used to be (probably still is) a billboard for the local phone book along the 210 out near Pomona. Every time I saw this billboard, I had to wonder what, exactly, they were hoping to achieve with it given that:
There was no competing phone book in the area. This was the phone book.
and
They gave them away for free. Around whatever time of year it is that they replace the phone books, there was always a big stack of them in the post office, the local bookstores, etc. as well as individual copies delivered to everyone with phone service.
“If you need to call a place, why not try looking the number up, eh?” seemed to be the message of these ads.
For me, ETF and “Exchange-Traded Funds” evoke the same level of awareness – that is, none at all. Maybe that’s what the advertisers were reckoning. They’re only pitching to the small minority that knows enough about this to care. No different from other advertising, really. When I turn on the TV and see an ad for a Ford F-150, how many people are really in the market? Five percent of the viewership?
And that is why it is bad advertising. The whole thing. Starting with you aren’t the decision maker, the EMT usually is. And I’d imagine the clocks starts ticking with the heart attack, not when you show up in the hospital - so a farther hospital will be worse. And anything it takes an entire paragraph to explain, using words like ‘stint through a catheter’ is not really meant for a billboard. And once again - faster than what - not covered on billboard. Faster than the 1hr 20 minute average? Faster than the hour standard? Faster than my husband with a copy of Grey’s Anatomy and a kitchen knife? Faster requires the object of comparison or it is useless. I’m 33% stronger (than my six year old daughter). Stats in general are bad advertising (what’s your sample size? What was the population, confidence interval, sample methodology?)
I’d bet they’re 33% faster than the passerby in the airport who sees you collapse, grabs the defibrillator off the wall and then spends 5 minutes trying to figure out how to activate it before he zaps you.
Of course, even this is probably counterproductive given that you just fainted and are not having a heart attack at all.
For Most Offensive Ad Inflicted One Me In The Last Five Minutes, I would like to nominate Callwave, a useless service that purports to act as an answering machine for all those vital phone calls you miss while surfing the web, presuming you are one of the 138 Americans who does not have a cellphone permanently implanted on your hip.
They are a “sponsor” (a.k.a. leech) on my e-mail service, and their ads block part of my e-mails, recur repeatedly despite clicking to close them, and even prevent me from readily moving on to other sites. Any advertiser that pulls this crap is probably a good bet to hijack your computer with spyware or other tricks.
Good point, but at least using the words instead of the acronym gives the listener a fighting chance. If I had heard “exchange-traded funds” I would have had a fighting chance of knowing what it was.
To build on your example, suppose you heard an ad that was all about “the new one-fifty, redesigned for higher performance” – you’d be left guessing. Is is a truck? A car? A motorcycle? A vibrator? What? Adding the additional information “Ford F-one-fifty” gives you the context you need. Someone who wasn’t familiar with that designation would still be lost, but you’d hit a higher percentage of your audience. For any product or service, the number of potential customers you have is usually small. Decreasing the effective size of the audience by making your message hard to understand is not a winning strategy.