Rotten sales pitches leave bad aftertaste

BEIJING - With television advertisements playing on children's desires to show their 'piety' by buying gifts for their elders, a new movement on the Internet is pushing for those same youngsters to show piety by protecting elders from phony ads.

A post calling for a boycott of such ads has already attracted more than 2,000 replies on MOP, one of China's major online bulletin boards.

"We should take concrete action to prevent our parents from being taken in by fake TV commercials," says the author, whose Web name is Hou Datao.