TV commercials

TV commercials nowadays are full of peculiarities. Recently one of the commercials which falls into this category drew my attention.

It's a Citibank commercial which has been aired on several TV stations. One of these commercial sequences depicts a credit card being swiped on the EDC (Electronic Data Capture) terminal. It looks normal, but if you watch this sequence carefully you'll notice something odd.

Any "normal" credit card has a magnetic strip on the back side which contains the owner's and issuing bank's data. While the EDC terminal -- the equipment which can "read" the data by having the credit card swiped through it -- has a magnetic sensor on the right side of EDC's reading sensor track and the card itself must be swiped in a downward direction to the EDC's reading sensor track.

The above mentioned Citibank commercial showed a sequence in which the credit card was swiped with the wrong magnetic strip facing and moving in the wrong direction. It's possible that the above peculiarities were deliberately done for the sake of "artistic" reasons. Who knows?

EKO NUGROHO

Jakarta