Sad Puppy Ad

It's been about a year and a half since I wrote a Beyond Kitsch post about an advertised product. It's not that there haven't been bad ones, but rather that there are so many that fill the pages of Parade and magazines like Discover that it takes something special to stand out. Today I saw one in the latest Discover and thought I'd give it a go.


In this case, it's not actually the product so much that I object to — though the "Diamondeau®" stone makes me wonder — it's the ad.

Let's start with how the product is displayed. It's 5 inches tall as shown, and nowhere in the ad are the real dimensions given. Plus, it's glammed up with glints galor. Ooo shiny! Must buy!

The ad layout is just about unintelligible, with copy running flush left down the left and flush right down the right, using six different fonts, and with a really ugly logo to boot.

The copy has five exclamation points, initial caps where none are needed including "with" and "a", puffery like "magnificent presentation case" and "exquisitely set" used twice, and a misspelling of "complimentary."

Looking around on their website (which I will not link to), I found this image of the magnificent presentation case:


It's fine, but magnificent?

The images of the puppy necklace on the site (listed for $159, by the way, not $269 as the ad claims as the non-offer code price, with no mention of limited stock) don't give a much better idea of its scale, though it's not quite as over-sized looking.

I also noticed the site has something called a Loyalty Scheme in its main navigation, which seemed a rather honest to label that type of program.

All in all, not a company to send your money to, but one look at this ad any you probably already knew that.