Ordinary Nothing

My father received an envelope sent to him from abroad by Time Magazine. In contained a page with a subscription offer. I’m not sure where they got the name and address from, since he definitely didn’t have any previous relations with them.

In this simple subscription offer where two noteworthy problems:

1. They presented the prices in a very interesting way. After a supposed discount, the price came to "Ns249". I have no idea what this "Ns" is. The obvious explanation is "New Shekel", but nobody writes that as "Ns", and certainly not as a prefix to the number. The official way to denote Shekels is by "ILS" that stood for "Israeli Shekel" and now stands for "New Israeli Shekel". Everybody that does international commerce in multiple coins manages to find this hardly hidden info, so it’s surprising Time couldn’t. There’s a different abbreviation that is sometimes used "NIS" for "New Israeli Shekel". It’s not correct, but it’s common. But no, they had to go and invent "Ns". Not very inspiring. Unless of course it means something else, in which case I think it’s worse since it’s even less clear.
2. They offered a free (assuming you believe a "price includes" kind of offer, possibly after a matching price increase, can be considered free) digital camera to subscribers. I took a short look at the camera’s details, and one line caught my attention: "High Resolution 100K Pixel". Yep, they said "High Resolution" in the same sentence as "100K Pixel". Because, you know, a simple mainstream mid-low-range digital camera today would take pictures of about what ? 3.1 megapixels ? 4 megapixels ? That’s only roughly about 40 times more pixels. So 100 kilopixels would fit the definition of high resolution about as much as a 14Kbps modem dial-up connection would fit the definition of broadband. Cute. Or maybe the envelope was just delayed at the post office for a few years…

And in case anyone wonders, no, Time Magazine did not gain a new subscriber.

January 11th, 2005 at 11:38 EET | Categories: Marketing | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.