19th December, 2006
untitled
Tuesday, 9:29 am in Politics & Current Affairs
Got some time to kill? Check out the Australian Advertising Standards Bureau’s page of modified and discontinued ads. Want to know why you only ever saw that Silent Ringtone ad one (subversion of authority figures)? Or why the ad for Tekken: Dark Resurrection was dropped (sexualisation of minors)? Or why you never see ads for Lady in the Water (ad scarier than movie)?
It’s an interesting look at the Zeitgeist, and at exactly what people complain about on TV. Though some of the (upheld) complaints are fairly spurious; one of the arguments against the Silent Ringtone was that it was ‘disturbing’ to the complainant’s dog. The real kicker? I’ve seen that ad and the sound isn’t played. I’m not kidding; I can hear the 14.4khz tone quite clearly (we tried it out at work one day), and it’s not played during the ad. Presumably to hide the fact that the tone is, in fact, quite (painfully) audible to a large number of adults. And I’m not even going to go into the basic logistical problems, such as the fact that mp3 encoding degrades the tone (making it more audible), and that mobile phone external speakers aren’t generally good enough to actually play it anyway.
- Mood » amused
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