One of the small fears which haunts newspaper design departments is the possibility of an advert clashing painfully with the story next to it. Airlines do not want their ads next to stories about air crashes, car makers do not with to be neighbours to complaints about the safety of their chariots, oil companies do not wish to wallow in warming stories, and so on. Still, accidents do happen, sometimes just because of coincidence. There was a memorable specimen during the problems in the Congo many years ago. The story was headlined “Two nuns raped in Congo”. The ad underneath was for pipe tobacco. It went “Gentlemen prefer Three Nuns”. In my early page planning days the ads people would try to avoid this sort of thing by putting on the plan they sent you the spaces to be reserved for ads, and some indication of what the ad was. However in these electronic days nobody uses paper plans any more so this habit has subsided. Hence the unfortunate coincidence in Thursday’s Hong Kong Standard.
The ad concerned a “Business Opportunity in the United Kingdom”. This was described as “a large, successful and profitable property business in Birmingham”. Investors could take a half share for about 10 million Sterling or buy the whole thing for twice as much. I have no reason at all to doubt the bona fides of this offer, and if I had a few million pounds to spare I would be happy to consider it. No doubt more details will be forthcoming to serious inquirers. I suspect, however, that there will not be many of them, because the story next door was about a couple who had pocketed HK$22 million of investors’ money by promoting a fraudulent enterprise involving the sale of preserved fruit. Readers who had waded through ten paragraphs of prune fraud were probably not minded to pursue property investments in Birmingham, however prosperous, if the only contact was a yahoo email address.
Moral? Advertise your business opportunities in the business pages, perhaps.
tim's experiment 
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