I can't STAND out-of-area ad announcers. You know the ones--they pronounce a local name horribly wrong--as only someone who's not from the area would pronounce it.
In the Bay Area, you'd get ads that pronounced "Concord" [caŋkoɹd], when in actuality, natives pronounced it [caŋkɚd]. Another one that came up in the Bay Area was the pronunciation of Vallejo. Natives generally pronounced it [vǝleio], while those from out of town said [vǝleiho]. There was some variation to this of course, but for the most part, people from the area pronounced it without the /h/.
Living in Utah, I still come across this (and I realize that I probably will for the rest of my life, but that doesn't stop it from peeving me :). Now the thing that sticks out here is the "open o," which as a rule, Utahns do not have in their phonemic inventories. So, when I hear it, I almost know for a fact that the person who used it is not from around here. Take for example those new Progressive commercials. They try to be all sneaky and say "Hey [insert your native state here], Progressive has lowered rates in our state!" Then they proceed to massacre the pronunciation of said state. So the guy says [jutɔ] instead of the native-sounding [juta].
I understand that advertisers do this to only make one commercial for a wider audience, and thus save money, but if you're going to try to convince people that it's a local commercial, why not do a bit of research into the local pronunciations of the area and make sure your announcers/spokespeople are pronouncing things the "normal" way?
So, what are your linguistically-related advertising pet peeves, if any?
EDITED: I just corrected my IPA transcription of "Utah." That's what I get for posting on Ambien. I knew something looked wrong. Oh well :)
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