Saturday 29 August 2015

Today's Review: This Anti-Littering Ad


There I was yesterday, minding my own business, when my eye was drawn to this interesting advert on the side of a bus stop. "Bin your litter", it said. Alright, I'm on board with that. I am certainly not a litterer. But I think they should have stopped there, because the rest of this poster is an atrocity. 

"Bin your litter" is a nice simple message, one we can all relate to. However, the phrase that follows it in this case is simply baffling. "It's a pretty quick thing to". To what? I assume it was meant to say "to do" but somehow this went through several people who aren't aware of how to end a sentence. Binning your litter may be a pretty quick thing to do, but so is proofreading, and no one bothered with that here. 

What's as equally baffling as the missing word is the emphasis on the word "pretty". You'd think if they were trying to point out how binning your litter is a simple task, they'd highlight the word "quick", but I can only assume the bolded "pretty" is in relation to the woman in the picture. I mean, sure, she's pretty. But what's that got to do with littering? I assume they were going for some sort of word play, without first looking up the meaning of the term. It's a crappy explanation of why that word is highlighted, but it's literally the only thing I can think of. Speaking of the picture, I do hope they took some kind of stock model shoot and photo shopped in that empty carton of cut price chicken, instead of hiring someone to explicitly pose with said carton. I guess you've gotta start somewhere, but if this was my first modelling gig I would be pretty unhappy. Ha, see what I did there? Puns.

You know what? I'm done. I can't analyse this thing anymore, it's making my brain hurt. I'm glad I don't have an NFC equipped phone, tapping that on the side of this ad would probably cause it to explode, or become sentient in a bid to wipe out the stupidity of the human race. This ad makes me want to litter. I mean, this whole poster is rubbish, but they put it in a bus stop instead of throwing it in the bin, and I hear that's a pretty quick thing to.

My rating: 0/5

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