I don’t watch much television anymore, but I do try to catch the occasional local newscast. If you do the same, you may have seen ads running for the business portrayed above. They appear to have a regular schedule booked in the 5 o’clock news. Being the curious sort, I often check out local businesses’ websites when I see them advertised somewhere. In the case of this tree service, I guess I’d better bone up on my Thai.

This is a trimmed screen shot of cntree.com. As you can see, there’s nothing about tree services on it. It’s occupied by a squatter who has filled it with spam posts, mostly in Thai. The featured article, according to Google Translate, is “How to choose shoe size”. There are a couple of English ones at the bottom. Oops.

Frankly, part of the responsibility for this snafu lies with whoever produced the ad. I’ve produced hundreds of television commercials in my career, and a plethora of other videos and multimedia products. Nobody’s perfect, most of all yours truly, but I try to always check every URL (website address) I’m asked to put into those products, regardless of who provided it. The last thing you want to do is have the black eye of a wrong website address or contact information on the product. This ad has been running for weeks on local television, but apparently nobody has caught this? I sure hope they can get it rectified…either by securing the domain and getting a website up or by at least getting the doggone ad changed.

So, if you’re looking to find your shoe size, types of alloys, glasses that fit your face, or high back chairs…apparently C&N Tree Service can help. It could be worse: they could be putting out cereal boxes with the number of a phone sex line on them by mistake!