My Kingdom For A Credit Card

I don't know if it's just me, but I find the stupidity of some adverts these days to be mind boggling. Perhaps it's the average joe in me speaking, but a recent radio spot for a certain credit card company's promotion just made me laugh out loud (and at seven in the morning this is no mean feat). Since I don't remember the exact wording I'll have to paraphrase:

Husband: Darling, how much have we spent using our ________ credit card?
Wife: 1000 ringgit, dear.
H: That means we get a Swatch watch free, right?
W: Right, and if we spend 3000 ringgit we get a Philips CD player!
H: But I want a DVD player!
W: Then spend 6000 ringgit!

Whoa. Let's back track for a second. Again, this may be the poor-man-average-joe-who doesn't have a lot to spend talking, but spending RM 6000 to get a bloody DVD player does NOT, I repeat does NOT make sense. Like any other geek, I like AV equipment (even the ones I can't possibly afford) but these days a quick trip to Carrefour or Sen Heng or Harvey Norman gets you a really good DVD player for what, RM 300? Add in about RM 1000 more and you can walk away with a pretty respectable HITB (Home Theatre In A Box) set.

Of course I'm sure the credit card company in question didn't mean to sound rather, well, un-smart. Still, the execution's about as smart as lighting your farts on fire (and trust me, that ain't smart at all). If you want to make your customers charge more on the cards, I'm sure you can afford to hire an ad agency that can structure the suggestion in a way that does not banish it to The Realm of The Incredibly Stupid. There is a psychology to advertising, or so they tell me.

If I sound incredibly pissed, that's because I bloody am. But hey, maybe I'm the only one who notices this, since I don't really have a credit card. Perhaps the rest of us out there DO regularly spend that much and think it's quite reasonable to throw in a DVD player after reaching the 6K mark. To you, I apologise, sincerely and truthfully.

But if the opposite is true, I'd hope that the next time some other credit card company decides to insult the intelligence of listeners everywhere they'll just fire the sod who came up with the idea in the first place.

Please.