95% fat free when it’s actually 5% fat.
I ABSOLUTELY DESPISE adverts that play on your emotions. LIke ads that have fluffy bunnies, and elderly people getting letters from long lost children and other emotion provoking stuff while playing really good stolen music in the back ground ALL IN ORDER TO PROMOTE A BANK OR AN INSURANCE COMPANY! Hate that.
I also hate when brands advertise themselves as being health food when there is no truth to the claim at all. For e.g I found this expensive ‘slimmers’ cheese that had more fat in it that the ordinairy no-name brand in the store.
Junk mail. Especially Junk E-Mail. ESPECIALLY ESPECIALLY junk
E-Mail that attempts to sell me thousands of e-mail addresses so that I can junk other people.
Ads that pretend that a well-groomed actor is really a doctor who believes in their product.
Any ad that attempts to sell a lifestyle: CK, Tommy Hillfiger, cigarette ads etc
ALL info-mercials! (except the mega memory program, it has helped me pass many an exam!)
Finally: ads that try to make you feel self-conscious about something or that try to make you dislike part of your self that only their product can cure you of.
Basically I think that ads are the devil 
For this I check the ingredients list…they are suppose to list what they put in the beverage, right?
I hate those smarmy insurance “policies” that the schools give the kids: you know, the ones that pay $500.00 for the loss of an eye, $1000.00 for the loss of a hand, etc. They must MINT money on these things…talk about dishonest. Worse, the public schools allow themselves to be touts for this swindle!
The one that gets me is when a local company sticks a flyer through my door, offering to shampoo my carpet for free if I call their number.
It’s not a free carpet shampoo. It’s a three-hour sales pitch from the local Kirby distributor, who will try to sell you their machine for £1600. If you tell them you don’t want it, all of a sudden they realise that they’ve “forgotten” to bring the shampoo attachment, and therefore can’t clean your carpet after all.
Yeah, I’ve got to admit that I fell for this one. But they shot themselves in the foot, because it just strengthened my resolve not to buy their product. In fact, I went one further, called their main competitor and purchased from them instead.
Most advertising practices are too stupid to actually draw me in, but a few are irritating because they make you have to look twice to find out the truth.
Pet peeve example – number of servings. Most people just glance at the nutritional label and say “Oh look, this bag of chips only has 100 calories.” And then you look at the column that says “servings per container” and find out that the little bag you have in your hand with about 20 chips in it contains 3 servings, so you are actually talking about 300 calories and have to multiply everything else (grams of fat, etc.) by 3 to get the real values.
20 ounce soda bottles that seem to have 100 calories in the bottle…until you see that there’s 2.5 servings in the bottle. What am I supposed to do, get a measuring cup and pour a “serving” out?
The one that I absolutely hate the most is not really an advertising technique, but it is done by people who are advertising something, so I shall tell the tale…
Several times in the last year (since we moved into the latest house) we have come home to see flyers attached to the handle of our door. Why these people are coming around when most people will be at work is beyond me, but why they would leave advertising flapping on the door handle is even more so. Why not just kick the door down to let people know that there are obviously no people inside the house.
I don’t mind things being left in my letter box (I actually do mind, but it does not anger me), nor do I mind things being left on our porch, there’s a lot of stuff there, so it may not be too obvious that we simply have not picked it up… but why of why hang something on the door to flap around in the breeze and attract attention!
The worst one was from Optus (the phone and cableTV people here) that was actually PRINTED ON DOOR HANGERS. It was obviously meant to be left exactly where it was. Oddly enough, I never used any of the services offered to me in this fashion.
Deceptive porn thumbnails! The thumb will look okay, the clip will be a dry vagina penetrated in extreme closeup for a minute.
Wait, did I type that? What I meant to say was spams that try to pose as e-mails from real people. How stupid do they think I am?
And it’s not deceptive, but there’s nothing I hate more than a popup that can’t be closed any way other than CTRL-ALT-DEL-ing out of Internet Explorer. Yeah, if you piss me off I’m REALLY going to want to follow your link to Bonzie Buddy.
I hate dishonest representation of movies. To make an action movie look more action-packed than it really is is expected; to sell Gosford Park as an intricate murder-mystery is despicable.
I hate the various scams pulled by phone companies and other telemarketers. At this point I tell anybody who calls that I don’t do business over the phone, even if the service they’re offering seems reasonable.
I remember there was once some product being sold that used the ad line “Recommended by more doctors.” I used to wonder what it was that they were recommending it more than - More than getting a pointy stick in the eye? Minds will usually automatically fill in what’s not being said with similar sayings we’ve been exposed to in the past - like “Recommended by more doctors than other similar brand name products.” Cunningly misleading. I don’t know if such types of ads have been formally classified as false advertising as of yet.
How little they pay.
(runs away)
These merely look absurd when you are surfing on a Macintosh computer.
cough cough I can consider myself one of the “switchers” (even though I don’t think the PC is a “horrible little machine” since I still own one). Yes, some digital cameras are TERRIBLE to try to install on a PC. My sister got one of them. She had no USB connection, so I was going to install it on my PC. Only when I saw the instructions, I quickly decided to install it on my Mac instead. The instructions for installing in on a PC were horrific. Convoluted and bizarre. On a Mac? Particularly OS X? YOU PLUG IT IN. That’s it.
And on one of my scanners (one that connected to the parallel port), I had to have the folks at CompUSA go into the BIOS to make things work on the parallel port. (I am no PC techie, but not a complete newbie either. But one thing I will NOT do unaided is mess around with the BIOS!)
I am not saying that PCs are terrible (I don’t want to start a platform war), not saying that PCs suck or are not any good for anything. But there is no question in my mind, from my experience—installing external hardware is usually EASIER with a Mac. Zip drives, CD burners, scanners, digital cameras, digital tablets—tried 'em all. Many of them were “cross platform” devices that I installed on both Mac and PC, because I intended to “share” them between the two systems. In almost all cases, installing on the Mac was easier. In some cases, installing the device on a PC was fraught with trouble, whereas installing the same device on a Mac was no problem. I believe the Switchers were all being honest about their experiences, which are similar to my own in many respects.
Oh, I guess I should mention what advertising methods annoy me? The “as low as” pisses me off, since (as someone else mentioned) only the most pathetic and cheap item is priced at the “as low as” price, where all the decent items are priced at more average (not spectacular) prices.
Only £499 for all this!!![sup]*[/sup] (picture of computer)
(tiny writing somewhere else on the page):
[sup]*product depicted with optional monitor, keyboard, mouse, operating system and software bundle[/sup]
Ads that use snips of songs out of context to advertise their products, when the rest of the song means anything but what the ad is trying to convey.
One is a blue jean ad that uses CCR’s Fortunate Son “Some folks are born made to wave the flag, ooh they’re red white and blue” like it’s some patriotic song, while the next line is “And when the band plays “Hail to the chief”, ooh they point the cannon at you”.
Another one that sucks is Jaguar using London Calling. The thing that strikes me as ironic is that they actually use the line “I never felt so much alikealikealike…” like it’s cool to be a lemming or something.
And the fact that some songs actually become hits because of their use in a commercial (Days Go By) make me want to throw up. Such crassness by “artists” would’ve have earned them much ridicule in the “good old days”.
You make the deal! No credit applicatiopn will be refused! $1 under invoice!
*Of course, you make the deal - who else would? If you go to buy a car, you make the deal. Of course, no credit application will be refused. Naturally, they may refuse to grant you credit after accepting and reviewing the application, but they certainly won’t refuse the application.
Oh, and in a sotto voce, fast voice at the end: “Invoice may not reflect true final cost to dealer.” *
I can only get you this price if you make a deal right now.
Whenever I hear this (or along these lines) I think that this guy is BS’ing me and no longer has any credibility. If you can get me this price toady you can get me this price a week from now. This just means you don’t want me to ever come back - and why should I buy something from someone who never wants me to come back?
I don’t think I ever bought anything from someone using this tactic - and I mean anything ever after (on other items) I will not deal w/ a person who does this even once to me.
See, I actually look at it the other way. They’re trying to get me to spend $5, but I know if I buy one, it’s only gonna be $2.50 (which is good if one’s usually $3 or $4). Of course, sometimes you have to buy two of the product to get the deal, but when this is the case the store puts a note on the price tag thingy.
New can! Same great soda!
Umm, hello? If I already like the soda, I’m going to buy it no matter what the can looks like. If I don’t like it, I’m not going to start drinking it because the can looks cool.
Sure. But, like I said, you’d be amazed at what you can get away with.
Many juices have white grape, apple, or pear juice concentrate as the first ingredient, and technically that’s what’s in there. But before the juice is added, it’s not uncommon for them to first pass the juice through ion exchange columns. One column replaces positively charged minerals with hydrogen atoms, and one replaces the acids, fruit flavors, and nutrient compounds with OH ions. The Hs combine with the OHs, and what you get out the other side is basically sugar water. It’s an expensive way to make sugar water, but to many juice companies it’s worth it, since they can label their products “100% Juice” or “No Sugar Added”. Then they dump this sugar water into raspberry juice or whatever, and slap a wholesome-looking label on it.
And your only clue is the “white grape juice concentrate” on the label.
All pop-up ads. Do these things actually attract customers? I find them unspeakably annoying.