I was shocked the first time I saw the television ad wherein TV personality and Optical Media Board chairman Edu Manzano, in a spelling contest setting, asked a young boy to spell remittance. In the ad, the boy recalls how his family has benefitted from the remittance service of LBC, then spells remittance as L-B-C. After seeing the ad, I vowed to turn the television off or switch to another channel whenever the ad is on so that my 4-year-old son would not see it.
It is a fact that children easily follow what they see or hear. My son Myles is not an exception. At a very young age of 2, he already knew how to sing rock songs because he hears his father and sister sing these songs. When he discovered Jollibee Chickenjoy, he wouldn’t eat any other kind of chicken dish, to the point that whenever my husband cooks fried chicken, we would put these in a bucket from Jollibee just so Myles would eat! When Vhong Navarro’s catching 3-in-1 plus 1 song for Selecta Ice Cream caught my son’s attention, the family ate no other kind of ice cream.
Which explains my fear of that “Spell Remittance” ad. I don’t like Myles to follow it and spell remittance that way! And now there are more ads of the same nature – “Spell Instant” and another one I have not seen yet. As a parent, I am really concerned since these ads are shown during primetime, or the time when many people watch television. And I am sure that many parents out there are also concerned.
Okay, the copywriter of that ad is creative. But he or she did not consider that the ad concept does not set a good example for viewers, especially children. Children easily follow what they see and hear and we all know that “remittance” and “instant” are not spelled as L-B-C.
I wonder why MTRCB has not done anything about the television ad yet when it is very quick to act on other issues like the verbal war between television hosts Joey de Leon and Willie Revillame, for example. Like foul language, wrong values and most especially wrong information, like what the “Spell Remittance” ad is conveying, should be banned from television, or at least, primetime TV. If the MTRCB cannot stop the airing of such ads, then they can show it during late nights when children are no longer watching.
English proficiency in the country has declined, what with the kind of education offered here and the popularity of texting, wherein words are written in shortcut forms. Now here comes a television advertisement contributing to the degradation of our already twisted English. I am sorry LBC. I don’t want to be a spoilsport, but the kind of humor that your television advertisement is promoting is not funny. It is foul. So can someone please stop the airing of that LBC ad!
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Email: queen786@yahoo.com