AAAAAAAAAAAAA Quick Post on ‘Jumping the Gun’ in Classifieds

My aforementioned MS Paint skills at work anonymyzing mobile phone numbers.

I saw the above ad in the Courier today, and I couldn't help but comment on it here.

1AAAAA CARS, ALL CARS

FREE REMOVAL

I don’t get it? I mean I get it, but on second glance, I don’t get why putting ‘1AAAAA’ was the strategy they chose.

I mean look at what they have elected to use; they clearly understand the concept of getting in on top based on the alphanumerical ordering system, hence the multiple A’s and single 1 in front of their ad proper. But it clearly didn’t work, because they forgot a couple of key points.

First, they forgot that there would be cars legitimately advertising their year model first (such as the pre-empting Mazda Astina), and which are thus numerically superior to a single 1. And secondly they forgot that no matter how many A’s you put after it, it is still going to the back of the line if anyone uses a single other letter past 1! I mean why include A’s at all, if you understand that a 1 pre-empts it? Did they think there would be a lot of 1BBBBBBB’s? Or 1AA’s? Yet they never considered a 11AAAA or the logical next step, 111AAA, then 1111AA, followed by 1111A and then eventually the far superior 11111?

Or perhaps they did it because they wanted to pack in a bit more legitimacy. After all people do use numbers to tell actual information about a car, as mentioned above, so perhaps they felt it would be a bit disingenuous to put 1111111 first, whereas people are so used to a bunch of A’s before an advertisement that it is no longer considered dishonest to jam them in front of your true advertising goal.

But hey, as I have said many times; I am prone to over thinking things.

I would however think that there would be an interesting study in here somewhere about the lengths of AAAAAAAA’s that people are willing to go to in their advertising.

At any rate, that is the end of my little rant on the subject.

MM