Dear Advertisers...

1. Stop trying to equate "People with healthy hearts eat whole grain" with "People who eat whole grain have healthy hearts".
   Seriously, it wasn't convincing the first time you tried it, Nestlé. At least then, though, you weren't single-handedly trying to start a campaign to get the entire country force-feeding itself your products.
   
   For those of you who weren't aware that were was a difference in the first place, it lies in the myriad ways you can confuse people with statistics. Essentially, the generic phrase "people who do action A tend to see effect B" implies a causal relationship, in which action A was the direct cause of effect B. However, the phrase "people with healthy hearts eat whole grain" reverses the action and the effect, implying no more than a correlation. And, as you learn on day one of a statistics course, correlation does not imply causation.
   
   There can be any number of reasons for a correlation. One is mediation - action A causes effect B, which in turn causes effect C. The other major one is moderation, in which effect C causes both effect A and effect B. In this case the moderating factor could well be "leading a generally healthy lifestyle". Either way, if there was any direct evidence that eating wholegrains actually made your heart healthier, you can bet that Nestlé would be touting it at full strength. The fact that they don't do this speaks for itself. I am sick and tired of shouting "who are these so-called 'experts' and what are their qualifications?" at the TV screen every time the advert comes on, and even more annoyed by the use of "everyday normal folk" telling us how important wholegrain is, as if to say "you can't trust these elitist scientist types". So just stop it, OK?
   
   
2. Don't pretend that the latest magic ingredient in your face cream does anything more than make the skin swell slightly.
   Hey! Women of Britain! Once the very first wrinkle appears on your skin, you are officially OLD and HAGGARD. You need to target your A-zone (whatever the hell that means) to reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, which can betray your real age!
   
   Luckily for these poor women, all the beauty companies in the country are working full-tilt to produce creams, containing ingredients with long names, that promise to reduce those pesky wrinkles and return your skin to the unblemished appearance of a six-year-old. After all, anything called "Boswelox" (yes, they did use a name as stupid as that) must be good! It sounds just like Botox, which everyone knows makes you look beautiful!
   
   First up, Botox is a ridiculous treatment. It involves injecting the most poisonous protein known to man (no, really) into your skin and hoping that it merely partially paralyses you rather than killing you outright. Secondly, if you rub anything into your face, the skin will look slightly fuller - mainly because, well, you've just rubbed something into it. That will naturally stretch its surface slightly, making wrinkles appear slightly less obvious. The fact that the effect will wear off again very rapidly is not one that the cosmetics companies are going to widely publicise.
   
   Thirdly, what on earth is a "Celebrity Beauty Editor"?
   
   
3. Please display the following line in 16-pt text at the bottom of every new 4x4 advert: IF YOU LIVE IN A CITY, YOU DO NOT NEED A 4x4.
   Several years ago, there was an advert - I forget for which company, which shows just how poor it was - which showed a man driving his enormous cube-shaped 4x4 home at rush hour, deliberately going out of his way to drive over six-inch-high piles of sand on the side of the road. The advert ended with the tagline "you may have to remind yourself it's a 4x4". Recently, the same trend has been taken up by Volkswagen, with the advert for their latest enormous cube-shaped Tiguan. Showing a car cruising around an impressive computer-generated city, with flats and steps sliding around in a highly alarming fashion, the tagline is "at home in the city".
   
   If you regularly drive in a city - or, indeed, any reasonably urban environment - please be so kind as to tell me when was the last time that you were either forced to drive up a short flight of stairs, or had to sit sadly looking at a flight of short stairs thinking "gosh, I can't go anywhere now. I wish I had a 4x4." If, as I strongly suspect, the answer is "never", you may have been as puzzled as I was when seeing these adverts.
   
   Owners of 4x4s frequently claim that their cars are no more polluting than estate cars of a similar size, but that's only half the argument. 4x4s also block visibility (for the driver as well as other road users), are difficult to manoeuvre, are frequently fitted with dangerous bullbars, and are so enormous that they can easily block entrances and roads where a smaller car would be fine. Out in the countryside, you may have a reason for them - in the city, they're a downright liability, and it's irresponsible at best to promote a 4x4 solely on its city driving performance.
   
   
4. Don't insult my intelligence. Those three reasonably attractive young women are not eager to text me and send photos.
   Slightly obscure, this one, unless you've been in the habit of watching the late-night Steven Seagal movies on channel 5 these past few weeks. Five only ever broadcast these ads past about 10:30pm or so, and with good reason - that's when the only people still watching TV are so addled with sleep deprivation and mindless Seagal-flavoured violence that they might possibly consider paying £1.50 a time to receive automated texts purporting to be from nubile young women in their area.
   
   Having not tried out the service for myself, I'm unaware of the mechanisms behind this enterprise. I know, though, that if I were running it I would set up one big computer to send out predetermined text messages - possibly written by any struggling writers who wouldn't mind being paid in cigarettes and beer - which consistently mail-merged the name of a town near the customer into a standard form. Ten minutes of wandering round the darker corners of the internet and you'll also have some photos to send out, resulting in a vast income for almost no effort.
   
   I have a hard time believing that anyone, no matter how starved for attention, actually believes that the insanely expensive texts they're getting are from beautiful young women who really, really want to get to know them better. It would save money on the advertising bills, therefore, if you just dressed up the computer in a low-cut top and surrounded it with heart-shaped balloons. You'd tap the nerd market, definitely. "Ooh, a dual-core Xenon server...with extra RAM?? That is so hot."

Food for thought, eh, advertisers? Now, if the people making the TV programmes themselves could show some improvement too, I might not have to resort to snarking about them online to get some cheap entertainment. A worthy goal, I feel.

Jeep picture by click, taken from Morguefile. Used under the terms of the Morguefile licence. Wholegrain logo taken from Nestlé's site wholegrain.co.uk. The image is not licensed, but qualifies as fair use for this purpose. Neither image is re-released under my CC licence.