Today's second bad ad is nothing like as bad, or as important, as the first one - it's just rather silly.

It comes from an unnamed department, but it's likely to have come from the stupidly named BERR (formerly the more staid-sounding DTI). It's promoting the Act On CO2 campaign and asking people to stop using the power-leaking standby function on their electronic equipment.

The entertaining this is the stack of electronic equipment, as shown above, which is something like 10 years out of date. Bearing in mind that this ad is running in newspapers in 2009, what do we see in the stack of gear? There's a CRT television set, which is fair enough - after all, many people still have them and they use a lot of power in standby (click to see the full ad).

Then there's a fairly old-looking DVD player, a VCR, a first-generation Playstation and, the coup de grace, what appears to be an old dual cassette deck. What's happened here is that the ad's designer has used a piece of stock photography to illustrate the kind of electronic equipment you might find in the average family home.

It's just a shame he or she couldn't find one that illustrates the kind of kit you might find in the average family home in the current century.

NB This post previously linked to a stock photography agency (it now points to the Wikipedia explanation of stock photography). We'd like to make it clear that the agency linked to is not responsible for this bad ad.