Opportunity lost !

We live in the big, wonderful world of advertising !

Without advertising their would be no newspapers and no free to air television. Neither could survive without the revenue stream provided by those who need to attract us to buy or use their products and services.

Some find advertisements annoying, but it would be a strange world without them. They inform - and without such messages we would have difficulty keeping track of all those new things appearing with the promise of bringing us a better life.

The advertising industry is huge and a lot of people make a good living designing and producing adverts. It is a creative industry and the best brains delve into science to create special effects to hold our attention - and receive their sponsor's message.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the design of television advertising. Here the stream of sound and motion converge to produce action that is not possible in the print media.

The best brains attract the best money - and it is therefore strange to find a glaring example of misplaced thinking leaving many costly advertising commercials missing their mark.

We are into the age of digital, wide screen television - but this new format shares living rooms with countless older non digital television sets.

These older analogue sets show a good picture, but because the channels broadcast in digital format - they delete a portion of the right and left hand edges of the picture.

For some unknown reason the well paid executives who design advertising insist on putting the contact telephone number - often an 1800 or 1300 series - and very often a ix digit number commencing with 13 - off centre of the picture - with the result that either the first or last two digits fail to appear on the older TV sets.

It will be several years before the analogue transmissions cease and all viewers will be using either a wide screen TV or their old TV supplemented with a set top box.
Until that happens, advertising with missing contact digit numbers will simply waste sponsor's money.

Big salaries do not guarantee logical thinking !