BS

The entire advertising industry is based on telling you lies. These lies range from slight embellishments to outright fabrications, but the core of the issue is they want you to believe something that’s just not true. Good ads will hide this behind something distracting and amusing. Bad ads lead to litigation or, worse, switched channels. And nobody wants that.

I heard one on the radio this morning, though, that stretched the truth just a little too far. It was advertising the radio station itself, a classic rock station, and was maybe twenty or thirty seconds long. It was a gentleman in his 40s or 50s offering a testimonial about how great he thought the radio station was. He sounded very convincing! He sounded like he was speaking on the phone, so the idea is you’re supposed to believe his message was recorded when he called in to the station to pay them a compliment. You couldn’t even tell he was reading  a script. Very convincing indeed.

Until, that is, you paid attention to what he was saying. Here is his message, paraphrased: “Your station is all I ever listen to. I used to have to download all the old classics, which was a hassle, but then I discovered your station and now I can just listen to them for free whenever I want. I chucked my old mp3 player and listen to [radio station] all the time now. You guys rock!”

So let me get this straight. Here’s a guy who made it to middle age without discovering the joys of FM radio? A guy who threw out his expensive electronic gadget — presumably already filled with the “old classics” — when he found out he could listen to those same songs on the radio, in between commercials? Really?

There’s been this big to-do lately about how so-and-so wants to legally force an FM receiver into the next generation of smart phones. I guess now we know who supports that nonsense.

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