Marketing Mishaps?

Marketing has always fascinated me. Sometimes, it works well and sells the product; other times, it is dire, bland and forgetful. Who remembers any other Cadbury advert after the eyebrow one? I don’t. Today, we have a new breed of marketing. Marketing that works, but throws out any rules of grammar they so wish. This irks me somewhat.

First is a rather fabulous PlayStation 4 advert that appeared on the back of many newspapers, in particular the Metro for me on the way to University.  It has in total 70 words, but only two commas and one full stop in the entire advert. If you were to hear this read aloud I’m pretty sure you would not be listening by the time you got to the third line. Commas are very much needed, prescriptively, but in terms of this advert maybe less so. It just about gets away with it, but varying font size to symbolise each new line has a voiced pause.

The other piece that caught my eye was the tag-line on the back of the Game of Thrones box set for series one (they learnt their lesson by the next series, thankfully). The quote reads: “Bloody and ambitiously epic… It’s addictive… once you start thrones dominates your life – Empire”. The problem, again, lies with the punctuation. For me, there needs to be a comma before thrones.

Maybe I’m just being a petty linguist, but is it that hard to read your (tiny) work out loud?

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