On the way back to the car at Niagra last week we spotted this great photo opportunity and it certainly falls into the category of an image you couldn't find outside Canada. So it must be time for a few more observations....Sausages. This is a minus point for the world's second largest country. Sausages here seem to fall into four types: hot italian, mild italian, chorizo-flavoured and honey and mustard. The variety of hot-dogs on offer is mind-boggling in comparison. Yuk. I could become quite emotional when I think of the sausages we have left behind.....cumberland....pork and leek....chipolata....
Advertising. Two points of difference here. First, negative advertising is allowed. That means you can advertise your car and point out all the ways in which it is the same as another much more expensive vehicle. Or you can say buy our anti-histimine because it starts working a good half hour quicker than this other one. Odd. Also, they advertise medicine. Which seems odd too.
Politics. Following on from the last point quite nicely, we are of course being bombarded with political adverts being as there is a general election due in Canada and also in a big country very near here whose telly we get a lot of on cable. All of these adverts are negative. An example might be...Stephen Harping might seem like the nice guy next door but his record is rubbish so don't vote Conservative. Or, Obama and all his mates are irresponsible idealists who will cost America millions of jobs, followed by "this message has been endorsed by John McCain" said very quickly. All very odd.
Language. Dominic has spelling lists from school which are providing me with much amusement. Highlights so far include "loonie" a slang term for a Canadian dollar and "doghouse". Can't wait till he gets "color" and "ize" endings.
Loot bags. We don't do party bags anymore, we do loot bags. And today Dominic went to a 7th birthday party and came home with a cuddly toy. It was a boys-only bowling party. Now there is absolutely no way that he would get something like that back home but guess what... he loved it. He has called it Freddie and taken it to bed with him tonight. We are reflecting what this tells us about children growing up too fast in the UK....
4 comments:
Interestingly they don't allow direct to consumer drug advertising in Canada. That is our colleagues in the US and obviously that promotional channel has no influence on the Canadian population.
Chris, is work it for you now that you're one of those lofty IT Directors???? Tell us something more interesting
There's a bit of negative advertising and D2C drug advertising in the UK, but pretty restricted. I'm thinking of things like "Ask your doctor about ...."
On negative advertising, when I wrote some, we had to be very careful to have independently verifiable sources and a huge amount of small print. We never did much because we felt it was tacky. And then we went down the tubes. I'm thinking of things like Halifax claiming to give you 50x more interest than other banks.
Subtle. Tasteful. Stuff like that.
Hi Kate I love your posts! I lost track of your blog for a while but now I am back, so happy to see we are on the same continent again! I hope you are having a great time.
I just emailed your husband, wanted to email you too, but don't have an address. Can you drop me a line at chris at chrisdamato dot com when you get a chance?
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