The other day, I was doing some cleaning around the flat, and I noticed that the cleaning product I was using claimed to kill of "99.9% of germs".

Immediately I got to thinking. Why 99.9%? Did they actually do experimentation to verify that this was the exact percentage? If so, why bother? It's not as if there's some anal-retentive out there who is going to want to verify the results of their experiment to see whether the product really does kill 99.9% of germs as opposed to 98.73%....

When I was growing up, advertisements used to be a straightforward matter. Someone would come on air and tell you to buy X product because it was good for you or it did what you wanted. Accompanying the ad were jingles, or if it was on TV, there were prominent and seductive displays of the product. Bottom line was that at the end of the ad, you knew exactly what had been advertised and why you should think about buying it.

Fast forward to 2009 in America, and advertising has become...