Advertise on Product Reviews Canada for $15 per Post

Wait, did you read that correctly?

Yes, just $15 USD to get a blog post on Product Reviews Canada AND Lilith Press. Two websites for one low price!

It isn't a lot, but it is affordable. It is a small blog after all, but growing.

Email lilithgallery@gmail.com to inquire about advertising your guest post on our site.

Moving Product Reviews to LilithPress.ca/Shopping.html

Hello Frequent Shopper!

If you are reading this it is because we have decided to move (copy) many of our most popular posts to the following website:

http://www.lilithpress.ca/Shopping.html

Going forward, all new Product Reviews will be posted on the Shopping section of Lilith Press Magazine. Or possibly both PRC and Lilith Press Shopping.

Also to avoid understanding that doesn't mean we are deleting this website. By moving, we really mean we are "focusing" on the new website and "copying" our most popular posts over to the new site.

 

We may also continue to do short snippet reviews on PRC and possibly some longer ones too.

 

So if you want to see more Canadian product reviews, written for Canadians, go visit Lilith Press and bookmark the website for future use.

Plus Lilith Press has separate sections for the following topics:

http://www.lilithpress.ca/Art.html

http://www.lilithpress.ca/Books.html

http://www.lilithpress.ca/Entertainment.html (Games, Movies, Television)

http://www.lilithpress.ca/Fashion.html

http://www.lilithpress.ca/Food.html

http://www.lilithpress.ca/Music.html

http://www.lilithpress.ca/Sports.html

http://www.lilithpress.ca/Tech.html (Cellphones, Computers, Tablets, etc)

http://www.lilithpress.ca/Transportation.html (Cars, Bikes, Trains and More)

http://www.lilithpress.ca/Travel.html

So technically not everything will be in the Shopping section. Quite a bit will be spread around in the Books, Food, and other sections. But we will cross-list anything that fits in multiple topics.

Now please note, we do have over 440 product reviews on here... so it will take some time to copy the old reviews to the new website. We have decided to prioritize the most popular reviews.

Also, if you could be a doll, please tweet, facebook and link about our new website. We could use the extra advertising.

Thanks for visiting and supporting Product Reviews Canada!

Gibberish in Advertising

Have you ever noticed how television advertising is often about using certain words and phrases that are ultimately meaningless?

Examples:

Affordable
Best
Call now
Cutting Edge
Cyberspace
Dealer pricing
Employee pricing
Excellence or Exceptional
Final weeks to save
Finest
First Annual
Free Gift
Friendly
Great Deal
Giving 110 Percent
Going out of business sale
Hassle Free
Home of the ______
Honest Truth
Huge Savings
Information Superhighway
Largest Selection
Last Chance
Loaded with options
Nearly Flawless
Networking
New and Improved
Once in a lifetime
Outside the box
Pass the savings onto you
Premium
Pre-owned
Professional
Prompt Service
Qualified
Quality
Quality of Life
Quality Workmanship
Service
Setting the standard
Synergy
Take advantage of
Trained Professional
Unique
Virtually Any
Your _______ needs
Zero money down

However on the internet, where keywords are EVERYTHING, these advertising words become filler - complete useless. The primary goal is to use the words for which the website was made for.

So for example lets pretend you were trying to sell car insurance on television. The monologue for a car insurance TV commercial might sound like this:

Are you looking for employee pricing car insurance? Imagine being able to get great deals on car insurance rates, the best service from our team of friendly and professionally trained staff who will fulfill all of your car insurance needs - offering you the best quality and excellence you can expect, all while making car insurance more hassle free and affordable. Get zero money down on your first month of car insurance by calling now!

Now imagine a website that has everything written like that? It would look idiotic. The stuff people get away with in television advertising would look like it was written by an amateur on the internet. The meaningless words shown in print are revealed as such and suddenly any normal person can no longer take the website in question as anything but either an amateurish mistake or a joke, poking fun at the use of meaningless words.

Take for example the image on the right, which shows keywords and which ones are the most expensive to advertise in (and most profitable) for publishers in theory.

Insurance
Loans
Mortgage
Attorney
Credit
Lawyer
Donate
Degree
Hosting
Claim
Conference Call
Trading
Software
Recovery
Transfer
Gas/Electricity
Classes
Rehab
Treatment
Cord Blood

I don't even know what "cord blood" is. I just looked it up. Apparently it has to do with special banks that store blood from umbilical cords for future use in stem cell transplants.

So back to the example of insurance, an insurance company's websites goal is to show lots of content. Content about every kind of insurance they sell, and in theory they should also be showing consumer stories about their customer experience - talking about how their car got stolen, they needed the car to get to work, and the insurance company was so fast, the service was friendly and helpful, and even got them a rental car while they processed the insurance claim.

This way their website gets lots of content on the topic, includes customer feedback, and customers end up feeling like they were treated like an individual instead of like another number.

Ask yourself which do you prefer: To buy your car insurance from a company full of gibberish or a company which shows they live up to the claims. I know which company I would pick.

Dukes of Hazard AutoTrader

I love a great car commercial - especially anything with the Dukes of Hazard. :)

Note - I have never used AutoTrader, I just really like this commercial. They should make a Dukes of Hazard movie (with the original actors starring, not that horrible film with the younger actors).



I was going to post a 2nd video on here, a documentary about the making of Dukes of Hazard (the show, not the ad above), but the video was disabled for embedding. Boooooo!

So instead here is a videos about many of the jumps made during Dukes of Hazard.

In case you are wondering the car is the 1969 Dodge Charger.

Chapman's Sport Frozen Popsicles

I saw these popsicles at the grocery store recently and decided to take a closer look.

They say "Sport" on them, but they're basically just sugar, water, chemicals and flavouring.

Evidently the "Sport" and "Hydration" on them is an advertising gimmick designed to trick stupid people who don't look at the ingredients. Want hydration? Drink some water!

Booooooooooo! Shame on you Chapman's!

More examples of Smart Advertising

Here are more examples of Smart Advertising, similar to our post from March 1st.

The most awesome Volkswagon commercial of all time

Lets face it, you can't beat a kid dressed as Darth Vader for humour.

This is NOT an endorsement of Volkswagon cars, but it is very amusing advertising.

10 Examples of Provocative and Smart Advertising

Lets face it, if you can make an ad interesting, funny or provocative in some way then you will get way more people signing up for whatever product you are trying to sell.

Below is 10 advertisements I found to be particularly amusing / well made.

Fighting Spam with Canadian Laws

Industry Canada has FINALLY finalized its regulations under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).

Took the government long enough.

For this reason Vigorate Digital hosted a live event here in Toronto on the morning of January 23rd, 2014 - and I attended on the invitation of a friend. (And also because I wanted a chance to throw rotten vegetables at anyone who dared to defend spam as a means of advertising.)

Vigorate Digital does email marketing in Toronto and is therefore one of the companies that is keen on staying on the right side of the law by making sure their advertising campaigns are "opt in", "user consent" and therefore within the new regulations.

Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) will come into effect on July 1st 2014... but what exactly will it do to spammers? Arrest them? Cut off their fingers? Slap them with a hefty fine? I would like to know.

After a little research I have determined it is to be a fine administered by the CRTC - which as we all know, has been completely incompetent when it comes to slapping fines to companies using telemarketing. The fine can be up to $10 million CDN - which means that the CRTC will be going after bigger companies / individuals, and they aren't going to be that worried about small mom and pop operations.

The big thing CASL is pushing is the idea of user consent - meaning users sign up or in some way ask for commercial emails to be sent to them. Without consent, those spam emails will be deemed illegal. (And there is a big complicated list of ways that consent or non consent can be determined.)

However after going through all this I have a hunch that most of this will result in a bureaucratic traffic jam when millions of spam complaints pour in and there isn't enough people to manage all the complaints and levy the appropriate fines.

Let alone collect the fines.

And what is the penalty for unpaid fines?

Imprisonment? Probably not. It is probably just more fines or "interest" on those fines. Which won't get paid.

So my problem with CASL is that while it seems like a nice idea, it probably has no teeth when it comes to catching the spammers who choose to just ignore the laws.

Another problem I have is that this does nothing to stop political organizations or charities from sending you spam - in which case I think those should also be required to have consent. Because if they're asking for donations, trying to sell some politician's book, it is basically commercial anyway.

Attack of the Snowmen Car Commercial

I love the commercial below.

True, it is a car commercial for the 2014 Nissan Rogue - and this post is in no way an endorsement for the SUV itself - but it is a ringing endorsement for the good people in marketing who made the commercial.

Someone should make a mock apocalyptic movie called "Attack of the Snowmen". I think it would be hysterical.

They could even make a sequel called "Attack of the Snowmen 2 - The Icepocalypse!"

New Business Cards from Staples

Today I picked up new business cards today from Staples for my personal training business.

Since a lot of my personal training clients come from word of mouth and online, having business cards is kind of 20th century these days. In a world of twitter, facebook, youtube, social media the old fashioned business card is likewise an old fashioned and obsolete form of advertising.

Lets face it, websites are essentially online brochures for whatever it is you are promoting. They get a much bigger audience if you promoted with Search Engine Optimization, etc.

Yet sometimes people ask for them and I procrastinated about getting them for waaaaaaay too long.

Anyway, I got a discount on these cards from Staples. 250 cards for $29 roughly. Total would have been closer to $49 under normal circumstances.

Which proves a point. You can get a great deal on business cards if you time it right and buy them on sale.

For me getting 250 was a smart choice. In the past I have always purchased business card in 2000, 1000 or 500 units. And I never used them all. If I was lucky I used half of them. I only got them in such large numbers because my mentality was that I didn't want to run out of them. Which is backwards now that I think of it for a variety of reasons.

Another problem I have run into in the past is I would sometimes design a new / better business card... and then what do I do with the old cards? Just toss them out? Now when I run out of business cards I can just commission better new ones.

Same thing happens if my phone number changes or something like that. The old business cards then become a waste.

Thus I lucked out when Staples had a sale on 250 glossy paper full colour cards on the day I went in to order them.

3 minute commercial brings tears to your eyes

The video below is a brilliantly made commercial. I don't even know what it is advertising and don't really care. It is the commercial itself which brings tears to your eyes.

Amusing Heineken Beer Commercial

They're trying really hard to look kewl in this ad. So much that it becomes cheesy. The guy ends up looking like an idiotic show off.

But whatever, I still like Heineken anyway.



As beer commercials go I still find these ones way more funny...