'We've got a sub for that'

Introducing the great 'I've just been humiliated in front of 1,200 people' sub. You choose the bread, the filling, the salad and the sauce. However you feel, whatever you want - we've got a sub for that.

And I've got a term for that: comfort eating.

'Receive Quid From the Government'

I just logged into StatCounter to see how The Engine Room was doing when I spotted this ad:


'Get a few quid' perhaps, but never 'receive quid'. I think I'm safe in saying that this copy wasn't written by a native British English speaker.

In fact, Google gives only 576 results for "Receive Quid" (and almost all of those follow their 'quid' with a 'pro quo').

Unfortunately, the ad changed before I thought to click on it - and no matter how many times I refresh StatCounter it won't come back. So I'll probably never find out how to receive quid from the government.

I wouldn't know what to do with 11,286 quids anyway.

Worst Case & Michael Ledwidge

This morning, on the way in to work, I saw an advert for the novel Worst Case by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge. Here's the book's front cover:

It seems strange to me that the title is placed between the authors' names. The novel could almost be called 'Worst Case & Michael Ledwidge'.

A long time ago, in an ancient time

The voiceover on the current Ferrero Rocher TV ad begins:

A long time ago, in an ancient time

Surely most ancient times were a long time ago?

And while repetition can be a powerful rhetorical device, those two 'times' don't do much for me.

Partner with Verizon. Why aren't we?

Slightly clunky wording in this advert for Verizon, as seen on ComputerWeekly.com:


'Partner' is being used as a verb here, so I would have opted for 'why don't we?' rather than 'why aren't we?'.

I wonder whether the fact that 'partner' can be a noun or a verb caused some confusion. Or was the confusion over tenses: present simple ('partner') followed by present continuous ('why aren't we [partnering])?

AdSense, the NHS and Camel cigarettes

Google's AdSense can be slightly strange. I write a post about camels, and AdSense serves up the following advertisement on the blog:


I can understand the confusion between camel the animal and Camel the cigarette, but is the National Health Service only helping Camel smokers to quit now? Do the other brands no longer kill you?

Customer refreshment logistics technicians

Yes, I'm still on holiday, so here's another picture from my collection. There's no mistake to spot this time, just some amusing language use:



If you haven't worked it out yet, this is an advert for bar staff. And yes, I took the photo in a pub using my camera phone. And no, I can't remember which pub it was. One in London, I can tell you that much...

Let me through – I'm a proofreader!

One of the adverts that adorned the Engine Room this evening read: Make £500pwk Proofreading For 100's Of UK Publishers.

Ok, per week or pw, but pwk? Why is every word capped? Why is there an apostrophe in 100's?

So the ad should read: Make £500 per week proofreading for hundreds of UK publishers.

May I have my £500 now, please?

And on the subject of ads, I just heard a TV ad for a nappy cream which promises to "protect... and care". An inanimate object "caring"? Does no-one at ad agencies read the code of conduct nowadays?

Agricultural Travel Bureau advert

I love trade/B2B magazines, I really do - and not just because I work on a couple. Where else would you find adverts like this? (Click on the image to see a larger version; I know it's a bit small.)


My favourite bit: "Visit the 'Lost City of the Incas' and the ancient Sacred Valley, as well as some interesting farms."

Talk about bathos...


(I believe I scanned this advert from Farmers Weekly.)

Odd AdSense advert for Bupa

I spotted an odd AdSense advert (say that 10 times quickly!) on this very blog a while back:



Is it just me, or has something gone very wrong with this banner for Bupa? It looks like a Mac user – possibly called A Haydn Jones – is responsible...

BA: You can't smell a city from a plane

I took this shot with my cameraphone on full zoom, so apologies for the shoddy picture quality.

Anyway... does anyone else think this British Airways advert is bizarre? Granted, you may not be able to smell a city from a coach, but you certainly can't smell one from a plane.




Oh, someone on Flickr has had the same thought - and taken a better picture too. Never mind.

New Media Age News: British Airways launches global campaign

Are you living? These people do.

Clutchslip has pointed out to me this ad for Admiral MultiCar:


Question: present continuous. Answer: present simple. Hmm.


(If you can't see the image, the text reads: "Are you living in a house with two or more cars? These people do and they all made big savings on their car insurance!")

Photo special: ceramic views across London

I've got quite a backlog of language-related photos now so I'm going to start posting some at weekends.

Spotted this advert in the window of a local estate agent's:


For those who can't see the photo, the text reads in part:

A beautiful spacious 2 Bedroom Flat with ceramic views across London is situated on 3^rd Floor

Ceramic views? Perhaps the flat looks out on to a pottery - not that I know of any in Forest Hill.

And presumably the writer meant 'scenic', but is 'ceramic' due to the careless use of a spellchecker's suggestions list?

McCain makes high-profile apostrophe error

I don't want The Engine Room to become one of those blogs that is fixated on misplaced, missing or inappropriate apostrophes (not that there is anything wrong with that in itself, of course; it's just that other blogs do it so much better).

However, this one is a real cracker (click for a larger image):



So this is an ad by multi-billion-dollar food company McCain. A full-page ad, on the outside back cover of the London Lite newspaper – which has a readership of 1.1 million. And look at that apostrophe.

I suddenly feel much better about my own mistakes. And can anyone come up with a higher-profile apostrophe error?

I do quite like 'caressive', though.


(For those who can't see the image, the copy in the advert reads: "Stop! Stop! I lied, as I bit into the pert roundness of the goose fat smothered potato, instantly sending caressive plumes of steam gushing from it's soft, fluffy centre like a hot breath on my lips.")

Jeffrey Archer: the ultimate storyteller

In the advertising for his latest novel, A Prisoner of Birth, Jeffrey Archer is described as "the ultimate storyteller". Does this mean that once you read one of his books, you'll never want to read another novel?

The advertising also makes reference to "the ultimate crime". Writing A Prisoner of Birth, perhaps?



(Sorry; this is a screengrab from Archer's website. I wanted to take a photo of a poster I saw at my local station but it came down before I got round to it. And I have to say that I haven't actually read A Prisoner of Birth; I was just amused by the advertising.)

The Times: coldest temperature on record

I was a little confused when I first saw this advert for The Times – especially by the fourth paragraph, "The coldest temperature on record is -27.1C, in Braemer, in February 1895 and January 1982."

I lived in Russia for a little while and certainly experienced temperatures lower than -27.1.

It was only when I read the fifth paragraph ("The hottest UK temperature recorded...") that I realised that the previous par was referring to the coldest UK temperature on record.

Even then, isn't the name of the Scottish village in question Braemar, not Braemer? (I may be wrong about this – possibly both spellings are acceptable, although my gazetteer only lists the former.)

I also want to know exactly where in February 1963 "enough snow fell to bury a double decker bus in an hour" – again, presumably this par is referring to somewhere in the UK, rather than somewhere in Antarctica...


(Click the image for a larger version.)

Photo special: www kat eat kinson co uk

Here's a snap I took a couple of months back of a billboard near my office:



This advert's interesting because of the subtle use of bold in the web address. It's easy to separate www.kateatkinson.co.uk into its component parts:

www
kate
atkinson
co
uk

With www.kateatkinson.co.uk (the unbolded version), the task is much harder and a reader may well come up with (for example):

www
kat
eat
kinson
co
uk


(Kate Atkinson is an English novelist; I think this advert was promoting her latest novel, When Will There be Good News?.)

Adverts: LEZ

The Engine Room isn't the only site to suffer from inappropriate context-sensitive adverts.

The magazine I work for has a sister website and today our web editor was complaining that, due to its ongoing coverage of the London Low Emission Zone (or LEZ – and I know you know where this is going), it has been displaying adverts for lesbian dating services. Among other things...

AdSense: no sense

This blog, like many others, uses Google's AdSense to provide relevant advertisements (see the two little ads above). However a couple of recent AdSense offerings have stopped me in my tracks.

One was an ad for cheapo British pub chain JD Wetherspoon - presumably AdSense picked up on my name for this one (and possibly my post about pub rowdyism...).

The other questionable advert was for, and I quote, "The Engine Room CD" on Play.com – it was news to Apus and me that we have ever released a CD. But it's given me the idea of an 'Engine Room Greatest Hits'. Watch this space.

If you spot any other inappropriate or plain bizarre AdSense adverts, on this blog or others, please let us know...

My other post about AdSense

AdSpeak

Like most people I do my best to avoid, or at least ignore, TV adverts, but a couple of adman phrases never cease to irritate me.

Manufacturers of painkillers regularly use the phrase: "No headache pill is more effective than..." Translation: "There's a legal limit on the active ingredients we're allowed to put into our pills and, like our competitors, we've complied with the law so apart from the packaging and the price they're all about the same."

And insurers regularly promise: "You could save up to £xxx." Translation: "You might not save a penny; all this advert promises is that there's an upper limit to the potential saving. And that potential saving is the most extreme case we could justify to the Office of Fair Trading."

In the first example the key word is "more" which to Joe Public might be synonymous with "as" but isn't. In the second example the key words are "could" and "up to".

But presumably most people don't pay close attention to the exact meaning of words, which is why advertisers can fool most of the people most of the time.