Thursday, May 7, 2009

Bad Copy In Facebook Ad

It's been noted here before: in this economy, companies that are hawking products, attempting to persuade consumers to part with their ever-disappearing dollars, have precious little room to falter in their promotional copy. It's just a fact of business life. Yet, mistakes invariably make it past copy editors and proofreaders. Below is a screen shot taken from an ad on Facebook. And, if you'll allow the Proofreader a moment to self-promote before continuing, you can now become a fan of the Proofreader on Facebook if you haven't already--which is probably true of you. Please become a fan and spread the word to your other Facebook friends. Now back to the mistake.
As you can see in the highlighted screen shot above, there are multiple mistakes, the most relevant to this blog being the misspelling "slliming" in the ad's third line. Evidently, advertisers of weight-loss products have problems with their proofreading, as this is not the first diet ad on the Web to have spelling issues. Turns out these advertisers slimmed down the word slimming by adding an extra L, which has a nice vertical shape, in place of an M, which is wide and fat. Perhaps the error was some kind of Freudian slip, but it should've been caught.

The other mistakes in this picture are the bodies. Those actually look like some cartoonishly large bodies to be depicted underneath the heading "How I Lost 55 Pounds." In fact, the guy on the right looks so cartoonish, that he is more likely the result of a Photoshop trick than steroids or whatever acai berry concoction this particular ad is promoting. The bodies are definitely funny-looking. The copy mistakes? They're never funny.

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