This ad for Rosetta Stone language courses is a puzzle. It surely was not devised simply as a brand-building ad, since no one walks into a language instruction store and chooses RosettaStone instead of a different brand.
Of course I have no way of knowing the ad’s real intention, but to the naked eye it appears to be a direct marketing ad. That is, they really want to sell courses directly to the readers of the ad, and therefore must presumably measure the success of the ad by how well or how poorly the ad investment is repaid by resulting sales.
If that is true, what’s puzzling is that the ad does not appear to be the work of an experienced direct marketing advertising professional. Both by its sins of omission and its sin of commission, it falls short of what a direct marketing professional would demand.
Let’s start with the illustration, the ad’s worst mistake. We see a jumble, a tangle, a snarl of type made by piling on and overlapping repetitions of the word
Network
