With all respect to the Ginsu Knife (has been out of production for some time now) I tend to use the phrase “Ginsu knife advertising” to refer to a particular category of come-on that I put on the “to be distrusted” list.
For those who don’t know or don’t remember, Ginsu Knives were a kind of kitchen knife that was included with certain sold-on-TV products, if you “call with in the next 10 minutes, and have your credit card standing by.”
All snake oil, of course. There never was a time limit on any of those things, though monitoring the level of phone traffic against the TV schedule was probably invaluable to them in fine-tuning the ad slots they were paying for.(1)
The products being sold this way ranged from OK to down-right rotten in quality. I used to hear folks say (approximately), “well it got me a new kitchen knife, at least.” Not an honest way to do business, in my mind. The idea that the buyer is the one who needs to beware is nothing less than a dodge and an excuse(2). I doubt St Peter at the Gates would fall for it, know what I mean?
Ok, so I was just looking online for how to recycle laser toner cartridges (I have never previously actually owned a laser printer, but I do now — vastly cheaper for simple copies, which I do in greater quantity now). Among other things what I got was a single page website with an improbably skinny woman, wearing an unconvincing smile (scary smile, actually), standing in a most unlikely jazz-dance (or perhaps disco) posture, pointing up and to her left at something she clearly can’t see, cause it’s the text of the page. My instant reaction was “where are the Ginsu Knives?”
I left that website as fast as I could, making sure that my browser hadn’t taken on any damage from being there.
The shame is that it might be a quite legitimate service being offered, money for empty toner cartridges. Maybe. With that style of advertising, though, I have no reason to think it is what it claims to be. Rather than opposite.
This 1960’s / 1970’s style of advertising is aimed at people of less discrimination, less able to spot a predator. This is why I also call it predatory advertising.
A long, long time ago, when TV was new and black-and-white was still cool, there was a general entertainment program that actually, literally, during their acknowledgment of their sponsor (some cigarette company) had a chorus-line of dancing cigarette boxes… women (judging by the legs) done up in costumes. It was humorous until one considered that the sponsor actually thought he was getting his money’s worth out of this.
Couldn’t possibly tell you the brand of the cigarette now… that also is a problem with this type of gimmicky advertising: you remember the gimmick, not the brand. Of course, it was also a very, very long time ago, but I doubt I could have told the brand at any time.
I’ve already forgotten the website name with the jazz-dancing, jean-wearing, rictus-faced woman on it. I remember her, though… as some one I hope got well paid for that piece of insult to the consumer. I wish her well, but I also hope she wakes up to the potential damage of working in the modern snake-oil industry.
This razzle-dazzle / dancing-cigarette-cartons attitude is why I don’t watch TV, any more, at all. Can’t stand the commercials, which are (most of them) insulting, faked up, geared (quite literally) at a 4th grade education, a 7 to 12 year old emotional level, and are often deliberately misleading (sometimes by implication, such as by what they didn’t say, sometimes flat out).
When I saw this type of main-stream, Ginsu-knife advertising start showing up on the Internet (middle and late 90’s), I knew the glory days of the computer industry were over, not because it meant “ordinary people were now cruising the internet” (a form of elitism I did observe in some of my piers at the time), but because of the attitude displayed in those early ads. Until that time, the ads had all been aimed at programmers, computer experts, forward thinkers of any industry, ground-floor visionaries, start up enterprises… that is, educated and/or truly motivated folks. When the ads switched over to mainstream, something of life went out of the internet.
Like early TV, early Internet was hoped by many and many (including myself) to become a vehicle for educating people, for providing greater appreciation and enjoyment of all the wonderful things on this Human Planet, but alas, the marketeers snapped it up, as they did TV, and applied the Madison Avenue mentality to it, to turn a quick buck. The occasional good, well-meaning ad, the totally honest ad or the ad that means to convince you rather than compel you, tends to get out-shouted by the noise.
Humorously, while I was writing this, I got a piece of junk mail in my inbox from one of the Big-Big companies on the internet, one of those who apparently wants to eat the world, based on their behavior. It’s an ad for … wait for it … advertising! I can pay money to them and get all kinds of tailored exposure for my product.(3)
Maybe I can advertise an ad blocker; wouldn’t that be delightfully ironic?
(1) Who ever had an ad-slot following one of those commercials hopefully got a much reduced per-second rate, as a percentage of the viewing audience just went to the telephone and isn’t seeing the TV any more. This was before cell phones, mostly before portable phones of any kind, and even mostly before TV remotes. You know, “back in my day, I had to shuffle through deep pile shag carpet both directions to change the channel.” Channel surfing really wasn’t a concept yet.
(2) The legal phrase is caveat emptor, which is Latin for (approximately) buyer beware. Caveat Emptor is actually legal, though I don’t think any government supporting it has actually bothered to seriously let the consumer (its citizens) know the implications. I find that reprehensible. If a company can not defend the honesty, durability and degree of perfection (per that current state of his art) of his product, then he shouldn’t sell it. If it’s not a product he’d want his spouse or his own children using, then he shouldn’t sell it. So there…
(3) Which demonstrates another of the pitfalls of modern advertising. I have no product to be advertised this way. This suggests these e-mailing lists are not pre-qualified or categorized in any way. Which probably means everybody on a very large mailing list just got the same email (or will get it, if the mailing list is being used in chunks). Which means possibly most people on the list have no use for it. Which means that all of us just got one tiny smidge more numb to advertising (over-exposure turns all advertising — or anything else — into “just noise”). Which means that the “volume level” or dosage of advertising has to go up to a bit more… and round and round it goes. For a while; such a cycle can not be sustained indefinitely. (The world in the movie Blade Runner, for instance, was a dying one, yet still advertising like it was a rich one.)