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You gotta love templates. They make creating things over and over again a lot faster and easier. But they also introduce the possibility for some issues. Sometimes I’ll create a letterhead file in Word and then save over it with an actual letter, which is bad, because next time I use my letterhead template, I have to make sure I remove all of the previous info. And I’m obviously not the only one with this problem.

While overdosing on fried sweet potatoes at a Thai restaurant for lunch today, I was leafing through the March issue of PC Gamer when I came across this ad for ATI graphics. It’s the kind of ad we’ve seen a zillion times before, extolling the virtues of their Radeon HD 4800 series GPUs. I would have flipped right past it except that I happened to notice the little icons for Sacred 2: Fallen Angel and the Ascaron logo toward the lower right portion of the ad.

So I scanned the ad copy, wondering why those logos were there. Nothing. No mention of Sacred 2 in the copy. It’s really a generic “ATI rocks” kind of ad. I grant that the presence of those logos could be to fulfill some co-op advertising contract that the two companies may have engaged in, but how, then do you explain the first line of copy that says:

Accelerate your gaming experience and go where you’ve never gone before, on [SB name] systems built with…

Oops. Forgot to fill in the actual SB name there ATI, huh?  I’m guessing that SB stands for System Builder…you know, HP, Dell, Gateway, Alienware, etc. And then there’s the legal copy at the bottom where you’ll find, in another set of brackets, this:

[Appropriate third party legal]

I suppose it’s a good thing that they also included the “appropriate third party legal” copy for the Sacred 2 and Ascaron logos, but here’s a bit of advice to whomever does ATI’s ads: If you don’t put in unnecessary logos, you won’t need unnecessary legal copy, either. Kinda like that sign that hangs down in the parking garage that says that the clearance is only 6 feet, 6 inches, but the clearance would be 8 feet if the sign wasn’t there.