Honest Ads

When you watch as much British tv as we've been lately, you start to notice some interesting differences from what we're used to seeing on Canadian and American ads.  There seems to be a great amount of effort put into making advertisements as transparent and honest as possible, and this leads to some pretty amusing statements.  The key is to read the fine print.

We're used to ads for products claiming "More people prefer..."  Well, one of our favourite ones here is for Flora butter.  The ad states that more people prefer Flora butter in a taste test, but when we read the not-so-small print along the bottom of the screen, it tells us something along the lines of "in a survey of 60 people, 47% preferred Flora butter and 42% preferred the leading brand."  Therefore not even half of the people surveyed actually would have chosen that brand of butter!  

I like the cosmetic ads that have to declare when the model's appearance has been enhanced.  In shampoo and hair colour ads, the advertisers state when the model/actress is wearing hair extensions, and whether or not they're real human hair.  My favourite examples of honest advertising has to be in the mascara ads, where they state every time the model had false eyelashes.  It's as if they are admitting up front that your own eyelashes will never look that good without some extra help.

The funniest ones are probably movie trailers, which are ridiculously honest.  In an effort to give a detailed explanation of the rating a movie has received, at the end of each ad there will be a sentence about the film's scenes or content that affected the rating, whether it be "scenes of bloody violence" or "scenes of sexuality."  Our favourite so far is from the new Renee Zellweger movie, which according to its rating "contains one use of strong language."  Can you imagine being the person who had the watch the entire movie (which looks awful, by the way) and count the amount of times "strong language" was used?  

To be honest, details like these would make movie watching for someone like me, who does not like to see blood or violence, much easier, as I would know exactly what I'm walking into.  And it's also nice to know whether your hair could actually look that full, or your eyelashes that long, because you bought a certain product.  And the claims made in the butter ad make me question all those similar claims I've seen through the years on tv back home.  It really makes you think.