The Asterisk and the Mouse

 

They call it mouse type in the ad trade. In a print advertisement, you’ll find it at the bottom of the page denying everything promised by the rest of the page.

 

FREE ELECTRIC WINDOWS AND CD PLAYER will have an asterisk right above the word free. This minuscule starburst has a barely visible companion next to that dense smudge of print at the bottom of the page which, if you had a magnifying glass with the power of the Hubble telescope, will inform you that the windows aren¹t free, aren¹t electric and that CD players aren’t available on the model not pictured above. It is only by reading such disclaimers that true contempt in which marketing executives hold us is fully revealed.

 

My daughter recently traded in her old mobile phone.  Special Christmas offer - Free forty minutes of call-time if you upgrade your mobile now - the ad said.  My daughter dutifully exchanged her old brick for a sleek, lavender-coloured jobbie. As promised, this new mobile could vibrate, respond to voice-commands and compose its own musical ringing tone. Perhaps the only other feature a teenaged girl could wish for in a mobile is for it to emit some mind distorting ray which prevents the bouncers at the Pod from asking for proof of age.

 

But, as my daughter discovered when she went to register her mobile, the minutes aren’t free - they aren’t even necessarily forty. If you don’t use them all up within two weeks of purchase, whatever free minutes you have left are forfeit.  

 

My daughter enjoys talking, during just one of her mobile-phone conversations a colony of bacteria could form on a  left-over pizza and evolve to a point where it developed the capacity for space-flight - so her free forty minutes will most certainly be used up long before the expiry date. But that’s not the point.

 

The point is there is a brand-manager who thinks I’m stupid -  a corporate dimwit in a suit or a skirt who closes off internal memos with "please revert to the undersigned” - who pronounces et cetera as ek-setera - who adds up colyims of figures not columns and who wouldn¹t recognise a creative way to tell me the actual truth about the forty minutes if it jumped out of his/her leatherette personal day-planner and bit him/her in the arse.

 

But, maybe I am stupid.

 

For the longest time I was completely convinced that the purchase of any product connected to the female menstrual cycle would endow the user with a graceful gymnastic prowess and a joyous, radiant disposition. And seeing diaphanously clad women, swirl in ecstasy, pirouetting through the misty feminine freshness of exotic rainforests, who could blame me? I am a man, but after years of watching those ads I found myself wishing I could menstruate and try out for the Irish Girls’ Ballet team.

 

Marketing-hype is not a bad thing, not if the hyper presents the hypee with an honest proposition which is also entertaining. A good TV ad is just that, a mini entertainment. Engaging me and amusing me is not just a compensation for having interrupted The Sopranos - it¹s also a sure way to get me to respond to the message of the ad. Tricking me into spending money on the basis of a dud special offer is a sure way to get me screaming for my money back.

 

In the parlance of the dim brand manager, my daughter¹s bad experience with the free forty-minute scam would have been a “negative consumer/product interface”. Not the ripping off of someone who didn’t read the mice-type. That same executive would rationalise the feminine hygiene ads as  “an aspirational/emotive proposition distancing the actual product from any perceived negative menstrual connotations”. Not as an asinine attempt to convince women that their periods are something to look forward to. No woman on Earth is that gullible.

 

I have to go to London next Wednesday, I was going to book with Aer Lingus - but I’m not. I’m going to buy a pack of StayFree panty liners - I hear they have wings.