For the first time in a long time, I actually spent some me time last night and watched some actual live broadcast television. Nothing in particular, just had the TV on and channel hopped for a while before settling in with a beer or three.
As I was watching “live TV” on my Sky box and not a recorded show I endured the adverts that litter the shows and it got me thinking, as stuff often does. What makes a good advert?
Whilst sitting at my home office desk, transferring the hundreds of photographs taken from my best friends wedding yesterday I tried playing a little catch up with all the shenanigans that have been going on for the last two days. Needless to say, I failed miserably. But one or two items did catch my eye and they both have a commonality.
It would seem that our delightful friend, Frampton Blands has been up to his usual trickery. Or at least, he has been trying to. This article popped into my social feeds and it is pretty clear from the title alone that it is going to be pure and utter bunkem.
Just for once, I would dearly love to see a non-profit organisation that actually has some kind of moral standard. The simple fact is, I seriously doubt that any non-profit in the field of anti-tobacco has any kind of morals. At all.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m all for a non-profit organisation to actually raise awareness of issues, conduct research, educate the masses and so forth, but there has to be some moral and ethical standard.
The constant flow of misinformation originating from various NGOs and charities makes a day in the life of a vaper feel a little like groundhog day. It is usually the same preposterous rubbish with some words jiggled about to make “new” headlines. Or in the case of this subject, tweets.
I do spend an incredible amount of time on social media, and although I may not see the tweets directly, other vaping advocates do so I get to see their responses. Social media. Great isn’t it?
Thought I’d have a stab at making a sensationalist headline for once. I’ll admit, it needs work. Some work. OK a lot of work, but it sure as hellfire beats the headline gracing the on-line Mirror today.
In a way, that headline can be seen as positive. In a bad light, if you squint. It isn’t the usual scaremongering headline that normally accompanies an article on personal vaporisers in the Mirror that’s for damn sure.
Last week, the Irish Cancer Society released an article under their ‘News’ section detailing some ‘alarming’ findings about who uses electronic cigarettes. After reading this article two or three times, I noted a few items that were a little odd. So I sent them a pretty lengthy e-mail and waited, not expecting a response.
Imagine my total surprise when I checked my inbox this morning to find that my email actually had a response from an ICS Advocacy Officer. I’ll say this now, I do appreciate it when my e-mails get a response however short. This one, was pretty detailed, if a little wishy-washy in places.
I recently posted about the possibility of two distinct stories that could arise from one source, it seems there has been a bit more action with one of the stories. Spurred on of course by new ’evidence'.
Armed with this stunning new evidence our resident chipmunk decides to put pen to paper and attempts to ‘dissect’ the information presented. Think we can all guess how this is going to pan out can’t we?
Advocacy. Such an interesting concept isn’t it? You have one group of folks saying one thing, and another group saying the opposite. Before social media there were unending group meetings, PR, debates and all that jazz. True it was much slower to get the points across, but that didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things as it gave each side a lot of time to come up with something ‘better’. Not to mention getting the face time to get the point across.
Today was meant to be the day when something erupted from California. There were two options on what it could be, either the classical “e-cigs don’t aid cessation” stories where some pseudo-scientist deep in the bowels of UU pokes a few buttons on Hex, sends the antz scurrying to come up with a catchy click worthy headline.
That one did pop up briefly. It is still being touted around but not as loudly as the other “story”.
Who is the biggest liar of them all?
Pithy intro, must work on that. But this is a blog it’s meant to entertain (somewhat) and inform (kind of). Not to mention I am a completely random individual so don’t judge. Anyway I digress, and that’s before I start.
Flavour danger!
In case you missed it on twitter today, our mutual frenemy has penned another e-cig article. He has written a few, here, here, here, here, here, and his most recent one here. Unfortunately, the term investigative journalism seems to have escaped his notice as the vast majority of what he writes, and how he writes it comes across as decidedly negative. That is of course complete at odds with his claims of ‘balance’.